How to Select iPhone Aftermarket Screen Replacement?

There are various kinds of screen assembly products with uneven quality, which makes many customers confused when placing orders. Therefore, REWA has set a stringent standard for selecting products to ensure customers’ shopping experience, aiming to select the best quality screen assembly product with the highest cost performance on the market. REWA hopes to make customers shop without worries and rest assured to use assembly products selected by REWA.

Concept Introduction

Based on display technology, common aftermarket screen assembly can be divided into OLED and LCD. While talking with customers, we found that many were not familiar with these kinds of screen assembly, which made it hard for them to select the product that suits them best among numerous screens.

Therefore, we will walk you through these concepts in detail. LCD, or liquid crystal display, works by emitting light from a backlight and filtering the light to display images on the display.

The main structures of LCD are backlight, glass substrate, touch panel, and polarizer.

The backlight is the light source. The glass substrate determines the transmittance. The position of the touch panel affects the touch stability. The polarizer decides if the screen supports all angles. OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, works by the way that each pixel provides its own light, which allows images to be displayed.

OLED can be divided into soft OLED and hard OLED. The biggest difference between soft OLED and hard OLED is that the soft display is foldable. So the soft screen has better drop performance and high repairability, coming with an expensive price.

The main structures of OLED are OLED, touch, and polarizer.

The OLED gives light on its own, without the need for a separate backlight or color filter, which also makes OLED more power-saving than LCD. As you can see, the OLED structure is simpler, so the screen itself will be lighter and thinner than the LCD. In terms of function, as OLED is self-illuminating, some pixels in the black area can be directly closed, so the display effect is purer and the contrast will be higher.

According to different structures of the touch panel, the screen assembly can be divided into incell, oncell and outcell.

The biggest difference is the position of the touch panel. Incell's touch panel is embedded in the glass substrate, oncell is above the glass substrate and under the polarizer, while outcell is above the polarizer and under the glass lens. Incell has the best stability and response speed, followed by oncell and outcell.

After understanding different types of screen assembly, let's take a look at the display effect of different screen assembly.

Test and Comparison of Different Screen Assembly

Next, we will test and compare hot-selling iPhone X aftermarket screen assemblies in light of thickness, color temperature, brightness, color gamut, and polarizer to see how they differ from OEM.

The first group for testing includes OEM, aftermarket soft OLED, and hard OLED. First of all, let’s measure the thickness.

OEM screen assembly of iPhone X is soft OLED so its thickness is the same as aftermarket soft OLED. Since hard OLED adopts glass display module, it is thicker than the other two.

Then we install the screen assemblies to the tester to compare display effect.

Compared to OEM, aftermarket soft OLED and hard OLED have slight color difference but the difference is not obvious. Only in images with high contrast can you see a slight exposure of hard OLED.

Next, we use the color analyzer to compare the brightness and color temperature.

The brightness of an OLED is decided by the organic luminescent material and voltage. It can be seen that OEM is brighter. The color temperature normally ranges from 7000k to 8000k. In the comparison, soft OLED has a higher color temperature

Next, we calculate the color gamut by measuring the coordinates of red, green, and blue. It is found that soft OLED has the narrowest color gamut. This is because soft OLED carrier solution adopts foldable COP while hard OLED uses COF. The power consumption of COP is higher than that of COF. Therefore, to ensure the stability of other functions and lifespan, the color gamut of aftermarket soft OLED is made to be narrower.

The last step is to test the polarizer. OEM and soft OLED perform well at all angles while hard OLED turns to black at 45 degrees.

OEM, incell, and G+G are the second group for testing. First of all, let’s measure the thickness.

The thickness of incell and G+G is almost the same. OEM is the thinnest. In light of structure, G+G will be thicker. But some manufactures will make the glass lens thin for screen fitness. In addition, the response time will be slightly delayed because the LCD of outcell uses cheap material.

Next, let’s take a look at the display effect.

The production process of G+G is backward with poor material. So it has a low resolution and the worst display effect.

The brightness and color temperature of G+G are lower, having little differences from the other two. Get the color gamut by measuring the coordinates of red, green and blue. As you can see, G+G has the narrowest gamut, which explains why the display is a little bit inferior.

Lastly, we test the polarizer. We can see that incell performs well at all angles while G+G turns to black at a certain angle.

Judging from the comparison results, soft OLED, hard OLED and incell have better display. In terms of thickness, LCD is a little thicker than OLED. But concerning brightness and color temperature, the difference between four aftermarket screen assemblies and OEM is not big. Although soft OLED and incell have a narrow color gamut, they perform almost as well as OEM in the display. The display of outcell is worse but it has the most advantageous price.

You can choose a suitable replacement screen assembly according to your own needs.

When replacing the aftermarket screen assembly, we will normally come across two problems. One is the true tone disappearance. The other is the “Important Display Message” might emerge.

True tone will be disabled after screen replacement of iPhone 8 and models above. We can restore true tone with a True Tone Repair Programmer.

At present, except that some iPhone 8 aftermarket screen assemblies don’t support true tone restoration, the aftermarket screen assembly of iPhone X and models above all support true tone restoration by default.

During screen replacement, another common problem that is likely to emerge is the pop-up saying “Important Display Message”. This is because the screen assembly data don’t match the motherboard data. Currently, iPhone 11 and models above all receive the pop-up after screen replacement. To solve the problem, REWA used to offer a solution which was to replace the aftermarket screen assembly touch IC with the OEM screen assembly touch IC. The solution is effective but has a high requirement for the technician.

After testing, REWA LAB recently found that some screen assemblies on the market can avoid the pop-up. We suspect that Apple has relaxed restrictions on aftermarket screen assemblies. REWA team has selected some iPhone 11 screen assemblies that can effectively avoid the pop-up message. You can contact our sales team to purchase.

Summary

REWA maintains close cooperation with many suppliers and factories in China, holding the latest product supply information on the market. To ensure that you can select the most suitable one from numerous products, REWA has formulated a complete product selection and test process. We only recommend products that have passed the test, aiming to offer customers more choices. Meanwhile, we make sure that our product features the lowest price among same quality products and the best quality among same price products. Therefore, choosing REWA will be a wise choice if you need to purchase assembly products.

Click here to buy REWA selected iPhone screen assembly.

Watch the video below to get the ultimate iPhone Aftermarket screen assembly guide.