The Privacy Display is the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra’s most interesting new feature – here’s how it works

The most interesting feature on the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra this year – in the absence of a full-on redesign – is undoubtedly its new Privacy Display. This clever new tech builds in digital privacy screen capability at the pixel level, so that when you’re out and about you can prevent people shoulder-surfing, spying on your emails, or even seeing what code you use to unlock your phone.

But how exactly does Privacy Display work, exactly? Is it easy to turn off and on? Does it impact screen brightness? After getting hands-on with the feature at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event in San Francisco, I’m here to answer all those questions and more.

How does it work?

The privacy display employs something Samsung is calling “black matrix” technology, which uses a combination of narrow- and wide-angle sub-pixels to control the viewing angle of the display.

Turn on the feature and the S26 Ultra reduces the intensity of the wide pixels, leaving the narrow pixels at full brightness. The result is that off-axis, you can’t read what’s on-screen easily. It’s the perfect tool for reading sensitive business emails while you’re sat on the bus … or sneaking a peek at pictures of tractors during a work meeting.

The effect kicks in as you move around 30 degrees away from the perpendicular and it works both in the vertical and horizontal planes, the effect becoming more pronounced the further away from head-on you get. If someone is sitting really close, it won’t help much – but, hopefully, you’ll have noticed them spying at this point anyway.

Now, this is not the first time we’ve seen privacy screen technology built directly into a screen. Laptop manufacturer HP, for instance, has been putting its digital SureView privacy screens into business laptops for some time.

Where the S26 Ultra is different is that it can control the effect on a per-pixel basis, allowing specific areas of the screen to be filtered, so you can show what’s on screen to a friend without having to worry about sensitive notifications popping up and being read.

The same caveat applies, however, if they’re shoulder to shoulder with you, the effect is reduced, and they’ll still be able to read your notifications.

How do you use it?

I worry about exciting new hardware features like these, because they’re often introduced to great fanfare, and then the majority of users never make full use of them because the settings are hidden away, deep in the menu system.

Not here. As soon as you pull down the control centre menu system from the top-right corner of the display, you’ll see a large, lozenge-shaped button titled Privacy display, just below the brightness and volume sliders. Tap the circular button embedded within this control and it toggles the feature on and off. Tap to the right of the circle and you’re taken to the settings screen.

This is where things start to get interesting. The first thing you’ll notice is that you can increase the intensity of the setting. In normal mode, the contents of your screen remain slightly visible when viewed from the side. Flip the Maximum Privacy Protection switch, however, and the screen goes completely black for, well, maximum privacy.

This screen is also where you can set the Privacy Screen to only block notifications. That’s a straightforward enough thing to do: simply tap “Conditions for turning on” and enable toggle Notification pop-ups on.

But that’s not all. On the same screen you can quickly set the phone to enable privacy mode automatically when entering lock screen pass codes and patters. Plus if you tap the Apps option, you can set the privacy screen to automatically switch itself on only when you’re using certain software; maybe you don’t want your fellow passengers seeing that you’re sharing top-secret government information to a contact on WhatsApp. This is your go-to setting in this scenario.

Here it is in action at Samsung’s Unpacked event in San Francisco:

Does it affect screen brightness?

The simple answer to this question is, yes. Tap the toggle in the control centre and you’ll instantly see the brightness drop by a few nits. Is this a big issue? Not unless you’re in the habit of viewing your screen at full brightness all the time.

In most circumstances, all you’ll need to do is nudge the brightness slider up by a few notch or two, which does beg the question: why doesn’t the phone adjust this automatically for you? Maybe it’s because turning up the brightness affects battery life, but I can’t imagine it would affect it that much.

Regardless, the effect on brightness isn’t all that big, and it doesn’t appear to affect colour vibrance, either. I’ll verify this when I’m able to test the display properly with my colorimeter, but to the naked eye, watching Netflix with this feature enabled is indistiguishable to watching with it off.

Final thoughts

I love that Samsung has introduced this feature on its flagship phone; it’s a seriously useful tool that works very well, and is incredibly easy to use. I’d love it even more, however, if Samsung were to introduce it across its range of S26 smartphones, though – not just the pricey Ultra.

More than anything right now, though, it’s great to see some proper hardware innovation in the smartphone space for once. With so many manufacturers concentrating so hard on AI features – understandably so, perhaps – it has felt for some time that the hardware has been a little neglected. So well done to Samsung for producing something that cuts through the noise.

Display Privacy probably won’t sell the Ultra on its own to potential Ultra customers, but it’s certainly created a bit of a stir.

Written By

Jonathan Bray

Head of reviews at Expert Reviews, Jon has been testing and writing about products since before most of you were born (well, only if you were born after 1996). In that time he’s tested and reviewed hundreds of laptops, PCs, smartphones, vacuum cleaners, coffee machines, doorbells, cameras and more. He’s worked on websites since the early days of tech, writing game reviews for AOL and hardware reviews for PC Pro, Computer Buyer and other print publications. He’s also had work published in Trusted Reviews, Computing Which? and The Observer. And yet, even after so many years in the industry, there’s still nothing more he loves than getting to grips with a new product and putting it through its paces.

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