The One Feature That Changes Everything — And One Thing It Takes Away
Marques Brownlee — better known as MKBHD — has been reviewing flagship smartphones for over a decade. When he drops his full verdict on a Samsung Galaxy Ultra, it matters. His S26 Ultra review landed today, March 6, and the take is nuanced in a way that tells you a lot about where Android flagships are right now [1]. The headline feature on the S26 Ultra is the Privacy Display — a genuinely new piece of hardware that lets you limit viewing angles at will, so nobody can snoop at your screen from the side. "This is a genuinely useful innovation," Brownlee says in his review. "It's really special that it's actually a new hardware feature, which we really don't get that often in the smartphone world these days." [1] But here's the catch — and this is where Brownlee earns his stripes as a reviewer. To pull this off, Samsung built a display with two types of pixels: wide-angle ones and narrow-angle ones with a focusing lens. When you turn on Privacy Mode, you're literally turning off half your pixels. Resolution drops visibly. Peak brightness takes a hit. And because half the pixels now have poor off-axis viewing permanently, the overall display viewing angles are slightly worse all the time, not just in Privacy Mode. He bought a microscope to show this. He literally filmed the pixels turning off. That's the kind of detail most tech coverage skips entirely.
