Well, aside from feeling superior when holding an Android or any phone (which is an absolutely unhinged and insane way to feel), there are definitely a few things that have changed and some of it helps, some of it hinders. ā The notion that something has changed and the S24 now doesn't capture true colors vs previous generations is somewhat hilarious because these phones are notorious for always being either overexposed or oversaturated. This has been the case for many years, and if you think your S21 was capturing "true colors", then you've been living in a vacuum and not actually seen photos from any other phone on the market.
A few things to note:
1) The 200MP sensor which bins down to 12MP can be beneficial in many scenarios, but does come with the downside of increased processing time and power needed, which can cause issues. The phone also tends to overexpose or oversaturate in many scenarios which is nothing new but definitely not helped by the new sensor, struggling with accuracy especially in naturally high contrast scenarios. ā The issue here, more than anything... is that the sensor itself is not all that large and much of what's being done is just post. Samsung played a numbers game instead of a results game.
2) As for the 10x... the 5x with a larger 50MP sensor is better. Objectively, without question. There are far fewer instances in which a 10x is going to be useful to almost anyone, meanwhile a good 5x is far more likely to be of use *AND* can be cut in to still get high quality digital 10x. ā There's a reason Pixel uses a 5x, why iPhone now uses a 5x, and why Samsung now does, too. The jump between the relatively dinky 3x and an optical 10x is WAY too big and causes tons of quality dropoff between 3-10 which is a massive range that is more likely to be used by most people than anything at 10x+.
3) As for the "dull screen", I have no idea what you're on about. The S24 Ultra looks properly balanced and calibrated, which the same could not be said for previous generations where the display was so extremely oversaturated that you couldn't actually trust whether or not what you made on your phone would even look good anywhere else (and it usually didn't.) ā The S24 Ultra's "vivid" mode actually looks the way it should, and natural is more toned down.
This was 10x digital *FROM A MOVING CAR*
This is 10x digital.
This is from the main camera (had to scale it down since there's a file size limit of 5MB and it only accepts JPG)
