Reports that some Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus units’ displays are a bit more red than they should be have garnered a response from DisplayMate’s Raymond Soneira, who says that the problem is likely due to miscalibration, and can be fixed very easily within the phone’s settings. Thanks to the variable color gamut of Samsung’s newest flagship duo, they come with options to tweak things like white balance, display temperature, and even entire preset display profiles right in the settings. Samsung made an official statement saying that this is not actually a defect, and it seems that Soneira agrees. According to him, those settings are the key to fixing the alleged reddening issue, and it can be done in just a few seconds by any user, without having to take any extra steps.
In the Galaxy S8’s display settings, there are options to set White Point, Color Balance, and Blue Light Filter, among other options. In most cases, the way the screen is calibrated out of the box may see these values tweaked a bit from their default, or conversely, could see the default settings showing a bit more red tint on the screen than should be there. In either case, simply adjusting these settings until the screen looks right, or even just choosing a different display profile preset, should do the trick. If that’s not the case, then a unit’s OLED panel might just be defective, but Soneira says that the chances of this are extremely low.
Soneira explains in a separate article about the display that the deep red OLED layer in the display should not be affected by changes to the display’s White Point on their own, and that the bug could just as easily be a side effect of the special diamond pixel texture in use with this display, which has twice as many green subpixels as a typical layout, and could perceivably throw off the red balance for some users. As mentioned above, he did say that defective panels may make up some part of the flood of reports going around the internet about Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus units having red-tinted screens out of the box, but the likelihood here is pretty low, given Samsung’s OLED manufacturing processes and track record.