Samsung’s ‘Night’ photo mode finally coming to the US, starting with the AT&T Galaxy S10+

Samsung’s new “Night” photo setting is rumored to finally compete with Google’s excellent Night Sight, but there’s just one hitch: When the feature first rolled out, it was limited to Exynos-powered Galaxy S10s, which aren’t available in the US. However, the folks at XDA Developers have spotted the feature as live on the most recent AT&T update for the Galaxy S10+.

At launch, the Galaxy S10 series had something called “Bright Night,” which was originally pegged to be a competitor to Google’s Night Sight, but it didn’t deliver on those hopes. Bright Night was just an automatic mode the camera would enter into via the existing Scene Optimizer to slightly improve extreme low-light results. Although it did use a similar feature to stack multiple exposures, it didn’t have Google’s AI chops or results. (You can read more about Bright Night over at SamMobile.)

The new dedicated “Night” camera mode allegedly does much better.

Photo showing the new “Night” mode on the S10+, Image via XDA and the SamCentral Discord server.

We haven’t had a chance to play with the new Night feature ourselves — none of us at Android Police has either the AT&T version of the phone or an Exynos-powered model, and expect a comparison to Google’s Night Sight once we do have access — but examples provided at other venues show definite improvements:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUSvw7arY8?start=35&feature=oembed&w=668&h=376]

This video compares the Exynos version’s performance in and outside Night Mode, but results on the US Snapdragon models should be similar. 

The update which delivers this new functionality (build G975USQU2ASF6) is exclusive to the AT&T version of the Galaxy S10+ for now — although the current Verizon update matches that build number, it doesn’t seem to have the new Night mode. It also brings the phone up to the June security patch level and adds a new quick settings tile for a QR reader. The same June patch update for other carriers sadly doesn’t appear to include the feature.

AT&T’s update should be rolling out as we speak to owners…