Samsung Galaxy S8 Drops In U.S. — And The Complaints Begin

For Samsung, the big day is here in the U.S. — the new flagship phone, the Galaxy S8, will hit U.S. shores today. After the very public fail of the S7 — and the costly product recall that followed — the launch is being watched with great interest segment-wide.

So of course, the complaints are rolling in — though the good news is that this time they are far less serious than spontaneous combustion.  It seems South Korean users of the phone are, in a few cases, complaining that the screen has a reddish tint.

Samsung has said the reddish appearance of the screen isn’t a defect, and that users can fix the issue by adjusting the color settings on their device to be less red in hue.

“Galaxy S8 was built with an adaptive display that optimizes the color range, saturation and sharpness depending on the environment,” the company said in an emailed statement.

At this point, it is not known how widespread the complaint is.  The few dozen or so images of red tinted screens showing up on social media are now collectively known as “cherry blossom editions.”

Industry analysts thus far have noted that screens with stronger hues of a certain color aren’t new and have appeared in other mobile devices. The Google Nexus 5 and Apple Inc.’s iPhone 7, for instance, faced user complaints about a yellowish display.

Dr. Raymond Soneira, president at Amherst, N.H.-based DisplayMate Technologies Corp, has extensively tested display panels on the Galaxy S8.  He notes that the issue is extremely unlikely to be related to hardware — and more likely draws from the phone’s numerous display settings.

Still, he acknowledged that the issue could also arise from problematic factory calibrations of the OLED panels, or a software bug.

“If it’s a software issue, it can be fixed on the fly,” said Dr. Soneira. “But if it’s a factory calibration issue, then, well, the phones just have to go back to the factory.”