Early protective cases for the Galaxy S27 Ultra have leaked, and they’ve reopened an argument about the phone’s camera island rather than settled it.
The dispute centres on the Galaxy S27 Ultra camera module that leaked CAD renders had already sketched out in broad strokes. Early third-party cases out of China had cutouts for the phone’s main lenses but nothing for the secondary elements beside them, which leaker Ice Universe flagged as evidence Samsung had quietly dropped the Laser AutoFocus sensor from the Ultra for 2027.
Leaker Steve ‘OnLeaks’ Hemmerstoffer has since posted an updated render on X, which he describes as the most accurate configuration yet for the rear camera island. It shows a telephoto lens, a microphone, the auxiliary Laser AF sensor and the LED flash stacked top to bottom inside a pill-shaped secondary enclosure. In other words, the sensors the case leaks appeared to omit are still there, just sitting flush enough with the housing that early case moulds didn’t cut separate holes for them.
Ice Universe wasn’t persuaded. Responding to the update, the leaker maintained that the lens sits at the bottom of the module with the flash above it: the reverse of the order OnLeaks describes. Android Authority, which tracked the exchange between the two, noted that the disagreement shows how much a CAD render can obscure once hardware sits flush with a housing instead of protruding from it.
The Galaxy S27 Ultra camera dispute, sensor by sensor
What’s notable here isn’t that Samsung is changing its camera stack: phones get new sensor arrangements every generation. It’s that two leakers with strong track records on Samsung hardware are reading the same design differently. That points to a flusher, more integrated camera island than the S26 generation, where each sensor was distinct enough to identify from a case cutout alone. A flush module is harder to reverse-engineer from a case mould, and that’s exactly the ambiguity playing out between OnLeaks and Ice Universe now.
For anyone tempted to buy a case sight unseen, that’s the practical takeaway: the earliest third-party cases on the market were built on incomplete information and may not match the final module once Samsung locks the design down.
What’s changed since our last look at the S27 Ultra
We last covered the Ultra’s design when the first CAD renders showed it splitting further from the standard Galaxy S27. At that point the renders established the phone’s general shape and confirmed the Ultra was diverging from its siblings, not what was happening inside the camera island itself. The case leaks and the OnLeaks/Ice Universe dispute are the first attempt to fill in that detail, and so far they’ve made the picture murkier rather than clearer.
Samsung hasn’t commented on the S27 Ultra’s camera hardware and won’t until closer to launch. Until then, treat any specific sensor count or arrangement, including the ones described here, as a leaker’s best reconstruction rather than a confirmed spec.
