Several Galaxy S9 Panels Found to Suffer From Black Crush and Colour Banding Issues

[Nergal]

 

There’s no denying the fact that Samsung makes some of the best mobile displays in the world. The super AMOLED panels are the primary reasons many users opt for Samsung devices. However, AMOLED panels often come with their share of problems, ranging from burn-ins to colour banding and overly saturated colours. The Google Pixel 2’s OLED panel has had its share of issues as well and now it looks like it is the Galaxy S9’s turn.

Despite the fact that Samsung has been continuously improving the quality of its AMOLED panels to stay ahead of the competition, some users are reporting issues with their Galaxy S9 displays. The problem isn’t widespread, and only a fraction of users are reporting it, but the numbers are not insignificant by any means. It’s impossible to determine how many devices are affected, as the problem will go unnoticed to the untrained eye.

Several Galaxy S9 owners on forums such as Reddit, XDA Developers and the official Galaxy S9 community page, are reporting colour banding issues on their brand-new smartphones with dark/black images. The phenomenon is termed as the black crush. It happens when the screen has problems displaying shades of dark accurately, resulting int he blacks in videos turn out to be too blocky and grainy, thus depleting the quality of dark videos. Even the Google Pixel 2 initially was found to have problems rendering darker shades correctly, which was fixed via an OTA update.

For now, there is no way to determine the scale of the problem, but we hope that Samsung takes notices and rolls out a fix via an update. Several users state that the problem was resolved simply by running the display at its native WQHD+ resolution. Another solution is to download third-party apps from the Play Store that will help you calibrate your panel to show dark shades better.