The Galaxy S25 Ultra may be mightily impressive for its AI capabilities, but Samsung hasn't exactly spent much time innovating its exterior design. Well, if a new rumor is to be believed, that might be due to change with the S26 Ultra. Tipster Kok announced on X/Twitter that: "In the Galaxy S26 Ultra display prototype, the camera hole is not visible."
Read more: Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra full review
We've seen various ways of concealing a phone's front-facing 'selfie' camera over the years, like nifty flip-forward and pop-out designs, but the most elegant (and likely) solution for the S26 Ultra would be an under-screen camera. This is the holy grail of selfie cameras, requiring no special mechanical engineering like a pop-out camera, while also not interrupting the phone's display with a notch or punch hole. If Samsung can pull off such a trick, it could give the S26 Ultra a much-needed boost over the competition when it comes to the phone's design.
Under-screen selfie cameras have been talked about for some time, but we've yet to see them make much impact. This is because implementing such a camera design is inherently difficult. Placing a semi-opaque screen directly in front of a camera severely impacts its recording quality: the multiple thin-film layers that constitute an OLED display, along with its pixel grid, not only diffract light passing through to the under display camera, they also cause potential color casts. Furthermore, the screen's partial opacity restricts light entering the camera, leading to increased image noise.
So how could Samsung solve such issues? Well, it could turn to its new best friend again: AI. It's possible that algorithms could compensate for the image quality reduction caused by positioning the camera behind the screen, with clever de-noising technology potentially compensating for the reduced light reaching the camera sensor. This would go a long way to making an under-screen selfie camera viable.
However, it's worth remembering that even if this latest rumor is true, it still refers to a "display prototype", meaning this is a long way from how the final version of the S26 Ultra might turn out. There's no way Samsung will allow its next flagship phone to have inferior selfie camera image quality to that from the S25 Ultra, so unless it can fully iron out the problems that come with under-screen cameras, it's likely to retain that signature punch hole for the foreseeable future.
