Photo by Demetri Wilright (www.photosbydemy.com)
Were you one of the lucky few to get a Samsung Galaxy S8 phone? Were you one of the unlucky few to turn on the phone and see a red tint on the screen? Here the world held their breath; was Samsung going to have another recalled device? Before critics could power up their computers, all of the phones were magically fixed. Samsung was able to prevent a product recall using only software.
Here’s The Engineering Behind it…
First let’s look at the cell phone screen. This one screen is actually made of up thousands of light emitting diodes or LEDs. These LEDs light up different colors when electricity is applied. Even though the screen can be any color you could imagine, the screen only uses red, green, and blue LEDs to create the colors. Want to see how that works? Check out the LED HAKboard here
Image from FossBytes
Some phones had a red tint because the red LEDs were brighter than the green and blue ones. Every phone wasn’t setup the same way, so the same brightness setting could cause your phone to look red, but your friends to look just fine.
Samsung was able to fix the red tint by lowering the brightness of the red LEDs across the screen. Their engineers understood the effect of brightness in LEDs, and applied this to fix the phone without a recall.
Now you understand the engineering behind Samsung’s tinted screen.