Samsung’s Achilles’ heel remains the camera
Yes, it’s the camera system that’s the biggest letdown with Samsung’s smartphones.
In my experience, Samsung phones struggle with noise and artifacts in pretty much any scenario where the lighting is less than a bright day’s noon.
Moreover, for years, Galaxy S Ultra flagships have favored a lower shutter speed in order for those dense 200 MP sensors to soak up as much light as possible.
Great when taking landscapes out in nature, but totally impractical when you want to capture the precious moments of your children playing around or your pets having a blast around the house.
And ever since becoming a father, 90% of my camera roll is kids, not landscapes or still subjects.
Can you live with such a compromise? Not me.
I simply can’t compromise on having a less than perfect camera with me all the time. Using a Galaxy phone still feels like such a compromise.
Samsung has introduced some software settings that allow you to force the camera to use a faster shutter and therefore minimize blur, but it’s a hidden setting in the Camera Assistant module that doesn’t yield significantly better results. I limited the Galaxy S26 Ultra to never go below 1/120s, but this led to grainier and often underexposed shots.
I’m mad because the rest of the hardware and software are great
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hating for the sake of hating. I’m merely criticizing a line of products that have all the makings of being all-time greats but still can’t nail the essential camera element.
For all the great features available in One UI, for all the impressive hardware and overall value, Galaxy cameras continue to let me down to this day, which is why Samsung product usage at home is limited to devices that you don’t use for photography. Hence, enter the Galaxy Tab S11.
What am I using as a daily-driver? You might be surprised
When not daily-driving a specific phone for the purposes of a review, I’ve been dailying an Oppo Find X9 Pro.
It has a superb camera system that gels exceptionally well with my use case and captures lovely pictures and portraits of my kids. Ten out of ten, no notes.
It also has exceptional battery life and lots of great interface features that make it my favorite smartphone from the past few years. It’s easily a multiple-day phone, depending on the usage, but it is one of the few devices that make it challenging to go through a full battery charge in a day.
The only issues? ColorOS is an unapologetic iOS clone, and the audio quality coming out of the loudspeakers is quite bad.
Still, not merely enough issues to sway me over the Samsung side.
