iPhone 12 OLED Screen Issue

One more input. The above is the origial photo taken with another X. The photo below is the same but with higher level of color saturation. This makes it obvious that the ratio of RGB OLED adjustment is very much different between 12 pm and X. Hope Apple can fix it by firmware update otherwise the 12 needs to be replaced.

I got my third replacement device (first pic is the old and second pic is the new device) and it looks quite a bit better now, especially when you have night shift on. Not perfect, but still better, also both have the issue where they kind of glow when displaying solid black images.

Hello everyone, apparently this problem is well known, I am Belgian and I have exactly the same symptoms as you describe, with one difference or an one more thing 😉, personally when I am on a dark gray image (see below) with the brightness at at least a lighter vertical stripe appears in the middle right. (see photos under different sensibility to light).

When I put the black screen video (https://youtu.be/aXHcRiSK_ys), it starts to flash quite randomly, with the brightness setting between 50% and 70%.

Subject phone is a 12 Pro Max, ordered 11/12, delivered 12/01, SN: G0NDJJ6K0D55

Grey picture: (this is displayed in perfect black on the oled iphone screen after 12)

Result of grey picture:

I tested my new iphone 12 pro from week 49 again, and at the boot up there is no flickering, but when i watch the black youtube video or a black image it starts to glow. what does this means now?

and really hilarious, if i put my screen brithness at 100% and open a black pic it start to glow grey.

i could not make a video of that because it does not adjust in die end the black level so you can see the glow. but i made some pictures

We have 2 new iPhone 12 regular. One has white cloudy sploches and red and green spots that appear and then quickly dosapaer. Other 12 does not. Have open apple case. Below is examples. Top has the issue and bottom seem fine. Both are set the same. The red circle also shows up on Messenger, the cloudy is present on lock screen all the time. Theory is it might be wallpaper background, but that would not explain Messenger screen and we have no wallpaper with color. Does not effect operation. While the red disappears and is random, the white cloudy is consistant, but... Is in an L shape most the time vs covering the entire lock keypad. We a,so notice very different Color for the number circles and the black background. 3rd photo show the lock screen with the white cloud in L pattern constant.

I have similar issue with my iPhone 12 mini. The best visible when on lowest brightness, night shift and True Tone are on and on grey background. Most affected areas are down right corner and right edge

Well it seems to me most these reviewers are bothered more by lack of always on display, higher refresh rate and notch than any of the issues discussed in this thread!

If the majority of iPhone 12 owners also feel this way probably gonna be waiting long time for fix if it is software related but guessing it's a combination of controller chip, also same reason for lack of high refresh rate screen, and QC issues as mentioned already! Anyways, already said I'm gonna return mine and stick with iPhone SE till they work out issues although going to miss night mode the most on the iPhone 12. But yeah green tint at lowest brightness unacceptable in current state since just noticed last night when I had the iPhone 12 next to the iPhone SE how much worse and dull the colors looked on the iPhone 12 compared to the SE just using Apple's own apps like the timer as you can see in picture below! Totally unacceptable having worse image quality on a phone that cost like 3x as much! The iPhone SE on right displays the correct or at least I"m guessing correct orange ring color around the time vs the yellowish ring on left of iPhone 12 due to green color mixing! and can't see it too good in this pic but the grey bar around when timer ends text also has noticeable green hue on left compared to perfectly grey looking bar on right.

Then again it's just like the higher refresh rate people are complaining about I"m sure 9/10 users won't notice difference unless they know what to look for or have another phone to compared right next to iPhone 12. My LG phone had always on display and overrated IMO never had any use for it myself. And tbh the notch on the iPhone 12 didn't bug me as much as I thought it would since only really notice it if you are looking at pics full screen. Videos and other apps won't use part of screen with notch so don't notice it 99% of time.

I'm really picky about my colors though and have all my monitors hardware calibrated and even the off supposedly minor axis color shift of OLED, is really annoying and noticeable. So basically love everything else about phone but the display with wrong colors, non-RGB OLED display with noticeable rainbow fringing chromatic abberations and flickering at low brightness. Uniformity was actually pretty excellent but didn't help fix the wrong screen colors though and not related to this thread at all like others noted. Guessing most won't be as bothered but OLED on phones pretty underwhelming after hearing how much better it's supposed to be than latest LCD tech.

Just ran my iPhone 12 through my hardware calibration device before sending it back and now it's obvious why. Green is around 105% vs 95 for blue and red from 100% brightness all the way to 0! RGB grey balance on the iPhone SE on other hand is around 100% for Red Green and Blue all the way from 100% brightness to 0 giving beautiful whites and grey colors! This is something that is set at factory so most likely QA issue and I got worse screen than is normal for Apple. Not sure how widespread this is but in another YT video someone linked they also measured elevated green levels: "whites lacking red and blue" https://youtu.be/8lO6Weps8Gg?t=291 She also says the Galaxy Note and other OLED phones she tested do the same thing with white so maybe that is just more normal OLED behaviour due to not using normal RGB pixels.

If your greyscale is off all your colors will be off and no way to fix it on mobile device except to exchange and try to get better screen!

iphone 12 vs iphone se 2 grey scale

Yeah well I finally got around to doing a hardware calibration of my iPhone 12 mini before I returned it to confirm the green tint was real and it was and way worse than all my other devices except for my only other OLED device which is an older LG V35!

The chart on this page shows all devices including the older Apple X and even 8 have lower than delta error 2 which shouldn't be noticeable to all but trained eye https://www.xda-developers.com/google-pixel-3a-display-review/

Both my OLED phones average higher than 5 which even average person will notice so I can only assume I got unlucky and 2 defective screens or bad batch!

Anyways, will stick with my iPhone SE 2 and iPad which both score near delta error 1 or less which is basically considered perfect to even best trained eyes! ΔE values below 1.0 appear indistinguishable from perfect. Just returned my iPhone 12 today since couldn't tolerate the green tint contaminating every other color which is can clearly see from the memory color checker pattern test I ran on it!

iPhone 12 hardware calibration test results showing strong green tints throughout. I even did an extended greyscale test with 20 points instead of normal 10 and you can see under 10% brightness the green seems to shoot up and get even worse while the red and blue dive down making it even more noticeable at low brightness levels!

LG V35 OLED screen even worse guess that's why I never use it!

iPhone SE 2 results which shows way more accurate colors without any signs of green tint though sharp eye might notice slight blue in bottom left which is supposed to be white since Red Green and Blue line of greyscale still not on top of each other like my main display which is most accurate display of all and what I use most the time because of it.

Ipad has better white but way worse black than the iPhone SE 2 probably because of the worse contrast ratio 1000 vs 1600.

Finally my main display while not OLED still has over 2x contrast the iPhone SE 2 and way bigger at 43" with better whites and colors as accurate or better and proper greys, which should explain why I was so disappointed with screen quality on my iPhone 12!

Yup TrueTone and Nightshift are completely useless features for me since even a blind person should be able to see how much worse it makes colors! First things I disable on the iPhone and iPad! But yeah out of the box I expect the display to be indistinguishable from perfect. At least my TV's and other displays have built-in controls to tweak the RGB levels and other colors to near perfect as you can see in pictures I posted above. The more control a display gives you the more likely it is to have terrible colors out of the box and will need a hardware calibration device to fix the colors. My Macbook Pro only has control to change brightness like on iPhone but from having tested it very accurate colors already so no need to change or tweak anything like on my other non-Apple displays! But yeah I never even bothered to hardware calibrate any of my Apple displays, until I got the iPhone 12, since colors always seemed pretty accurate to my hyper critical eyes and my testing proved as much as my charts above clearly show!

Anyways, for anyone else complaining of yellow tint do yourself a favor and disable or turn of truetone and NightShift since it makes such a dramatic change to colors like the green matrix tint my iPhone 12 had anyone except maybe colorblind people can tell something is wrong!

I leave with my final post showing how bad color accuracy goes from being near perfect on my iPad to unusable with NightShift/TrueTone on. See for yourself white becomes yellow and all grays too what looks like yellow layer above all other colors just like the green tint did on my iPhone 12!

But yeah agree shouldn't have to mess with phone out of box to get decent color except turn off truetone and nightshift. My older iPhone SE 2 does that and why I kept that one instead of newer iPhone 12, which after doing the same nowhere near acceptable colors!

The only time it’s flashing is when you watch a pure black screen. The main problem is that blacks are not displaying correctly on the iPhone 12 oled display. They look grey/greenish . See iPhone XS Max vs iPhone 12 “Pro Max”

Just got my iPhone 12 Pro Max today and it’s glowing green - so annoying that I’ll have to send it back and keep waiting until they finally fix the screens.

Production date: 2020 December, week 50, factory G6 (China, Shenzhen Foxconn).

I couldn’t see the glow at first, I had to let my eyes adjust to the total darkness for 5 minutes. It’s not that bad but still when compared to my old iPhone X it’s bad, iPhone X is perfectly black.

I’ve taken proper pictures now, you can see how bad it is compared to my old iPhone X:

Both iPhones set to 0% brightness:

Both iPhones set to 100% brightness:

Production date: 2020 December, week 50, factory G6 (China, Shenzhen Foxconn).

As I did with my iPhone 12 Pro max.

I would highly recommend for you all to return the phone and wait for the iPhone 13 series or just pick up an iPhone 11 which has an LCD display (save yourself £200)

Lowlight performance is almost identical as both iPhone 11 and 12 base models have the same 1/2.55" prehistoric sensor. Real-world performance between A13 bionic and A14 is negligible unless you're doing editing or heavy gaming. Last year, exactly the same person leaked details that were almost 100 per cent accurate for iPhone 12.

Just looking at the before this years iPhone 13 Pro is going to be the one to get :) -issues

Haha same, lots of people still hopes for a software fix but that’s not happening.

It’s just annoying how apple messed up the screens. Apart from having green glow there’s a yellow tint too, awful displays...

iphone 12 pro max vs iPhone X: