Main Camera
Galaxy S25 Ultra daytime camera samples
The Galaxy S25 Ultra has the best wide-angle camera we’ve tested so far, and it is definitely impressive. It has everything that a camera should have: excellent dynamics, superb HDR, nearly perfect subject exposure, great detail, and finally, no noticeable oversharpening.
The latter is great, as Samsung cameras have often suffered from oversharpening in the past. Colors are great, perfectly striking the difficult balance between realistic and vivid, which makes for excellent photos.
Galaxy S25 Ultra low-light camera samples
When the lights go down, the Galaxy S25 Ultra‘s main camera continues with its super-solid performance. It does a superb job at capturing almost perfect low-light images without trying to turn the night into day.
Details and colors are great, and so is the dynamic range, which correctly brings up shadows but doesn’t struggle with artificial lighting either. There is some natural noise in some of the samples, but it’s perfectly fine.
Zoom Quality
Galaxy S25 Ultra zoom samples
The Galaxy S25 Ultra has two zoom cameras, which deliver exceptional quality. Similarly to last year’s Galaxy S24 Ultra, we get exceptional sharpness in all zoom levels that matter (up to 10X), but the ProVisual Engine has delivered some improvements here as well, despite the unchanged hardware.
As a result, we get sharper photos with more details in comparison with last year’s Galaxy S24 Ultra and pretty much any other phone we’ve tested thus far.
What’s more, the lack of oversharpening means that you get very natural images that lack the artifacts usually associated with smartphone zoom cameras, which is superb. Dynamics, exposure, and colors are also top-notch, making the Galaxy S25 Ultra the phone with the best zooming capabilities at the moment.
Ultra-wide Camera
Galaxy S25 Ultra ultrawide daytime samples
The new 50MP ultrawide is good, but in our tests, it ranks slightly lower than the old 12MP Galaxy S24 Ultra ultrawide in terms of sharpness and detail. It also tends to slightly underexpose the scene, which leads to photos that could be a bit more gloomy in certain situations, but that’s a very minor gripe for an otherwise great ultrawide camera. It has a good field of view, with good corner sharpness, and delivers great colors.
Galaxy S25 Ultra ultrawide night-time samples
When the lights go down, the ultrawide continues the strong performance with more than adequate dynamics, natural colors, and realistic color temperature that doesn’t lean towards the red or blue hues. Sharpness might be a smidgen better on the Galaxy S24 Ultra, but the Galaxy S25 Ultra arguably gives you better ultrawide photos.
Front Camera
Galaxy S25 Ultra selfie samples
The selfie camera of the Galaxy S25 Ultra hasn’t received any hardware updates, but it has also beed administered the cure for oversharpening, which is good. Selfies are excellent, however, they are slightly inferior when directly pitted against the Galaxy S24 Ultra: they are slightly less detailed and with a slightly cooler color temperature. Subject exposure is also a smidgen less impressive here.
Video
A large part of the improvements with the Galaxy S25 Ultra are in the video-recording realm. Samsung has improved HDR recording from 8-bit to 10-bit, which captures more information and delivers videos with richer colors and greater dynamics. Galaxy Log is also a new feature, enabling the capture of flat video that’s perfect for color-grading in post.
The phone can capture videos up to 4K@120fps and 8K@30fps, but 4K videos at a lower framerate are more practical. Videos are very stable, with good dynamic range and color accuracy.
Main Camera – Video
Screen capture from Galaxy S25 Ultra main camera video
Videos taken with the main camera of the Galaxy S25 Ultra are lovely, with great exposure, dynamics, and colors. The only issue here is the sharpness: they are on the softer side when compared to the Galaxy S24 Ultra and its competitors, which isn’t great to see.
Ultrawide camera – Video
Screen capture from Galaxy S25 Ultra ultrawide video
Ultrawide videos also suffer from the sharpness problem, failing to deliver videos as tack-sharp as the Galaxy S24 Ultra did. At the same time, the oversharpening is dealt with here as well, so you will have to pick your poison. Other than that, the colors and dynamics, as well as overall stabilization when shooting ultrawide videos, are all excellent.
Zoom camera – Video
Screen capture from Galaxy S25 Ultra 5X video
Zoom in to take a video, and the Galaxy S25 Ultra will reward you with nothing short of excellence, both from a quality and detail perspective. Both cameras deliver outstanding videos with exceptional stabilization and sharpness, as well as the simply lovely dynamics and colors.
Selfie camera – Video
Screen capture from Galaxy S25 Ultra selfie video
Videos taken with the frontal camera are pretty decent, with no oversharpening but decent sharpness still. Color temperature is slightly colder and subject exposure was better on the Galaxy S24 Ultra, but other than that, the selfie camera is great for video as well.
