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In a secluded room deep within Samsung Display’s headquarters in South Korea, rows of whirring gray and black machines repeatedly fold, flex and stress test the company’s newest mobile displays. During a mid-June visit, I was among the first people outside the company to step inside the high-security lab and see how Samsung pushes its foldable screens to their limits before they reach consumers.
On Tuesday, Samsung unveiled Flex Titanium, a new display technology for its upcoming Galaxy foldable phones including the Z Fold 8. It combines a titanium-alloy film with a titanium plate to create a thinner, more durable display structure designed to better withstand drops and other impacts — an important consideration for foldable phones that can cost thousands of dollars.
Watch this: I Went Inside Samsung’s Secret Display Lab and Saw Its Wildest Phone Concepts
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As Samsung makes its foldable phones thinner — last year’s Galaxy Z Fold 7 measures an impressively slim 4.2mm when open — the company is looking for ways to scale back various components to maintain a sleek profile. Samsung says it spent about three years developing Flex Titanium technology while examining customer feedback across seven generations of its foldable phones.
“We have to understand user behavior and various display challenges like dropping or pressure with a large object or a tiny object,” Samsung executive vice president Byung Duk Yang said in an interview. “Because of that, we have developed a very comprehensive and sophisticated evaluation method to understand user behavior in the real world.”
The machine to my left tests a display’s image quality. You can slide open the panels to peer inside via the small windows.
Samsung
Down another long hallway (I feel like I’m in an episode of Severance at this point), we enter a lab for examining the display’s image quality, including brightness and color. After placing a display in the center of the machine and closing what looks like a miniature garage door with sliders on the windows for peering in, the testing begins.
A series of bright lights beams down on the panel, and the machine measures how much light is reflected — the less, the better. That’s for a few reasons: The display’s colors appear deeper, less reflection makes it easier to see the screen under bright lighting and you’re less likely to just be staring at your reflection when you look down at your phone. It takes about three minutes to test one panel.
This marble-sized ball is small but mighty. It’s dropped onto a display panel to test if it cracks.
Samsung
Making a “better display”
Samsung’s new Flex Titanium is all about bolstering durabily without adding bulk. Compared to polymer film, titanium-alloy film has 20 times greater mechanical stiffness, the company says, meaning it better retains its shape. This component sits below the OLED panel and is less than one-third the thickness of a human hair. Below that is the titanium plate, which Samsung says can provide more stable support when the phone is unfolded without compromising flexibility.
Last year’s Z Fold 7 also used a titanium plate, but the display structure was made up of multiple polymer-based support layers. Samsung has now consolidated those layers into a single titanium-alloy film, reducing the thickness of the display module while maintaining strength, flexibility and long-term durability, the company says.
At CES 2026, Samsung Display showed off a concept for a creaseless screen.
Celso Bulgatti/CNET
Samsung is slated to share more about Flex Titanium and upcoming Galaxy foldable devices, including the Z Fold 8, during its summer Unpacked event on July 22. These advancements look to be a step toward mitigating many of the durability and aesthetic compromises that have long characterized foldable phones — though the work is far from done.
“Years ago, Samsung created this foldable category,” Yang said. “And the foldable display and the structure we developed became the standard. So we feel some responsibility for this market; we have to make a better display.”
