Samsung has quietly turned the Galaxy S25 Ultra into something no flagship phone has been before: a legitimate underwater camera. A new feature called Ocean Mode, buried inside the Expert RAW camera app, lets users shoot photos and video beneath the surface — no waterproof housing required. Just the phone, the ocean, and whatever’s swimming past.
The feature was first spotted by Android Authority, which reported that Samsung rolled out Ocean Mode as part of an Expert RAW app update. It’s not a gimmick bolted onto the standard camera interface. Instead, it lives inside Samsung’s more advanced photography app, signaling that the company sees this as a serious tool for serious shooters — or at least for people who want more than a blurry snapshot of a reef.
Here’s what makes it interesting. Ocean Mode doesn’t just let you press the shutter button while submerged. It recalibrates the entire camera experience for an underwater environment. The touchscreen is disabled, since capacitive displays don’t work reliably underwater, and all controls shift to the phone’s physical buttons. Volume keys handle the shutter. The side button toggles between photo and video. Samsung has also built in automatic white balance correction to compensate for the way water absorbs red light, which typically gives underwater photos that washed-out blue-green cast that makes everything look like it was shot through a dirty aquarium.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra carries an IP68 rating, meaning it can withstand submersion in 1.5 meters of freshwater for up to 30 minutes. That’s been the spec for years across Samsung’s flagship lineup. But IP68 has always come with a giant asterisk: Samsung, like Apple and every other manufacturer, has never officially endorsed using the phone underwater. The warranty doesn’t cover water damage. The rating is there as a safety net, not an invitation.
Ocean Mode changes that calculus. Not legally — Samsung’s warranty language almost certainly still excludes water damage — but practically. By building a dedicated underwater shooting mode, Samsung is telling users that the hardware can handle it. That’s a meaningful shift in messaging, even if the fine print hasn’t caught up.
And the timing isn’t accidental. Apple introduced a similar underwater camera capability with the iPhone 16 series last year, calling it a feature designed for snorkeling and shallow water photography. Samsung’s response with Ocean Mode goes further in some respects, particularly with the white balance correction and the integration into Expert RAW, which gives photographers access to 16-bit RAW files for post-processing.
The technical challenges of shooting underwater with a smartphone are real. Water pressure increases with depth. Salt water is more corrosive than fresh. Temperature differentials can cause condensation inside the device. Sand and sediment can work their way into speaker grilles and charging ports. None of these problems disappear because Samsung added a software mode.
But the 1.5-meter depth limit keeps things within a reasonable safety margin for snorkeling. Nobody’s taking a Galaxy S25 Ultra on a 30-meter scuba dive. The use case here is clear: vacation snorkeling, tide pool exploration, shallow reef photography. The kind of shooting that previously required either a dedicated underwater camera like a GoPro or an expensive waterproof housing for your phone.
Samsung’s approach through Expert RAW is telling. The app has long been the company’s answer to photographers who want manual controls, RAW capture, and astrophotography modes. Placing Ocean Mode here rather than in the default camera app suggests Samsung views it as an enthusiast feature, not a mass-market one. At least for now.
The white balance correction deserves particular attention. Underwater photography has always been plagued by color loss. Water absorbs wavelengths of light progressively — reds disappear first, then oranges, then yellows. By 5 meters deep, most scenes look monochromatic blue. At snorkeling depth, the effect is less extreme but still pronounced. Samsung’s automatic correction attempts to restore natural color in-camera, which is something that typically requires post-processing with specialized software like Adobe Lightroom using underwater-specific color profiles.
How well it actually works remains to be seen. Early reports from users testing the mode suggest the color correction is noticeable but imperfect — better than shooting in standard mode underwater, but not a replacement for manual editing. The 16-bit RAW files from Expert RAW give photographers plenty of latitude to fine-tune results after the fact, which is probably the point.
Video capability in Ocean Mode adds another dimension. Underwater video on smartphones has historically been terrible. Autofocus hunts constantly. Exposure swings wildly as light refracts through moving water. Audio is useless. Samsung’s mode addresses some of these issues by locking certain parameters, though detailed specs on video resolution and frame rate in Ocean Mode haven’t been fully documented yet.
The competitive implications extend beyond Apple. Action camera makers like GoPro and DJI have owned the underwater content creation space for years. A smartphone that can shoot passable underwater footage without accessories directly threatens that market — not for professional use, but for the casual user who doesn’t want to carry a second device on vacation. That’s a large and lucrative segment.
Samsung’s move also raises questions about durability claims and consumer expectations. If a company builds a feature that encourages underwater use, and a customer’s phone suffers water damage while using that feature, the warranty dispute gets complicated. Samsung will likely argue that Ocean Mode is designed for use within the IP68 parameters — 1.5 meters, 30 minutes, freshwater — and that anything beyond those limits is user error. But ocean water isn’t freshwater. The mode is literally called Ocean Mode. That tension between marketing and warranty coverage will probably generate some interesting customer service interactions.
The broader trend here is unmistakable. Smartphones are absorbing the capabilities of specialized devices at an accelerating rate. Dedicated point-and-shoot cameras are already near extinction. Action cameras are feeling pressure. Now underwater cameras join the list of standalone devices that smartphones are making optional for casual users.
For professional underwater photographers, nothing changes. They’ll continue using mirrorless cameras in aluminum housings with external strobes and wet lenses. The physics of light underwater demand hardware that no smartphone can replicate. But professionals aren’t Samsung’s target here.
The target is the 25-year-old on a trip to Thailand who wants to capture a sea turtle while snorkeling off Koh Tao. The family at a resort in Cancún. The surfer who wants a quick clip in waist-deep water. These people weren’t buying GoPros. They were either not capturing the moment at all or risking their phone in a ziplock bag. Ocean Mode gives them a real option.
Samsung hasn’t announced whether Ocean Mode will expand to other devices in its lineup, such as the Galaxy S25 or S25+, both of which share the same IP68 rating. The restriction to the Ultra model and Expert RAW app suggests either hardware-specific calibration is involved or Samsung is using the feature as a differentiator for its most expensive handset. Probably both.
So where does this go? If Ocean Mode proves popular — and the social media content it generates could be its own marketing engine — expect Samsung to push the feature downstream in future generations. Expect Apple to respond with enhancements to its own underwater capabilities. Expect IP ratings to become a more prominent part of phone marketing, with manufacturers potentially pushing toward IP69K or custom depth ratings that go beyond the current 1.5-meter standard.
The phone in your pocket just became a snorkeling companion. Not a perfect one. But a surprisingly capable one. And for most people, that’s more than enough.
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