As tends to happen ahead of major launches, a handful of devices appear to have slipped into the gray market. Reports suggest units are circulating in parts of Southeast Asia, where eager buyers have been willing to pay a premium to get their hands on the phone early.
Indian YouTuber Sahil Karoul is one of them. He shared an unboxing video, some hands-on impressions, and several camera samples across YouTube and X.
The creator posted side-by-side comparisons with the Galaxy S25 Ultra. And to be fair, these aren’t controlled tests. The framing varies slightly, and conditions aren’t identical between shots. Still, some patterns do stand out.
The Galaxy S26 Ultra images tend to look a bit brighter overall. Exposure appears slightly lifted, especially in harsher daylight and mixed lighting scenarios. If the rumored wider apertures on the main and telephoto cameras are accurate, that would explain the extra light intake. It could also simply be more aggressive processing.
Portrait shots show a similar trend. Skin tones look a touch brighter and, in some cases, more natural. That said, edge detection still isn’t flawless. Fine hair strands and tricky background edges occasionally show minor inconsistencies in the bokeh effect. Nothing disastrous, but not perfect either.
Low-light samples look marginally cleaner compared to the S25 Ultra — a bit less visible noise and slightly better shadow detail. The difference, however, isn’t dramatic.
The S26 Ultra retains the same core camera setup as its predecessor — a 200MP main sensor, 50MP ultrawide, 50MP 5x periscope, and 10MP 3x telephoto — with adjustments focused more on lens tuning and image processing rather than entirely new sensors.
If these early samples are anything to go by, Samsung’s approach this year seems evolutionary. The output looks a bit brighter, a bit cleaner, maybe slightly more polished — but not radically different. For S25 Ultra owners, nothing here immediately screams “urgent upgrade.”
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