If the rumors are true, then we are only one week away from the reveal of the Galaxy S26 Ultra. And as the February 25 Galaxy Unpacked launch event draws closer, Samsung is continuing to tease features from its next flagship camera phone.
The latest taster, perhaps unsurprisingly, shows off some of the phone’s AI camera features. In a trio of Shorts, Samsung shows off how the Galaxy camera will be able to reconstruct missing elements of an image using AI, as well as adding an element into a photo simply by asking for it in your own words, or sketching it into your image - multimodal input, in Samsung speak. The last short demonstrates how an element from a photograph - in this case a puppy - can instantly be turned into a selection of graphical stickers.
The emphasis here is the "fluid creative experience". Samsung wants to integrate AI into every aspect of the camera system so its use is completely natural, with a seamless capture, edit and share experience - no switching between apps, and no messing about in menus or fine-tuning tools. Traditional prerequisites for creating a compelling photo - experience, technical skill, etc - are no longer required, as thanks to AI this is "the easiest and most user-friendly Galaxy camera experience yet".
Past leaks have suggested that the S26 Ultra is unlikely to have much new camera hardware, so it was inevitable that Samsung would instead focus on software improvements when promoting the S26 Ultra. But as much as we love to tear into Samsung for its lack of camera hardware innovation, does this even matter any more? With AI now able to essentially magic an image out of nothing, it could be argued that the camera itself offers little more than suggestions to the Neural Processing Unit, whereupon AI modifies that raw image data so much that you'd never know whether the original exposure was captured on a 12MP or 200MP sensor.
