Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra hands-on: Privacy Display steals the show on new quad-camera flagship

Samsung has updated its flagship smartphone for 2026, with the Galaxy S26 Ultra packing its finest mobile camera tech to date with a quad-camera setup that brings back the mighty 200MP primary sensor. While this year’s camera hardware is very familiar to anyone upgrading from last year’s Ultra, from the design through to the software, there’s enough new here to get excited about.

The Galaxy S26 Ultra’s headline feature is Privacy Display, a hardware-and-software one-two punch that prevents prying eyes from seeing what’s on the phone’s massive 6.9-inch screen. It also sports a fresh new chip courtesy of Qualcomm, some nifty AI tools, our favorite being Audio Eraser for third-party apps, and should run cooler for gamers and long bouts of 4K or 8K video capture, thanks to the upgraded vapor chamber.

Starting at £1,279 (US pricing to be confirmed), the S26 Ultra is Samsung’s priciest non-folding phone to date, so what other tricks does it have up its sleeve?

Design: the S Pen’s back, but Titanium isn’t

The Galaxy S26 Ultra brings back much of what we know and love from the S25 Ultra, including the S Pen with 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity that stows neatly in the bottom corner. Expect Samsung’s trademark look and feel with a flat Armor Aluminum frame set against a flat glass front and back, and raised cameras around the back.

Despite its big screen, the S26 Ultra is relatively skinny at 7.9mm. The corners have been slightly rounded off, making it more comfortable in the hand and less angular than last year’s Ultra, and it’s also a comfortable 214g, a little lighter than an iPhone 17 Pro Max.

Available in six colors, you can pick up the S26 Ultra in Cobalt Violet, Sky Blue, Black, White, plus a couple of online-exclusive colors: Silver Shadow and Pink Gold. The phone’s also as durable as flagships get with an IP68/69 dust and water resistance ratings and Corning’s Ultra Gorilla Armor 2 glass on the front, complete with a glare-free finish.

Our biggest gripe with the S26 Ultra is its lack of MagSafe-style Qi 2 magnetic mounting, which is extremely handy for hands-free capture. Samsung will be dropping official cases that add the feature, or you can opt for one of the best Galaxy S26 Ultra cases from the likes of Mous or Pitaka, but if you’re a fan of case-free phones, magnets are out.

Screen: privacy please

If you’ve used a privacy screen protector before, then you know what Samsung’s headline feature for the Galaxy S26 Ultra does: it limits off-angle viewing, but unlike other phones, the S26 Ultra does it out of the box. Just press a button in the quick settings panel to toggle Privacy Display on or off, making it impossible for anyone on either side of you to see what’s on-screen.

Outside its foldables, many techies have felt Samsung smartphones have lacked serious wow-factor in recent years, so it’s great to see a headline feature that’s both practical and impressive land on its latest flagship. After using the phone, Privacy Display is easy to activate and effective, with the option to only fire up in specific apps, and you can adjust the effect's strength for maximum control.

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Samsung product expert Kadesh Beckford confirmed that the Privacy Display works with third-party screen protectors for anyone who wants extra durability, and they also explained how the tech works: Samsung activates individual pixels to narrow the viewing angle, allowing only front-on viewing. Very cool.

The rest of the screen is less groundbreaking but a good box-checking exercise, with its Dynamic AMOLED 2X tech, 3120 x 1440 resolution creating a crisp 500 PPI pixel density, and a 120Hz adaptive refresh rate for iPhone 17 Pro-matching smoothness.

Camera: AI and aperture upgrades

On first glance, the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s camera is virtually identical to its predecessor with the same pixel counts and focal lenghts, but dig a little deeper and there are some differences.

Starting with the primary camera, it has a 1/1.3-inch primary sensor with a 200MP resolution. The upgrade comes from the faster f/1.4 lens, down from f/1.7, which should help with low-light performance. The 50MP 5x telephoto camera’s lens is also faster, f/2.9 versus f/3.5 in the S25 Ultra, paired with a 1/2.52-inch sensor, while the ultra-wide camera’s 50MP setup is identical across the board, with an f/1.9 aperture and a 1/2.5-inch sensor.

Our biggest issue with Samsung’s flagships of late has been the 3x camera. Sitting between two powerhouses (the primary camera and 5x zoom), it always delivered a noticeable drop in quality when it fired up, especially in low-light scenes. This year, Samsung seems to have confusingly dropped the sensor size from 1/3.52 inches to 1/3.94 inches. This could be a newer, better-optimised sensor, so we’ll have to get the S26 Ultra in for review before we write it off. But with a smaller sensor, this could be a downgrade in the 70-100mm range.

You can expect Samsung’s finest AI photo processing to debut on the S26 Ultra, which should help eke out more from the hardware mix than older Galaxy phones, and video also gets a solid set of software updates. Action camera fans will appreciate Horizon Lock, which takes stabilization to a new level, keeping the horizon level even with extreme tilts. Nightography video is another area AI has overcome challenges faced by small smartphone sensors. And a feature that seems perfect for gigs is Auto Framing: when zooming in beyond the telephoto camera’s native focal length, it uses AI to keep the performer centered in the frame.

The S26 Ultra also brings back Log capture, while adding support for APV codec capture at up to 8K resolution. If you haven’t used APV before, it stands for Advanced Professional Video and is a royalty-free alternative to Apple’s ProRes. Unlike Log capture, APV doesn’t flatten the tone curve. Instead, it’s a codec that captures higher bit depth, producing less gradient banding and artifacting, and delivering a crisper image.

Interface: OneUI with added AI

Diving into Samsung’s interface, OneUI might as well be called OneAI at this rate. New features aplenty, the S26 series’s Creative Studio can create sticker packs and edit photos using text prompts and gen AI, the phone analyzes screenshots and auto-sorts and indexes them, making them searchable and arranged in folders, and Bixby, Samsung’s voice assistant is smarter, acting like a ChatGPT-style LLM that can control your phone settings and pull online information all in one place.

Probably the neatest AI addition is Audio Eraser. We’ve seen it baked into the sound and video recorders, cleaning up audio recorded on phones, but now it works with third-party video apps as well. Whether watching YouTube or Netflix, you can dial out the background crowd during a gig or a football match, and it worked surprisingly well when we tested it.

Power, pricing, and availability

Qualcomm saves its higher clock-speed flagship chips for Samsung’s Ultra model, and this year is no exception, with the S26 Ultra powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. Packing the largest vapor chamber of any Galaxy phone and delivering 20% better cooling, so gamers, 8K video fans, and video editors should see the benefits of this upgrade.

The S26 Ultra’s battery capacity remains unchanged at 5,000 mAh, though Samsung upgrades charging speeds with 60W wired charging, powering it to 75% in 30 minutes, and 25W wireless charging.

Available to pre-order now and on sale March 11, the Galaxy S26 Ultra starts at £1,279 for the 256GB model, climbs to £1,449 for 512GB storage, and tops out at £ 1,699 for the maxed-out 1TB, 16GB RAM configuration. Competing head-on with the iPhone 17 Pro Max and Pixel 10 Pro, thanks to its Privacy Display, the Galaxy S26 Ultra could be the most interesting of the three, but can it really command such a high asking price even with its new party trick? Check back for the full review to find out.