The best camera system on any phone right now, wrapped around a big, capable Android flagship that finally fixed its own worst habit.
I'd been carrying an S22 Ultra until the screen picked up a crack down one corner, and the sensible move would have been to get it repaired. Instead I looked at what a year had changed and found the S23 Ultra to be the same phone from the outside, squared-off Note-style body, built-in S Pen, same silhouette, with everything that moved living underneath it: a 200-megapixel main sensor up from 108, and a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy tuned for this phone rather than taken off a shared reference design.
The 10x optical zoom is the reason to buy this phone, so that's most of what I'm going to talk about. No other manufacturer ships a lens like it, Apple tops out at 5x, and the gap shows up in what you end up pointing the thing at. From my seat at a wedding last fall I shot the exchange of rings with faces sharp, from far enough back that nobody's phone had any business being involved. A hawk that lands on the pole two yards over from mine has a growing portrait series he knows nothing about. I photographed the moon with visible surface detail, which is an absurd sentence to type about a phone, and the everyday zoom holds up nearly as well, because past 5x, where other phones dissolve into watercolor mush, this one keeps handing you photographs. A year on, my camera roll has a whole category of picture in it that no previous phone of mine could have taken.
“I photographed the moon with visible surface detail, which is an absurd sentence to type about a phone.”
The 200MP headline matters less than what gets done with it. Default shots bin down to sharp 12MP files with better noise handling than the S22 Ultra managed, and the full-resolution mode is there for the shots you already know you're going to crop deep into. Nightography also stopped being a hold-your-breath ritual somewhere along the way, and dim restaurants come out clean and fast and mercifully un-smeared.
The S Pen stays built into the body, and I stopped using mine in week two. It's a lovely tool for somebody with a note-taking habit, which I wanted to be and turned out not to be, so 234 grams of phone includes a few grams I've carried around for a year purely out of respect for someone else's workflow. I tried twice to build the habit deliberately, once with a shopping list and once with meeting notes, and both attempts lasted under a week.
That weight is the tradeoff Samsung doesn't try to hide from you. This is a two-hand phone every day of the week, not only on the afternoon you unbox it.
The rest of the phone is quietly excellent in a way that's hard to write about interestingly. The 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy runs cooler and more efficiently than the Exynos-flavored chips some regions used to be handed, camera-heavy days still end with battery to spare, 45W charging gets you to 65 percent in about twenty-five minutes, and the 6.8-inch, 1,750-nit panel stays readable in direct July sun at a bus stop, which is where dimmer screens fall over.
A year in, with the launch price softened and the software matured, the recommendation writes itself for one specific person, somebody who'll use that zoom weekly. I never worked out why the 10x lens hunts for focus on anything closer than about ten feet, which makes it useless for the one thing indoors you'd assume a long lens would be good at, and no setting I found changes its mind. The hawk has moved to a different pole this summer and I've definately been more put out about that than is reasonable.