Galaxy S II display reportedly has yellow spots, we test

The Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II is having a magnificent debut on the smartphone scene, winning plenty of users for the Android and Samsung cause. Well it appears that not all is rosy with the Korean flagship as a watchful user has noticed an issue with that gorgeous 4.3” Super AMOLED Plus display.

The problem reported by numerous forum users concerns the leftmost quarter of the lower half of the screen and is most visible at the lowest brightness settings.

Some even say, it's not that those units are faulty, it's like that on all Galaxy SII phones. Well, we rolled up our sleeves and went to check ours and report back.

And indeed, upon a really, really close inspection, we noticed that the part of the display in question is slightly darker than the rest of the screen and has a slight yellow tint to it.

To make the effect more prominent in the photo on the left we have flipped the lower half of the screen so the darker and lighter parts are closer by. It's really the best we can do to demonstrate an effect that is pretty hard to see otherwise.

Now uneven backlighting is something that we are used to seeing on LCD screens, but we can’t quite explain how it appeared on the Galaxy S II. Granted the effect is pretty subtle and we didn’t notice it until told what to look for, but it’s there and it seems probable that all early units of the smartphone have it.

Last time we saw a similar problem it was with the iPhone 4 and it turned out to be a temporary effect caused by the glue used in assembly that disappeared by itself with time. We guess, it won't be the case here as quite a lot of time passed since those phones came out of the factory.

We’d be glad if Samsung stepped up and cleared this out for everyone and we are sure their customers agree with us.

Anyway we wouldn’t call the display issue a deal-breaker and we don’t even think most people will notice it, but still – knowing that there’s a problem with that gorgeous screen on your smartphone can leave somewhat of a bad taste in your mouth.

You can check out if your handset has the display issue by looking at a neutral gray background (you can open this page, helpfully prepared by Erethnor of XDA-developers, in the browser). You might want to choose a darker environment and reduce the brightness of the display to make it easier to see.