Less than a week since it officially went on sale, the Galaxy S25 Ultra appears to have a bad camera glitch that’s affecting the way photos come out in night mode.
Reddit and Samsung Community posters have been sharing their night mode glitch, but Samsung has finally come out to admit the problem — and a software fix is on its way very soon.
After testing out the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s low light performance by taking it out on a clear night for an astrophotography session, I noticed later on how some of the photos came out with these odd bandings.
They were all from the phone’s 200MP main camera because I also shot a few with the new 50MP ultrawide and didn’t see the same bandings.
In the gallery above, you can see how there are about three bands running horizontally across the images. I shot other nighttime photos in pro mode with the shutter speed set for 30 seconds and none of them resulted in having the same white bands.
This is clearly a problem that stems from the phone’s image processing with night mode photos, as the photo below also shows these odd artifacting elements closer to the edges.
Samsung's response
A Samsung spokesperson sent a response regarding this glitch, which I also found on my Galaxy S25 Plus test unit.
“We are aware of a limited number of cases where images appear blurred when taking photos in Night Mode on Galaxy S25 Ultra and have issued a fix to resolve in the next software update rolling out starting this week,” said the Samsung spokesperson.
Interestingly, I didn’t realize that the astrophotography photos were also more blurred looking, which again could be attributed to this glitch. I shot astrophotography images with the Galaxy S24 Ultra last year and was impressed by the performance, so you can imagine how I felt seeing the results with the S25 Ultra.
Apart from that, the Galaxy S25 Ultra is still one of the best camera phones around — managing to prove it has the better telephoto camera performance in my 200 photo shootout against the iPhone 16 Pro Max. I also find a lot of value in how it effectively removes unwanted background noise with its Audio Eraser feature, while support for LOG video recording rounds out the versatility of its cameras.
Hopefully this upcoming software fix this week corrects this glitch.
More from Tom's Guide
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
