How Super Steady with Horizontal Lock keeps Samsung Galaxy S26 videos level during intense motion

You’re running on a trail, chasing your friend down a ski run, or filming your kid’s football game from the sidelines. Your feet are moving, your hands are shaking, and your phone is bouncing around, but the video you’re shooting looks perfectly smooth. How’s that possible?

It might sound like something that’s only feasible by a professional cinematographer using a gimbal, but that’s the promise of Super Steady with Horizontal Lock on the Samsung Galaxy S26 series: perfectly stabilised video footage. Here’s how it works.

Super Steady has been a feature on Galaxy phones for several generations, reducing shakiness and blur during movement. The S26 series upgrades it with a new addition: Horizontal Lock, an option that takes stabilisation beyond just smoothing out bumps and actively keeps the horizon level — even when the phone itself is tilted or rotated.*

What sets Horizontal Lock apart from standard stabilisation is its range. The system keeps the frame level through a complete 360-degree rotation, rather than just the minor tilts of a moving hand. Whether the phone tips sideways on a bumpy trail or swings through a full arc mid-shot, the horizon in the recorded video doesn’t move.

The system relies on two sensors working in tandem: the gyroscope, which continuously tracks the phone’s orientation and knows which way is up at any given moment, and the accelerometer, which measures movement and velocity.

Samsung’s image processing reads both in real time and uses that data to correct for rotational tilt and physical shake at the same time. The camera also widens its optical field of view during stabilisation, giving the system extra frame to work with so it can crop and correct without cutting off the shot. The combined effect is footage that stays level regardless of how the phone is moving — walking, running, or shooting from an angle a traditional camera mount couldn’t reach, and with no third-party gimbal required.

Activating the feature is straightforward: Open the Camera app, switch to Video mode, tap the Super Steady icon — which looks like a person in motion — and then select “Super Steady with Horizontal Lock.” Recording then begins with the stabilisation and level-lock active.

The feature is available across the Galaxy S26 series — the S26, S26+, and S26 Ultra — not exclusively on the Ultra model.

Samsung has already put the feature to work in broadcast settings. Recently, for the Street League Skateboarding DTLA Takeover, Samsung mounted S26 Ultra cameras directly inside the course itself — on rails, ledges, and gaps — marking the first time a live SLS competition had been filmed this way.

The stabilisation requirement in that context is unforgiving: Cameras fixed inches from a skateboarder moving at full speed, with no operator to correct the angle. Joshua Cho, Samsung’s Executive Vice President and Head of the Visual Solution Team, put it plainly: “Mobile innovation is opening new possibilities for how sports are captured and experienced.”

Horizontal Lock arrives as part of a wider set of video upgrades across the S26 series. It ships alongside Enhanced Nightography Video, Samsung’s low-light video mode with AI noise reduction, and Instant Slow-Mo, so you can shoot a range of action all day and night. Together they represent Samsung’s broader push to close the gap between what a smartphone can shoot and what dedicated video hardware can produce.

Standard video stabilisation reduces shake, smoothing out the bouncing and tilting of a moving hand. Horizontal Lock does something completely new: Its real-time adjustments and intelligent processing produce high-quality video footage that’s otherwise very expensive to achieve.

Amateur videographer? Not anymore. For anyone who has tried to film some cool fast-moving action and ended up with a shaky, unusable clip, the appeal is obvious: a phone that handles the physics of stabilisation automatically, so the only thing you need to focus on is what to point it at.

^{*Super Steady results may vary depending on editing method and/or shooting conditions.}