Watch out for Chinese "AMOLED" replacement screens for Samsung phones.

[Fflint]

I'm posting this thread here as a warning to others who may want to buy an "AMOLED" screen from China hoping buying "an AMOLED" means it is a refurbished original rather than a locally made inferior replica.

Long story short - it is the latter. tl/dr: it has horrible ghosting during movement, it looks good when you display stationary images only. When you tell them you;re unhappy, they ask you for a "video of a problem" Seriously? A video, of ghosting? Well, anyway, to my surprise the ghosting is so bad it does actually show on video...

The short version is above. The long version is: As probably many of you I have an older "top tier" Samsung phone with a broken screen that has certain features modern phones do not have (in my case it is gear vr) so I'd like to repair it.

I started searching for a replacement screen knowing very well newly made clones are useless, but I though the method to avoid them is to look for words in item descriptions like "LCD, TFT, new" etc, and if the screen claimed to be "original AMOLED" I thought it would be a refurbished screen. The worst I would have to deal with with a refurbished, but working screen is some burn in.

So I bought such an AMOLED screen, It arrived, I installed it. The blacks looked great, as an OLED should, but the moment I touched it it felt "strange" (mushy? Original samsung screens feel solid like a piece of glass, this felt like having some give, not as much as the resistive panels of the old, but definitely some). Then I went into the settings menu and I saw what looked like a horrible lag when scrolling (later troubleshooted as ghosting). This makes the screen unusable for fast fps games like NOVA, it makes it look like crap when scrolling any webpage and it makes it totally unusable for the purpose I bought it for - GearVR. If you watch content it is fine, but if you move your head (as you do in GearVR) everything becomes blurry. I even thought this is some software feature until I recorded this screen in slow motion and I noticed an original Samsung screen (albeit on an older S8) refreshes completely differently.

Specifically, Samsung's Super AMOLED (on S8 for example - I'll have a refurbished S9 screen to compare with later in the week) switches to dark during refresh. This new screen simply draws the new scene and then it takes time for the old scene to fade. For some time that feels like 10%~15% of the refresh time the old scene remains. This very bad.

So, if you just want to make a phone "working", and all you do it watch photos, perhaps putting a screen like this is an option for you(however, if that's all you do, just buy a modern cheap smartphone - you'll have a better battery life). If you browse a lot of scrolled content your eyes will not be happy with this screen, and if you're gaming or using GearVR - forget about it.