Never have I been more disappointed by a camera on a phone ever. Foliage looks terrible, 48mp photos during the day aren’t any more detailed than the 12mp photos on my S8 while having strange artifacts, lens smearing, and terrible video outdoors and in very dark scenes (indoors in semi-ideal conditions is the only time it’s good). The 12mp photos should be the go-to but they’re a disaster, 8mp level of detail. And you can sort of fix this by turning off noise reduction but this phone is not designed for custom camera apps in mind so camera2api support is limited. Why does samsung solely give quality control checks on their flagships only? Do they truly believe people can’t just buy second hand phones from the used market and get the same level of quality control?
Why would they make a phone worse than a 6 year old one?
You need to get a few things straight. When you buy a phone, you don’t buy just the hardware of it, the camera is one of the many sensors. You primarily buy software support. If companies supported their phones indefinitely we would stay with our old phones until they stopped working but no. You wanted Android 13 & 14 and their new features because Android 9 wasn’t cutting it any longer. In addition you got security patches that is why you got a new phone, stop pretending that you didn’t know that in the first place. It will take more than 5 years for a midrange phone to catch up to a flagship specs-wise but that doesn’t mean that an old phone is better or secure to use.