Watch Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2018 and check out their official website for a full list of features.

Why we’re excited

The highly anticipated Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is a game-changing smartphone for photographers and filmmakers.

The camera

The Note 9 is going to have an “intelligent camera” with dual apertures, dual cameras, dual optical image stabilization, a dual pixel image sensor, and 960 FPS (frames per second) slo-mo video recording (which means you slow down your video up to 40X with a 24 FPS output) along with a wide range of other improvements that should make filmmaking and photography better, like the option to automatically adjust the white balance based on what you’re photographing (which it uses machine learning and image recognition to decide).

You can even take photos using the included S pen, which we see as a huge opportunity for long exposure shots and night photography with the Note 9 mounted on a tripod. They even say on their website that “the telephoto and wide-angle lenses shoot the whole scene (even when you’re zoomed in)” - whoa!

For the unfamiliar, the dual aperture is very useful for getting a sharper image with less noise, as it will choose the f1.5 (faster) aperture that lets in more light in low light environments and the f2.4 (slower) aperture that lets in less light, making your image sharper in bright environments. And dual optical image stabilization roughly means that both the wide angle and telephoto cameras on the Note 9 will have a much more stable video.

Storage, monitoring, battery life, processing power, and editing

You can have up to 1TB of storage with their 512GB microSD and the built-in storage (which as they said is more than most laptops) and according the demonstration, there’s a dramatically improved battery life - which we’re extremely excited for as filmmakers and heavy mobile users. They also have a new cooling system and processor, which basically means that it should be much faster and reactive, especially when doing compute-intensive things, like editing videos and raw photos.

Just like their other recent models, like the Galaxy S8 and S9 series, you can also use a monitor to preview your recording on a bigger screen using a simple USB-C to HDMI adapter cord, and there’s built-in DeX support, which is a minimal desktop experience that allows you to use your phone more like a desktop by hooking it up to a monitor and using a wide variety of apps for editing, such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Compatibility with Beastgrip gear

We won’t know for sure until we test it out ourselves with our gear, but based on their demonstration, we’re confident that the Galaxy Note 9 will work perfectly with the Beastgrip Pro, our lenses and other accessories out-of-the-box (we’ll post an update here as soon as we receive ours).

Wrapping up

We can’t wait to create some new content with the Note 9! It’s going to be available as of August 24th, so stay tuned for more info! BG

August 09, 2018 — Sean Lawrence
Tags: News