With any luck, a future patch will fix it right up
Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Ultra isn’t supposed to launch until later this week, but as we learned over the weekend, some lucky buyers have gotten their phones early. There’s nothing better than getting a new gadget in the mail ahead of launch, but the experience can quickly turn sour if unexpected bugs or hardware failures pop up. Unfortunately, it seems like some S22 Ultra owners are finding themselves frustrated in the hours after unboxing.
Several users on the dedicated Galaxy S22 and S22 Ultra subreddits have reported display issues, with strange bands running along the full width of the screen (via 9to5Google). Looking through the comments on these posts, a few common factors seem to line up. First, these strange bands have only appeared on Exynos models so far, not the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1-based phones shipping in the US and other regions. It also seems like certain screen configurations trigger these issues, suggesting it might be a problem with the new AMD GPU, not the display itself.
According to these reports, these bands seem to appear most often when the screen is set to 1440p with natural color settings. While some have suggested performing a full factory reset, it sounds like the (hopefully temporary) fix is much easier. Switching from natural to vivid in color settings and, in some cases, reducing your resolution from QHD to FHD seems to solve the problem. Obviously, with such high-end hardware — and a high-end price to match — it’s not a permanent solution, but it might tide early adopters over until a software patch can iron it out.
All this said, we can’t write off this being a hardware-based issue just yet, potentially requiring replacement devices to be shipped out to any affected user. We’ll have to wait for further comments from Samsung regarding these defects. This launch isn’t the first time the company has had flawed screens at launch, though usually, a software patch is enough to fix these sorts of problems.
For now, if you pick up an Exynos-based S22 Ultra only to spot some display distortion, try switching your color and resolution settings. It might be enough to make the phone usable while you wait for more information.
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