Apple iPhone 4S: Cheap Yellow Sunglasses Test Screen Quality — Really!

Credit: chr0m

The day I received my Apple iPhone 4S, I made a bizarre discovery.

My new smartphone looked fine to me at first, but then I looked at it while wearing a cheap pair of plastic yellow-tinted polarized sunglasses. It was awful! Whoa.

With the glasses on,  the display had a sickly yellow hue — I kind of expected that — but worse, it was hardly readable. I figured it must have something to do with the glasses.

This all made sense in strange way to me until recently, when I traded in my 32GB model for a replacement 64GB iPhone 4S model. This time, the sunglasses made zero difference: Cheap glasses on or off, the screen was just beautiful. My new iPhone 4S, the replacement, was crystal clear at every angle, too. The difference was so amazing that, as I was about to pull out my local AT&T store’s parking lot,  I nearly dropped the phone on the floorboard when I noticed it. And it takes a lot to shock me.

Until that moment, I hadn’t realized just how faulty the display on my first iPhone 4S was.

My advice for buying the iPhone 4S: If you can, definitely try to compare two iPhone unit screens side-by-side before you buy.

And if you already have an Apple iPhone 4S, here’s a tip to see if you’ve got a keeper. Look at it through some polarized sunglasses — a pair costs just a couple of bucks. Or slip a tryout pair on at the drugstore. If you can’t read the screen with the glasses on and it has a yellow hue, you’ve got a lemon.

Here’s what folks are saying about this issue on Apple’s discussion forums.