Galaxy S22 Ultra, used as a cinema camera in the short film Jackals & Fireflies. VIDEO

Phone cameras have become the main way you can tell two high-end devices apart, and they have advantages and disadvantages over each other, despite the fact that they are now all equally capable and use equally bright and fast screens. When it comes to film, the iPhone is always praised, and Apple has pushed these capabilities including making short films demonstrating the capabilities of its phones. It looks like Samsung is trying something in this direction too, as a trailer for the short film Jackals & Fireflies mentions at the end that it was filmed with a Samsung phone (a Galaxy S22 Ultra).

Video performance on the Galaxy S22 Ultra seems to be enough for arthouse shorts

With last year’s flagship being the best performing camera phone released by the South Korean company so far, the results don’t disappoint.

The S22 Ultra benefits from a 108-megapixel sensor on the wide lens, a 12-megapixel ultra-wide, and two zoom lenses, 3x and 10x. This makes the phone one of the most complete camera systems on the market, offering greater creative freedom. However, the video capabilities, while powerful, have never been so highly praised. While Apple invests in professional codecs like ProRes and cinema formats like Dolby Vision, Samsung usually boasts HDR10+, an inferior format, and 8K shooting.

However, what Charlie Kaufman, the director of this new short, has managed to do is hide the fact that his film is shot with his phone. If you watch the trailer without knowing anything about it, you might say it’s a low-budget film shot with ordinary equipment for the budget. It’s only when you find out that it was shot with a Galaxy S22 Ultra that you realise the dark sequences seem to have a bit too much noise, but nothing else stands out. Still, the footage is edited in such a way as to hide things like the sharpness that phones add to the footage, and colours are significantly adjusted to be more natural than what the original phone captures.

Unfortunately, we don’t know when Jackals & Fireflies will be released, so we can take a closer look at the shots taken with the phone.