I've just got my S24+ today to upgrade my trusty but ageing S10+ having not strayed from Samsung for almost 10 years. Naturally I was hoping it would be an upgrade in all departments but although on the whole it is, there's several annoying and unexpected downgrades that are making me seriously question whether it's actually worth spending quite a bit of money to change.
Firstly, the screen although pin sharp is really washed out. Even in vivid mode the colours are dull and the blacks are significantly more grey than the S10 screen, and even look washed out when put alongside my wife's budget spec A52! I've played around with brightness and colour tone etc but I can't dial it out, and my cousin who's got an S24 Ultra said exactly the same when comparing it against the S22 it's replacing.
Then there's some bizarre features missing from OneUI 6.1, the ones I've noticed so far are specifically in the Always On Display settings. I use AOD to display as a bedside clock, with my S10 and also in OneUI 6.0 / Android 14 on the A52 you can rotate the AOD to landscape orientation and control the brightness, you could even do the latter from the AOD lock screen by tapping twice on the clock to access the brightness slider. In OneUI 6.1 unless I'm missing something it seems all that functionality is missing, the brightness of the AOD is linked to the main screen brightness setting which is far too bright for overnight use, and you can't set it to landscape mode which I'd prefer when on it's horizontal night stand next to the bed. Why this functionality would be omitted I have no idea, but it's really annoying! Please someone enlighten me to some hidden menu somewhere that fixes all these issues?! 🙂
Sadly, after the 3rd S24 Ultra, I have given up on this phone.
The vividness slider does absolutely nothing and is one of the biggest insults of the mobile era I have ever had to endure. I almost stuck with it even though the side by side comparison with my S23 Ultra still made the S24 Ultra look dull and yellow like an iPhone.
Then I tried the camera and compare dit against my S23 Ultra shooting the same shots.
S24 Ultra is a downgrade I will never take a chance on it again. I hope the S25 has something to offer.
This S24 is a bogus phone that noone should have to buy.
Just got the latest software update for my S24 Ultra. It's a bit so so. The added screen vividness slider makes no difference what so ever. I can only see a very very, and I do mean a very tiny change in the colors. The screen still isn't up to what my old S22 ultra looked like. I'm still disappointed in the screen on the S24 ultra. However, as for the camera, there is an improvement in the photo colors and shutter speed. I still see that screen jumping when you use video and you zoom in. When you go from 1x to 3x zoom on the video you can see a very noticeable shift in the image on the screen and then a sudden color correction. This I believe is a result of the camera lenses switching as you zoom in and out. This happens in both the standard video mode and the pro video mode. It's also noticeable with the photo mode, but it's not a big deal because it won't show up on your photos afterwards when you view them. However, in video mode it completely ruins the video when you play it back and you see the scene shift and a color change happens while viewing the video. My old S22 ultra never had this problem. But then you couldn't have an uninterrupted video on the S22 ultra when you zoomed in while recording. The video on the S22 ultra would go out of focus for a second as the lenses switched. I have yet to try out night photography and videos yet. So I'll see how much improvement was made in those modes later. All in all, I'm getting adjusted to my S24 Ultra and am pleased with the camera improvements. Samsung still needs to make further improvements on the screen vividness slider, if that's even possible. However when Samsung releases the next model S25 or S26 Ultra, I don't think I'm going to pre-order a new phone. I'll wait a month or two to let them work out all the software bugs before I buy the new model again.
For the screen vividness slider, mine shows significant changes, so not sure why you, and others are having this issue. I would suggest, that like with any update in which weirdness occurs, that you wipe your devices cache by powering off the device, then powering it up by holding volume Up and Power/Bixby button.
