[Samsung Galaxy S10+ Questions & Answers] jbalic:
So here comes a long post, sorry upfront :)

Being a professional (fashion) photographer, and personally a true lover of good photos and all that entails photo quality, the main thing I look for in a smartphone is the best possible camera. So after some reviews I decided to get the new Samsung S10+.

And I am not happy at all.

Problems:

1.	There are only «natural» and «vivid» modes for the screen «calibration». Natural shows really flat tones and saturation, and vivid (with all the other adjustments) can't get anywhere close to render tones appropriately. It washes out all the highlights to blend them with those a bit darker - no depth; some colors pop out intensely (strong reds for example) while others don't match.

Along with that neither of the two modes helps to get the dark tones shown as dark as they really are, the shadows are always too bright, which adds to the washed out look of photos/low contrast.

This alone made me want to return it, until I figured out a way to make it better - by leaving it on Vivid, and turning on blue light filter on 0 - 15% opacity. Not sure why from the blue light filter, but the colors and white balance are all much more true this way than on either natural on vivid, and the contrast is better a bit, so I suggest you try it out ;)

2.	Software in the camera has an inexcusable bug (at least I hope it's a bug and it will be fixed with an update soon):

HDR is not selected, I take a photo, immediately go open it, get a spinning circle on the lower part of the screen for maybe a second, and the photo shifts in front of my eyes to an HDR kind of photo.. washes out all the highlights, pumps and fades the shadows, leaving really noticeable blotchy artifacts where there were shadows (being a professional photographer I spot that immediately, so maybe some of you haven't payed attention, but I promise you there are blotchy artifacts in brightened shadows on any S10+ camera). Obviously it does that via software in the second after the photo was taken, so you can notice it only if you open the photo from the camera app immediately after it was taken. If you continue shooting the same scene (same light), for the next immediate shot you won't see it changing, so it obviously remembers some «settings» it applies. Just mentioning this if you go try out, you can see that shift best while changing the scenes you take photos of (brighter, darker, etc).

SO - S10+ takes HDR photos, or makes HDR processing to photos, when HDR is not turned on!

And it does a lousy job at it, because the photos in general look really washed out - the are no whites, no blacks, no contrast or depth. They obviously look better on my calibrated desktop screen, because as I mentioned before, the screen on S10+ lacks in contrast of the shadows as well as in the photos, so putting those together - all the photos on S10+ screen look dull and without contrast. Other issue is that most of the times when I tried photographing the same scene with HDR on and HDR off, photos looked the same, and in some cases with HDR on it would do just a stronger HDR. Please, please, does anyone have any idea how to stop it from processing photos taken without HDR to make them look like I actually wanted that dullness?

P.s. today I did a test with Note9 and S9+, neither have that problem.

3.	This is not just Samsung's problem, at least I know Huawei Mate 20Pro has the same problem - photo effects inside the camera and extra ones that you can get are so outdated that they are unusable. In today's world driven by instagram and all the apps for color «filters» (VSCO, Snapseed, etc), these on Samsung are prehistoric. I tried to find a way to make my own and load them somehow, but can't find a way. Any ideas?

4.	Same scene photographed with S10+ is 3mb, and with my older Samsung S7 it's 4mb. How can that be? Why isn't there no more a setting in the camera app to choose resolution?

Looking forward to your thoughts! I love everything else about this phone, but can't stand those HDR photos from the get go, would hate to go return it just because of it..