I cracked my screen and thought for sure something inside of my iPhone XR was broke, but the tech came to my apartment and 30 minutes later, my phone was back to new.
It got me wondering, how does the screen really work? Is the picture in the glass itself and that’s why it can just be replaced and back to normal? Is there something behind that glass that had to be replaced too? Where the hell does the picture even come from.
Sorry if I’m asking too many questions but I’m so intrigued after my screen was literally cracked and there were black spots and green and black lines all over it, and just by replacing the glass it’s back to normal.
In: Technology
The phone screen consists of a bunch of components that are all stacked and glued together.
On the outer most layer you obviously have the glass that keeps things feeling nice. Behind that glass you have the digitizer which is what handles the touchscreen part, and the OLED or LCD display. All of these are stacked and adhered together so “replacing the screen” is swapping out all of these parts.
[This Samsung page has a nice image showing how LCD screens are built up and all the layers used to create the image](https://pid.samsungdisplay.com/en/learning-center/blog/lcd-structure). In an OLED phone everything from the color filter back is replaced by the [OLED assembly](https://www.oled-info.com/files/OLED-device-structure-img_assist-400×295.jpg) which doesn’t need the back reflector or light guides because an OLED produces the light rather than filtering the light
There is a layer of glass, usually has an oleophobic coating on top to avoid getting too greasy from fingerprints, then comes the screen. You phones uses AMOLED technology, but there are other smartphones that use LCD. Both have a dense layer of tiny groups of colored light emitters that work together to create the images.
When you break the glass on top of the screen, since the screen is so close to the glass its probable that it damages it and the source of its energy, when that happens it can spread trought all of the screen. Some other times you get a thin line across the glass and it doesn’t affect the screen.
The screen has many layers behind the glass, one of which is a sheet of OLEDs that light up to display an image. If you had colored lines, then that layer got screwed up, too. The tech pulled the entire display from the phone an swapped in a new one.
The screen itself is just millions of tiny lights that can show either Red, Green, or Blue. [Here’s a video to demonstrate that](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MIiI7ZlHtTg)
A cable connects the screen to the rest of the phone. The rest of the phone tells the screen which of those tiny little lights to turn on, which colors, and how bright each light needs to be.
If the screen cracked, it’s probably just the lights that are damaged, or the structure holding all the lights in exactly their right spot. But the phone is still sending messages. So if you attach a new screen with un-damaged lights, everything starts working again.
Latest Answers