Samsung's Privacy Display on the Galaxy S26 Ultra may be hurting image quality

Samsung’s trying something new with its latest Galaxy flagship series, giving the S26 Ultra an innovative screen feature it calls the Privacy Display. When active, it effectively blocks anyone from seeing what’s happening on your phone’s screen unless they’re looking straight-on, right at it. But as more and more people get a chance to see the Privacy Display in action, we’re noticing a growing number of concerns about this technology’s impact on image quality.

In order to construct the Privacy Display, Samsung built the Galaxy S26 Ultra with two different kinds of pixels. Some of them are “narrow” pixels, only visible from the front. Others are “wide” pixels, with normal viewing angles that you can even see from the side. In regular operation, both kinds of pixels are active. When you activate the Privacy Display, the phone selectively turns off the wide ones, leaving only the narrow ones remaining — and the view of the phone’s display limited to the front.

But take a moment to think about that, and you may spot a potential problem — even when Privacy Display isn’t engaged, the viewing angle of those narrow subpixels is still limited. Looking straight at the S26 Ultra, you’d see wide and narrow subpixels alike, but from the side you’d only see wide subpixels. Couldn’t that have a negative impact on image quality?

Check out this side-by-side close-up look at the screen panels of the Galaxy S25 Ultra (left) and Galaxy S26 Ultra (right), shared by Evgeny Makarov on X:

You’ll probably want to click on those to view them larger, and when you do, pay particular attention to the text in each. The larger, black text features noticeably rougher edges bordering it on the S26 Ultra’s screen. And on the smaller text, its gray coloring looks much more consistent on the S25 Ultra, while we see color start to bleed in on the S26 Ultra.

Mind you, this isn’t even looking at the screen from an acute angle. Even head-on, with the Privacy Display not activated (as in the images above), there’s an appreciable decrease in fidelity.

Right now, though, the jury’s still out on whether or not that’s an actual problem. Mind you, when we’re looking under the microscope, imperfections feel a lot more prominent, and are harder to ignore. But at arm’s length, is this really going to be a difference that will impact your perception?

That could very well come down to just how sensitive your eyes are to this kind of effect. Over on Reddit’s Samsung Galaxy sub, user RunTillYouPuke shares their hands-on experience:

This makes a weird effect that when you tilt the phone even a little bit, you can see subtle color change. It is especially visible on solid colors like white background for example. Probably many of you won’t notice this, but folks with good eyesight will, and it may bother them like me.

They ended up cancelling their pre-order and going with a Galaxy S25 Ultra instead. If you’re at all worried that you might have a similar reaction, it sounds like it’s time to head down to your local carrier store and check out the Galaxy S26 Ultra for yourself before putting any money down on the phone.