It appears that maybe we were premature to declare there was a bit of fuss about nothing to do with the Pixel 2 XL display. While I stand by the blue tint “issue” being a bit of a non-issue, the image burn-in reported yesterday is a bit more worrying. Today’s discovery that the pixels themselves are slow to activate causing awful scrolling effects is even worse.
Here’s a great example of what we’re talking about:
https://twitter.com/hallstephenj/status/922329787389104128
As you can see, when the brightness is lower than about half (which, let’s face it, might be fairly often), black pixels take a while to activate and this is most prominent when scrolling, and equally, take a while to deactivate too. What this means is you get a jelly-scrolling type effect, and it’s rather noticeable. I hadn’t noticed this myself as my brightness sits around 50% most of the time, but like the sound of a friend eating noisily, once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and you notice it everywhere.
It’s just one more issue with an already embattled display, and Google’s assurances of active investigation may not offer a lot of comfort to those who’ve already pre-ordered, or who’ve already bought their Pixel 2 XL somewhere else.
While customers don’t have them in Australia yet, the feedback on our coverage has been pretty one-sided: a good many people are considering their pre-orders and looking at something else.
