I used to use a OnePlus 6T. One day, the screen stopped accepting touch input. The Android ecosystem has been a bit slow lately, and I didn’t want to create e-waste, so I tried to get the screen replaced.

I found a company with a local store, uBreakiFix, that could service my phone. However, the new screen seemed dull and lifeless. Worse, it had backlight bleed. That should be impossible. My phone has an AMOLED panel, and OLED panels don’t have backlights.

Let’s take a look at that screen:

The mystery screen sure does look similar to an LCD, doesn’t it? It’s using RGB stripe, which is common on LCD, and more expensive on OLED.

The larger problem is the use of RGB pixels, whereas almost all OLED phones (OnePlus 6T and LG V30 included), use PenTile RGBG layout. Simply, it has half the number of green sub-pixels.

The screen they used has visible backlight bleed, a pixel layout similar to S-IPS LCD, and a subpixel geometry nowhere near the PenTile display it should be. It’s a counterfeit. I got a refund. And then an iPhone.