Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra introduces breakthrough privacy screen

If you’ve ever pressed a plastic privacy filter onto your smartphone display to keep others out of your business, then you know why millions of Americans buy them every year. You probably also understand why hundreds of millions more don’t bother.

Stick-on privacy filters take a must-have smartphone feature – protecting personal information from prying eyes – and pack it into a frustratingly uncompromising package. Leave the plastic cover affixed to your smartphone display, and it will prevent you and your partner from reading together about nearby restaurants. Remove the filter, and dust and oil attack the adhesive. And just try to unlock your phone with the under-screen fingerprint reader.

Which is why Samsung’s Privacy Display feature, built into the just-announced Galaxy S26 Ultra (starting at $1,299), is so instantly compelling: It protects your information with a surgical precision that stick-on filters conditioned us to think wasn’t possible.

Privacy Display works by controlling the direction of light emitted from each of the display’s pixels. Which means it can combine private and unrestricted information on the same screen.

In the phone settings, you select which apps and alerts are for your eyes only. And then Privacy Display ensures your friends can’t see, for example, that your prescription is ready for pickup – even though they’re flipping through photos with you.

You should know that Privacy Display isn’t the only cool new feature inside the Galaxy S26-series of smartphones, which were unveiled at Samsung’s annual flagship Unpacked event. But none of those features have the potential to be the next once-in-a-generation must-have capability, like touchscreens, selfie cameras and rideshare apps.

That’s a big deal. In a mature market like smartphones, new must-have features don’t come along very often. For instance, folks shopping this year for a new device likely want a thinner, lighter 5G smartphone with a better camera, faster processor, brighter display and bigger battery than they now have. That’s more or less what they wanted when they bought the phone they’re now carrying!

All of which begs the question: when might Samsung offer Privacy Display in every smartphone it sells? And will Apple and others follow suit with similar technology?

Don’t hold your breath

From what I can gather, it will be some years before Samsung is prepared to manufacture something so novel as Privacy Display-enabled screens by the hundreds of millions. That’s probably fine with Samsung: companies with a lock on cool new tech typically don’t rush to include it in their entry-level products before competitors are ready to challenge them.

Electronics maker LG, like Korean rival Samsung, makes displays for smartphones, TVs and other products. LG has filed for at least one patent that might be related to privacy filters. LG no longer makes smartphones, but it may have an eye toward offering privacy-capable displays to Apple, Motorola and others.

Toward that end, I don’t see anything to suggest that any other smartphone vendors are planning to offer integrated privacy filters anytime soon. Based on what little is stirring the rumor mill, Apple may be more interested – at least initially – in putting privacy filters in laptops than smartphones.

And those other features?

To name a few: the Galaxy S26-series cameras offer much sharper photos – especially in low light, which has always been a challenge for digital photography. Samsung credits both the performance in the custom version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor inside the phones as well as its own light-collecting techniques for the improved photo quality.

S26-series cameras are also taking advantage of new real-time sensor information to produce videos that are much more stable.

The smartphones include some cool new AI-enabled features that are quick and simple to use, like:

• Document Scanner, which makes quick work of scanning everything from old recipes to assembling travel expenses for work.
• Photo Assist, which lets you edit photos by telling the app what you want. You can even integrate objects from other pictures, so you can change the subject into a different shirt or add a hat.
• Audio Eraser, a popular AI feature in last year’s top Samsung phones, can now eliminate background noise and highlight someone’s voice in videos on YouTube, Netflix and Instagram.

The S26-series is also thinner, lighter and charges faster than previous-year models. The top-of-the-line S26 Ultra is even skinnier (7.9mm versus 8.8mm) and weighs less (214g vs 233g) than Apple’s latest flagship, the iPhone 17 Pro Max – even with Samsung’s trademark S Pen tucked inside.

In other words, the new Galaxy S26-series smartphones have the best Samsung has to offer folks who want what they wanted last time – only better. And for those inclined to add what could be the next big thing, they should check out Privacy Filter in the S26 Ultra.

USA TODAY columnist Mike Feibus is president and principal analyst of FeibusTech, a Scottsdale, Arizona, market research and consulting firm. Reach him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @MikeFeibus. 

The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY.