Super Steady and AI low-light: how the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra makes capturing concerts easier

Whether you’re at an indoor concert or an outdoor festival, properly capturing the experience on camera can be a challenge. Between sometimes poor lighting, loud crowds that can distract from the music, potentially being far from the stage, and having to shoot hand-held, there are a lot of obstacles to overcome.

But the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra’s cameras are designed with challenging situations like these in mind, and there’s an assortment of tools to help, which we’ll dig into below.

TL;DR: Between its Nightography¹ capabilities for low-light scenarios, its advanced stabilisation, its AI-powered zoom, and its capable editing tools, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is ideally suited to capturing concerts and festivals, whatever the lighting and however far you are from the stage.

Nightography ensures photos and videos come out great even in the dark

Concerts usually aren’t the brightest environments — they tend to take place in venues with the lights turned down low, and those that are outside sometimes occur after dark, so either way you’re likely to be facing challenging lighting.

But Nightography on the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra ensures your photos are still vibrant and sharp, even when there’s not much light. This works in part through AI² low-light image enhancements, such as noise reduction and AI multi-frame processing, which combines 30 images into a single photo, to capture true-to-life colours and details.

But Nightography also benefits from next-gen sensors, with wider apertures that allow more light to hit the sensor, with the wide camera letting in 47% more light³ than the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra’s and the 5x telephoto letting in 37% more light.

AI scene recognition means you can just point and shoot

Concerts aren’t all lit the same way. Some are brightly lit outdoor events while others are dimly lit interiors, so depending on the lighting and environment you need different settings to capture the scene perfectly, but with the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra you don’t need to worry about configuring those settings yourself if you don’t want to.

Instead, you can rely on AI scene recognition to automatically select the best settings for whatever you’re pointing the phone at and intelligently control the exposure, so then you can just point and shoot.

This is great for amateur users or anyone who simply doesn’t want to spend time adjusting settings when they could be enjoying the music — though manual adjustments are always possible if you prefer.

With Super Steady video your footage will be blur-free

Shooting video without a tripod can lead to blurry footage from shaking hands, particularly if you’re holding the phone high at a festival or concert, so it’s above the crowd and with a view of the stage.

But the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has a trick up its sleeve, as with Super Steady Horizontal Lock⁴ you get advanced stabilisation, powered by real-time gyro and accelerometer data. So even if your hands are shaking a bit, your footage will remain smooth, ensuring the concert looks just as you remembered it.

Advanced AI-powered zoom brings the stage to you

Another challenging element of filming concerts and festivals is that the stage and performers are often a long way away — unless you’re lucky enough to have secured a spot near the front.

Assuming you haven’t though, then no matter how good your camera is, it’s not going to capture an up-close view of the action unless it also has great zoom — which thankfully the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra does.

While the vast majority of smartphones just have one telephoto lens (if any), the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has two, with both 3x and 5x optical zoom. So it’s capable at numerous focal lengths.

But if you need to zoom further than 5x, that’s not a problem either, as it’s also capable of 10x optical-quality zoom, and up to 100x digital zoom, enhanced by AI. So however far away you are from your favourite musician, you should be able to get a front-row seat in the footage you capture.

Powerful editing tools help you polish your footage

With its advanced stabilisation, intelligent exposure control, and all the other features detailed above, footage from the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra will often be good enough to share instantly, but if you do want to make some edits, the phone includes some powerful tools to help.

When it comes to editing concert footage, one of the most useful things you’ll find here is Audio Eraser⁵, which lets you reduce or remove background noise, even in third-party apps. So you can quiet the crowd and keep the focus on the music.

And with APV (Advanced Professional Video) codec support, the quality of your footage won’t be reduced after repeated edits, as APV preserves more of the original information in your footage, all while using 10% less storage than other comparable formats.

So whether you’re a professional content creator or simply want your concert footage to look professional, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has tools to help.

If you’re ready to start capturing concert footage that looks and sounds true to life, head to the Samsung website to find out more.