Consumer Reports confirms Galaxy S8 red tint problem as Samsung promises an update to fix it
The Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ launched last week, and has received many positive reviews. However, the smartphone has a problem. The screen -- which has been widely praised -- has an issue which means some suffer with a red tint. This has been confirmed by Consumer Reports in its tests of the phone.
Officials have pointed out that tweaking color calibration settings is all it takes to fix the problem, but Samsung has also said that it will push out an update to address the issue. But how much of a problem is the red tint?
According to Consumer Reports, the tint may not even be noticed by many people -- although it's clearly something that users will now be looking out for, analyzing the screen more closely than they might otherwise have done. After testing phones both with the red tint problem and without, Consumer Reports says:
To see how much that mattered, our imaging experts examined a pair of phones -- one with the reddish tint, one without -- while they were displaying the same test photograph under varied lighting conditions. They discerned a difference between the photos on the two displays, but even the red-tinged photo looked appealing and natural. It wasn't noticeably distorted.
It's unclear how much consumers might object to the red tint, especially if they weren't looking at two phones side by side. In any case it's easy to adjust the color balance. Go to the Display submenu of Settings, and then tap Screen Mode. This will allow you to access sliding controls for red, green, and blue levels, and you can play with those until the display looks right to you.
For anyone who doesn't like the idea of having to manually fix things, Samsung is due to take control in the very near future. In a statement to the Korea Herald, the company said: "Because there are some complaints about the red-tinted screens, we decided to upgrade the software next week for all Galaxy S8 clients."
Image credit: Nasrul Kamil Yunus / Shutterstock