The Samsung Galaxy S10 5G has Samsung's most advanced camera array on a phone to date. It's a quad-camera phone at the rear, although that's only because the fourth camera is a time-of-flight sensor.
You don't shoot photos with that. It's there to detect distance in shots that you take with the other 3 cameras, which comprise a 12MP f/2.4 telephoto lens, a 12MP f/1.5-f/2.4 wide-angle lens and a 16MP f/2.2 ultra-wide lens.
It's not that functionally different from the Galaxy S10+, right down to Samsung's camera app, with a slider that switches between Food, Night, Panorama, Pro, Live Focus, Photo, Video, Live Focus Video, Super Slow Mo and Slow Motion shooting.
I'm a big fan of Samsung's layout here, because it splits the video and stills shooting modes quite neatly from each other without feeling cluttered.
One small trap in the video section is that the default for video shooting is in 4K. That's undeniably great for resolution purposes, but because the Galaxy S10 5G uses fixed storage, it does mean your videos are using up a very limited storage resource each time you shoot video unless you explicitly tell it not to.
That being said, the Galaxy S10 5G can capture some really gorgeous looking video. Here's a sample taken at Sydney's Vivid Festival of the Galaxy S10 5G's camera in action:
It's not the greatest story ever told, but given the dark and rainy atmosphere, it's surprisingly workable for consumer-grade video shooting.
The biggest battle in smartphone cameras of late has been between Samsung and Huawei, with the latter company producing some of the best camera phones of the last 12 months. However, Samsung is firing back heavily with the Galaxy S10 5G.
It's a mixed comparison. Huawei's P30 Pro has larger optical zoom distance, and slightly better low light performance, but Samsung's camera UI is more friendly, and its video performance is considerably better than that of the Huawei.
In the 5G phone space, the Samsung sits neatly ahead of the Oppo Reno 5G or LG V50 ThinQ for low light performance. You can read more about our 5G phone low light shootout here.
Ultimately the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G demonstrates that while Samsung may have slipped slightly against its competition, it's not a fight it's willing to lose. It's got a powerful and easy to use camera with plenty of flexibility.
Samsung Galaxy S10 5G sample photos







