Galaxy A56 vs A36 vs A26 vs A16: Is the Price Jump Worth It?

0:00 Did you know the Galaxy A series is Samsung's bestselling lineup and that the Galaxy A15 was actually their most sold model worldwide last year? Right here we've got the Galaxy A16 5G, A26, A36, and A56. This year brings a few subtle upgrades across the board, but also one key missing feature on two of them. We'll be diving into design, screen performance, cameras, and battery to help you figure out which one's the right pick for you. Hey, I'm Olive, your host here at versus.com. Starting with design, all four phones look pretty similar with a raised island for the buttons on the right side. However, the material sets them apart. The A16, A26, and A36 use

0:47 plastic frames, while the A56 has a more premium brushed aluminum one. On the back, the A16 also sticks with plastic, while the others use Corning Gorilla Glass Victus Plus. The A26, A36, and A56 feature an updated camera layout that's purely aesthetic since the cameras themselves haven't changed from last year. The A16, however, keeps last year's design. For security, the A16 and A26 use sidemounted fingerprint scanners on the power button, while the A36 and A56 have optical underd display fingerprint readers. In terms of weight, the A16 is 197 g, the A26 is 200 g. The A36 is also 197 g and the A56 is 198 g.

1:32 As for colors, the A16 comes in blue, black, light green, light gray, and gold. The A26 is available in black, white, mint, and peach pink. You can get the A36 in awesome black, awesome lavender, awesome lime, and awesome white. And finally, the A56 comes in awesome light gray, awesome graphite, awesome pink, and awesome olive, just like me. So, as always, let's ask around the office and see who prefers which one in terms of design. A36, A56, A36, A16, A56. And you of course also A56 because awesome olive. For protection, the A16 has an IP54 rating while the A26, A36, and A56

2:17 all have IP67. So they'll all handle a little rain just fine. But now let's check out these displays. So this year, all models come with flat 6.7 in AMOLED displays, though they're not exactly the same. In our screen luminance test under simulated sunlight at 100,000 lux, we first measured typical max brightness on a full white screen. The A16 reached 804 nits. The A26 hit 878 nits. The A36 jumped to 1,297 nits and the A56 peaked at 1,320 nits. Next, we tested peak brightness by lighting up just a small portion of the screen. The A16 hit 1,089 nits. The A26 reached 1,297 nits. The A36 jumped to 2,131

3:06 nits. And the A56 reached 1,985 nits. As for refresh rate, the A16 has a 90 Hz refresh rate, while the rest have 120 Hz panels. For more information about screen resolution, protection, and much more, feel free to pause the video right here. The A36 and A56 definitely have the better screens here, but honestly, we'd prefer to see even slimmer bezels like on the OnePlus Nord 4. But now, let's see which one packs the best [Music] speakers. Both the A16 and A26 come with a single bottom firing speaker, while the A36 and A56 have stereo speakers, one at the bottom and one in the earpiece. Give it a listen.

3:51 [Music] As you heard, the A36 and A56 are clearly the best. They sound identical with solid volume and a decent bit of bass. But now, let's move on to the camera. As mentioned earlier, all these phones come with 50 megapixel main cameras with no hardware changes from last year's models. In terms of image

4:37 processing, the A16 and A56 tend to push saturation a bit more, while the A26 and A36 offer a more toned down look. dynamic range is pretty similar across the board. Indoors, these differences become more noticeable, especially in colorful scenes, where the A16 and A56 deliver punchier, more vibrant results. For ultrawide, the A16 comes with a 5 megapixel camera. The A26 and A36 both have 8 megapixel modules, and the A56 has a 12 megapixel shooter. Once again, no hardware changes from last year. Outdoors, the A16 clearly has the least detail. The A26 and A56 do show a bit of oversharpening compared to the A36, but other than that, all photos are pretty similar overall. Indoors is where the differences really show. The A56

5:24 delivers the most detail, while the A36 struggled the most with white balance. In portrait mode, while they're not on the same level as the S series, the photos actually turn out pretty decent with solid edge detection. Same goes for indoor shots. Quality drops a bit as expected, but they still hold up and deliver good results. It's a bit of a letdown that none of these phones include a telephoto lens for portraits, though. On video with the main lens, the A16 is limited to 1080p at 30 fps, while the rest can shoot in 4K at 30 fps. As always, we try to shoot at 4K 30 fps for fairness. Here, the A26 has the widest field of view, but that's because it doesn't support video stabilization in 4K, only in full HD. Overall, while the

6:10 A56 videos are a bit oversharpened, they generally come out as the best of the bunch. Indoors, the A56 does the best job with dynamic range and keeping exposure steady, even if the white balance sometimes comes off a bit cool. For ultra wide video, the A16, A26, and A36 are stuck at 1080p 30fps, while the A56 can shoot in 4K 30 fps. No surprise here. The A56 looks the best thanks to that higher resolution. However, it could still improve on capturing the finer detail. Indoors, it's the same story. The A56 still gives you the best looking videos, but here it's even more noticeable that it's missing some fine detail. In front, the A16 and A26 still have the same 13 megapixel cameras as last year.

6:56 The A36 and A56 though come with new 12 megapixel sensors. Even though they have less megapixels, they should be more efficient. Here, we think the A36 tried to mimic the phone's color because its photo came out extremely magenta. All the other phones, even the A16, took pretty decent selfies. In low light, the A36 again leaned way too magenta. Interestingly, the A16 and A26 didn't apply any face smoothening, but the A36 and A56 added a lot even though we had the feature turned off. For front camera video, the A16 and A26 are capped at 1080p 30fps, while the A36 and A56 can shoot in 4K 30fps. We honestly have no idea what's up with the A36 cuz this video looks way off. And even though not

7:43 perfect, the A56 will definitely give you better results overall. So, now it's time to test the audio on all of these devices. We're going to start off with the A16. It's a very windy day and a very busy road. So, how is it handling all of that? We've then got the A26. Is it any better at all than the A16? What do you guys think? Moving on to the A36. Any better than the other two? How do I sound? What do you think? And finally, we've got the A56. Is it better than the rest? As always, let's talk about it. As you heard, it was a very windy day. The A16 is definitely the weakest here with lowquality audio. The A26, 36, and 56 are all pretty much identical, offering slightly better noise cancellation.

8:29 For zoom, none of these phones have a telephoto lens, so you are working with digital zoom only. At two times, the results are still decent, but anything beyond that, like five times, starts to fall apart fast. At 10 times, things get pretty rough on all of them. The A36 and A56 do preserve more detail, but that's mostly because of heavy [Music] post-processing. Instead of zoom lenses, all these phones come with last year's macro lenses. And honestly, we don't get why. The A16 and A26 have tiny 2 megapixel sensors, while the A36 and A56 come with 5 megapixel lenses. As you can see, the A16 and A26 deliver pretty poor quality. And while the A36 and A56 show a bit more detail, the results still

9:16 aren't great. Once again, we really think that a simple telephoto, even just 10 megapixels, would have been way more useful, even for zoom macro shots in low light with the main lens. Interestingly, the A16 and A26 tend to get the colors more accurate, while the A36 and A56 go for that more social media ready look. With the ultra wide cam, the A56 definitely pulls in more shadow detail than the rest, while as usual, the A36 leans toward warmer tones. Portrait mode at night gives us similar results as regular photos with the main lens. All photos have lots of noise, but the A56 has the least. For video with the main lens, the A56 isn't

10:01 perfect, but it is the most balanced. It keeps the noise down and gets the white balance closest to how the scene actually looked. As for ultra wide video at night, the quality drops hard across the board. So, if you're planning to film with that lens in low light, just keep your expectations in check. All in all, these phones aren't winning any photography awards anytime soon, but for the price, they actually hold up pretty well. What really surprised us was how solid the front camera performance is on the A16, A26, and A56. The A36 though definitely needs a software fix for that weird magenta undertone. All right, now let's see what these bad boys are packing under the hood. Light it up.

10:47 Here we've got updated processors across the board. The Galaxy A16 runs on the Exynos 1330. The A26 steps up to the Exynos 1380. The A36, interestingly, uses a Snapdragon 6 Gen 3, and the A56 features Samsung's new Exynos 1580. For RAM, our review units come with 4 GB on the A16, 6 GB on the A26, 8 GB on the A36, and 8 GB on the A56. You can also check out other RAM and storage variants available, but keep in mind, not all versions are sold globally. One important missing feature this year though is SD card support in the A36 and A56, which honestly it's disappointing to see, especially in mid-range phones. But let's move on and put these phones

11:32 through their paces in some realworld scenarios. In Grid Auto Sport, we tweaked the preferences file to unlock 60 FPS since the game is capped at 30 FPS by default. All phones started off with a max of around 60 FPS at the beginning of gameplay, but after about 15 minutes, the A16 dropped all the way down to 16 FPS. The A26 dropped to 39 FPS, while the A36 dipped to 38 FPS. The A56 was the most stable, only dropping to 56 FPS. For max temperatures, the A16 hit 45° CC. The A26 reached 47°C. The A36 peaked at 49°C. and the A56 stayed cooler at just 42° C. Next, we fired up Withering Waves and cranked the graphics to the max. To no one's surprise, the

12:19 A16 performed the worst, hitting a peak of 31 FPS and dropping as low as 4 FPS. The A26 did a bit better with a max of 39 FPS and a low of 17 FPS. The A36, thanks to that Snapdragon chip, came out on top with a max of 57 FPS and a minimum of 26 FPS. The A56 followed with a max of 48 FPS and a minimum of 15 FPS. For temperatures, the A16 climbed up to 46 degrees C. The A26 reached 45° CC, and both the A36 and A56 stayed a bit cooler at 43°C. Then we fired up Bloons TD6 and flooded the screen with thousands of units to stress the CPU. The A16 again showed the worst performance, starting at 45 FPS and dropping to just 2 FPS.

13:05 All the other models started at 60 FPS and dropped to just 4 FPS. Again, for max temps, the A16 reached 44° C. The A26 was the hottest, peaking at 49°C, while the A36 reached 44°C and the A56 46°C. Moving on, we exported 100 photos in Lightroom. The A16 was by far the slowest, taking over 21 minutes to complete the task. The fastest was the A56, which finished in just over 9 minutes. Next, we rendered a 3minut 4K 30fps video in Cap Cut. Surprisingly, the A26 came out on top here, finishing the render in just 37 seconds. The A16 once again was the slowest, taking 1 minute and 57 seconds. For fun, we also opened a massive Microsoft Excel file with over 4 million cells.

13:52 Unsurprisingly, the A16 lagged behind again, taking 21 seconds to load, while the A56 was the fastest at just 12 seconds. Now, let's check out some benchmarks. In Geekbench 6, the A16 scored the lowest, while unsurprisingly, the A56 offered the best performance. Interestingly though, the A26 slightly outperformed the A36 and its Snapdragon chipset. In 3D Mark's Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, the A16 once again landed at the bottom, and the A56 took the top spot. That said, while the A36 had a higher best loop score than the A26, the A26 was more stable, delivering a stronger, lowest loop score. In Ant22, results were pretty straightforward with each phone stepping up in score from the A16 to the A56, which had the highest

14:39 overall results. And lastly, we ran the cross-platform disc check benchmark to test read and write speeds. The A36, thanks to its Snapdragon chip, was the fastest in sequential write. The A56 led in sequential read and memory copy while the A26 performed best in random write and read. So to sum it up, the A16 is clearly the weakest, while the A56 tops the charts in benchmarks. That said, in realworld use, the performance gap between the A26, A36, and even the A56 isn't always that huge. Now moving on to the software side of things. The A16 still runs 1 UI 6.1 based on Android 14, while the A26, 36, and 56 all come with 1 UI7 out of the box based on Android

15:24 15. Samsung is now offering 6 years of software and security updates across the entire A series lineup, which is a huge and very welcome improvement. The Galaxy A16 comes with a pretty minimal feature set, which actually makes sense given its limited RAM. That said, it does come with quite a bit of bloatware, but it can be easily uninstalled. The A26, A36, and A56 all run the fresh 1 UI7, which brings in new animations, icons, and separates the notification and quick settings panels, something not everyone might love. Samsung also includes some AI powered tools on these models, though the feature set isn't as complete as what you'd find on the S series. Still, you get handy tools like object eraser

16:10 without cloud support and AI select which lets you grab SCX re content or even turn video clips into GIFs. All four phones support Google Gemini, but the A16 misses out on Circle to Search, which is available on the A26, A36, and A56. All in all, you'll notice quite a bit of lag on the A16 here and there, but for light users, it'll still do the job just fine. The rest of the phones handle things much better with the A56 easily feeling the most responsive. Battery size stays the same this year with all models packing 5,000 mAh batteries. For wired charging, the Galaxy A16 and A26 support 25 W while the A36 and A56 bump it up to 45 W, which is actually more than what the base Galaxy S25 offers. Unfortunately,

16:58 we still don't get wireless charging support on any of them. In our charging test, we used a 100 watts charger. The A56 was the fastest, hitting 100% in 1 hour and 10 minutes, peaking at 43 watts. The A36 followed, finishing in 1 hour and 17 minutes with a max of 41 watts. The A26 came in at 1 hour and 25 minutes, reaching 25 watts, and the A16 wasn't far behind, finishing in 1 hour and 29 minutes, also at 25 watts. Now, as for prices, the Galaxy A16 5G retails for $199. The A26 comes in at $299. The A36 will set you back $399. And the A56 tops the list at $499. Pretty straightforward pricing.

17:44 Just keep in mind Samsung often runs discounts, so chances are you'll be able to snag any of these for less and maybe save some cash for some, you know, Fortnite skins. Piecing it all together, this year brings some solid incremental upgrades. New screens, new processors, and faster charging on the A36 and A56. But the removal of SD card support is a pretty big downside, especially for phones in this price range. While all four are solid picks, the A56 doesn't feel like a huge step forward. Honestly, grabbing an A55 instead might not be such a crazy idea. But let us know which one of all these new A series phones better fit your needs. Of course, you will find links to all of them in the

18:30 description below. And before you go, don't forget to give us a big thumbs up if you enjoyed this video and hit subscribe as we're always testing new devices to help you make the best choice. We'll see you in our next video. And until then, take [Applause] care. [Applause] [Music] Yeah. Hey. Hey. [Music]