Galaxy Unpacked 2026 is less than a couple of weeks away, with a promised line-up of three new Samsung Galaxy S26 phones. While the regular Galaxy S26 and the S26 Plus are nothing to get excited about and a clear sign of Samsung doing the least possible effort to keep the series alive and consumers buying its phones, there’s still one very interesting innovation coming to the Galaxy S26 Ultra: a new Privacy Display feature.
This groundbreaking display technology promises to replace those bad privacy screen protectors your friends use by adding an integrated, hardware-level feature that just makes the screen really dim when viewed at an angle without affecting the person looking straight at it. And as someone who only takes Parisian subways and buses, it’s the one feature I’m really excited to see in action. I just don’t want people looking over my shoulder in the metro to see what I’m doing, especially when I need to quickly check something sensitive or personal, like my banking app or my Oura stats.
Galaxy S26 Ultra Privacy Display: Hot or Not? 18 votes Hot 83 % Not 17 %
Why Privacy Display is so exciting
SammyGuru
From blinding brightness and adaptive refresh rates to foldable panels and under-display fingerprint sensors, display technology goes through a major leap every few years. This new privacy feature that Samsung is touting is the newest and most interesting innovation because it should make our phones more immune to snooping from nearby onlookers.
The Galaxy S26 Ultra’s brighter, thinner, and less power-hungry M14 OLED panel uses two Samsung Display techs: “Flex Magic Pixel” to adjust the pixels to control light, and a foldable-born “Color filter on Encapsulation” layout to replace the polarizer in traditional displays with a color filter. When activated, the screen physically narrows the light output so that it’s only clearly visible to the person holding it, but appears completely black to anyone looking from a side angle.
More impressive, though, is the fact that this privacy trickery isn’t an all-or-nothing affair. I was afraid that I wouldn’t use this at all if it made it impossible to watch videos in bed or browse on a crowded metro at an awkward eye angle. The good news is that if I don’t want to make my entire display private, I don’t have to. Thanks to selective pixel-by-pixel masking, I can choose to only apply privacy to incoming notifications to stop snoopers from seeing what my friends or husband are sharing with me.
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