The Galaxy S25 Ultra has a bad night mode camera glitch — here’s what I found
Expected to launch later this week, the Galaxy S25 Ultra is facing a major hurdle before its imminent release after recent reports about a camera glitch. Apparently it’s affecting photos that are captured using night mode on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. Reddit users report that they’re seeing strange white lines in their photos.
Based on the report, it appears as though these white bands only appear when using the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s main camera with night mode enabled. It doesn’t happen with the ultrawide and telephoto cameras, nor does it happen when using pro mode with a longer exposure with the main camera. And after using a third party camera app, Open Camera, a Reddit user says that the same white bands occurred in the photos as well.
I recently shot over 200 photos with the Galaxy S25 Ultra vs. Galaxy S24, capturing more than a handful of photos using night mode on both phones. However, I didn’t see this glitch in any of the samples I’ve taken with the Galaxy S25 Ultra. That was up until this weekend when I tried capturing astrophotography images. Here’s what I found.
White bands in night mode
Image 1 of 10
Since astrophotography requires longer exposures, I set up my Galaxy 25 Ultra on a tripod and put it into night mode. However, I also made sure to set the night mode exposure to the maximum time possible — which in this case turned out to be 8 seconds. I shot several images of my favorite constellations with the Galaxy S25 Ultra, along with the other cameras as well. I even switched to pro mode to see the quality difference of both modes.
It wasn’t until halfway that I decided to preview the snapshots when I noticed the white bands going across the photos I’ve taken. Once I determined it was only on the images I captured with night mode, I decided to take several more shots of different parts of the sky. Unfortunately, the same white bands were in all of them.
Image 1 of 2
In contrast, the photos I shot in pro mode with 30-second exposures didn’t have these same white bands. You can see the difference between the two in the photos above, with the pro mode shot looking much cleaner than the night mode one. This leads me to believe that it could simply be Samsung’s image processing that’s causing this glitch. Although, I did find other oddities aside from the bands.
Artifacting elements
Another thing I noticed is that there are artifacting elements that crop up towards the edges of the photos. They’re mainly isolated around where those white bands appear, but these artifacting elements have a similar pattern. You can see what they look like from the image above.
I’m also not happy with the astrophotography performance of the Galaxy S25 Ultra. I tried several times adjusting the focus, but despite tapping on different objects in the night sky that seemed to be in focus, the images look much softer. In fact, I’d argue that astrophotography on the Galaxy S24 Ultra looks much better.
I’ve reached out to Samsung the banding issues, and I will update this story when I hear back.
This might be a cause for concern with anyone thinking about buying the Galaxy S25 Ultra, but I don’t believe this is a hardware issue at fault. That would be a more serious challenge considering that production has long started with the phone. Instead, this all points to a simple glitch that could be fixed with a firmware update of some kind.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra already proves that it’s a best camera phone contender, narrowly beating out its main rival in the iPhone 16 Pro Max in our camera shootout. While this glitch seems to happen only under specific circumstances, it nonetheless dampens the S25 Ultra’s package. While my Galaxy S25 Ultra unit is affected by this glitch, I’m hoping that Samsung will release a software fix soon because launch day is right around the corner.
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