Early Galaxy S22 Ultra adopters have run into an annoying display bug (confirmed by Samsung)
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UPDATE: Samsung has reacted almost unusually promptly to these relatively widespread display issues, claiming only a "limited number" of S22 Ultra devices are experiencing a "pixelated line on the display when customer plays YouTube or unlocks the device with fingerprints."
More importantly, the company is promising to deliver "software updates to address the issue soon", having already started work on a (hopefully) permanent fix. In the meantime, you're officially advised to keep your screen on the Vivid mode rather than Natural and FHD+ instead of WQHD+ resolution. That's obviously (mildly) inconvenient, but it does confirm the glitches are related to the S22 Ultra's software and not hardware, which is certainly good news. Our original story follows below.
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Because we've been around the block more than a few times, we can't say we were shocked to find a few flaws in our aforementioned in-depth S22 Ultra review, and now that the first units have reached their lucky owners, we're also not very surprised to see a bunch of early adopters complaining of an extremely similar issue.
While we wouldn't exactly call this first-ever reported Galaxy S22 Ultra glitch widespread... yet, it's not entirely clear just how many devices Samsung has managed to deliver to end users to date. As such, it's impossible to tell if the few dozen copies confirmed to exhibit highly unusual (and highly distressing) display behavior out in the wild are indeed a small minority or a worrying number set to rapidly grow as other pre-orders are fulfilled.
What seems to be the problem?
Like most screen issues, this is a situation better visualized than described, which you can easily do in a number of places across Reddit and Samsung's EU Community webpage.
In a nutshell, the ultra-high-quality (in theory, at least) 6.8-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel on the S22 Ultra appears to be acting up for some people when its best available settings are enabled, with the video watching experience badly impacted by weird lines showing up and flashing at random.
These are pretty thick lines of jumbled pixels we're talking about here, mind you, which is something you'd maybe expect to be a problem on an old CRT TV but definitely not on a "modern" smartphone costing $1,200 and up.
As always, the mysterious launch glitch doesn't present the exact same symptoms on every single affected device, with some users reporting sightings when unlocking their screens with their fingerprints instead of during YouTube viewing sessions.
In most cases, however, the problem surfaces only in natural screen mode, with 120Hz refresh rate technology and WQHD+ resolution (3088 x 1440 pixels) both activated.
What can you do to fix it?
Well, it's pretty simple - at least for the time being, your best course of action is to switch from "natural" to "vivid" colors and, if needed, downgrade your screen resolution to the default FHD+ setting (2316 x 1080 pixels) too. One of the two changes might be enough to do the trick, but obviously, this is not an acceptable long-term solution for a myriad of reasons.
Instead, you could try to ask Samsung for a replacement device, but at least one user claims to have now experienced the same issue on two different units. Oddly enough, the company appears to have no problem replacing "faulty" phones despite not being clear if the root cause is connected to the S22 Ultra's hardware or software.
Because the freaky lines are going away for many people with a simple setting change, common sense suggests the issue is likely of a software nature, which means a permanent fix could be rolled out as part of an over-the-air update very soon. After all, Samsung is aware of the troubles encountered by dozens of Galaxy S22 Ultra across the old continent, as already confirmed by an official Community Moderator.
One important thing to highlight here is that the bugs seem somehow connected to the Exynos 2200 SoC powering the European version of the 6.8-inch giant, so they may have something to do with the hot new AMD RDNA2 (aka Xclipse 920) GPU rather than the display itself. Either way, there are no reports of similar stateside issues on Snapdragon units, as far as we know.
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