Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0: Screen Roulette

This weekend I tried as many Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0 as I could find in NYC stores. That’s basically Best Buy and Barnes & Noble (Staples isn’t stocking the S2 yet, at least that I’ve found).

Yes, it is possible to get one with a screen that stays primarily white.

But then there are some that turn absolutely sickly blue when the screen is tilted even at a shallow angle.

Whether a screen turns blue or not doesn’t depend on any Display Settings. It’s the screen hardware itself, not any software setting, that creates the blue.

I tried to find a Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 for a screen comparison. That was a failure. Samsung has done a very good job of purging that tablet from stores. Maybe they were afraid of such a comparison?

Anyway, I grabbed a Dell Venue 8 7000/7840 and BAM! Its screen (Super AMOLED? AMOLED? Dell now says just OLED) goes blue when tilted too.

I then tried the new Samsung Galaxy Note 5. That screen — at least of the oneunit I tried — stayed primarily white. It also seemed like an entirely different kind of screen to me. I can’t put it into words, but I really think there’s a vast difference in the construction of the Tab S 8.0 and Note 5 screens — and I think it goes beyond the number and size of pixels of each screen.

As for the sharpness of the S2 screen, I have no complaints. Even on the 8.0,Surface Japan text is plenty sharp to read at its tiny size without pinch-zoom or cropping the page.

And the speed of the tablet is still astonishing after the Asus ZenPad S 8.0 “Basic” and the Insignia Flex Elite 7.85 — two tablets I also used this weekend before the tab S 8.0. (I still can’t find an Asus ZenPad S 8.0 “Pro” version anywhere in NYC.)

I don’t know what’s going on with the quality variation of the 8.0’s screen.

Is this a First Batch problem? Or deficiency in QA? Or are they coming from two different plants, one of which is producing sub-optimal screens that are somehow getting into the sales channel?

If I ultimately decide on this tablet — no final decision has been made yet (and I could have made everyone here dizzy with posts of my infinite shifts in decision-making, so you’ve all been spared that), I still need to try the Asus ZenPad S 8.0 “Pro” and the new iPad Mini 4 — I just hope I don’t wind up having to go back and forth to a store complaining about the blueness of the damn screen until I get one that works properly!