South Korean Samsung Galaxy S8’s Owners Facing Reddish Display Issue

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Samsung began shipping the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus on Tuesday in South Korea and looks like the device is not off to a good start. Some users who pre-ordered the Galaxy S8 in South Korea have complained that the display on their Galaxy S8 has an excessive reddish tint, with some claiming the issue isn’t downright fixable. Many users in South Korea took to local social media sites and support forums to post about the color balance issue. Some users have also posted images on Instagram and local tech community sites such as Ruliweb and Ppomppu, showing the Galaxy S8’s red-tinted display.

Thankfully, Samsung is aware of the issue and has said that the issue has nothing to do with the display quality, adding the issue can easily be fixed by adjusting color balance from within display settings. Samsung is also allowing a device exchange at their service centers if the issue still persists even after adjusting the color balance.

“It is not a quality problem and it can be adjusted with the phone itself. If the color still appears to be reddish, customers can change it at the service center.”

Though some users claimed they were unable to fix the issue by adjusting the color balance as the display was already calibrated.

The cause is most likely due to Samsung’s attempt to strengthen the red color on the Galaxy S8’s OLED panel. The OLED panel on the Galaxy S8 uses two subpixels: red-green and blue-green. According to experts, Samsung specifically developed deep red display panels for the Galaxy S8 to avoid the potential color balance problem of too much green. If they did tweak the colors to address such imbalance, they might have been a little too heavy handed on some units.

It’s not clear at this point if the color balance issue is only present in a small subset of units or across all devices. With the global launch of the Galaxy S8 just a couple of days away at this point, Samsung will have to make sure the display issue doesn’t get widespread in a similar fashion the Galaxy Note 7‘s battery issue did.