Display Shootout: iPhone 5 vs Samsung GSIII

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
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Seattle, WA
SIII loses to both iPhone 4 and iPhone 5: http://www.displaymate.com/Smartphone_ShootOut_2.htm. Good read in general to understand OLEDs vs LCDs. Seems like Apple has done a stellar job here technically and Samsung far less so. Lack of adequate brightness is an issue for Samsung SIII. I think I will wait to see how Motorola's new phone does here.

"The display on the iPhone 5 is a significant improvement over the display on the iPhone 4. Apple has uncharacteristically understated how much better the display is on the iPhone 5 – something that could be an important factor for those considering whether to upgrade. In every category that we measure (except Brightness Decrease with Viewing Angle), the performance of the iPhone 5 display has improved over the iPhone 4, sometimes by a bit and sometimes by a lot. Everyone knows about the 18 percent increase in screen area, but here are 3 major display enhancements on the iPhone 5 that we will discuss in detail below:

Screen Reflectance on the iPhone 5 has decreased substantially – the iPhone 4 has 52 percent brighter reflections than the iPhone 5. This means you won’t be distracted as much by reflections that appear on the screen. The iPhone 5 has among the lowest Reflectance values we have ever measured on a Mobile device.

The iPhone 5 has the highest Contrast Rating for High Ambient Light for any Mobile device we have ever tested, and it’s 57 percent higher than the iPhone 4. This means screen readability in bright ambient lighting has improved substantially – both the image colors and contrast won’t appear as washed out outdoors as on other Smartphones, including the iPhone 4.

The color quality and color accuracy have improved substantially. The iPhone 5 received a Color Gamut and Factory Display Calibration upgrade similar to the new iPad. While it’s not quite as accurate as the Excellent calibration on the new iPad, it is still Very Good and probably more accurate than any consumer display you own (including your HDTV), unless you have a new iPad.

[...]

The display on the iPhone 5 is a significant improvement over the display on the iPhone 4. Apple has uncharacteristically understated how much better the display is on the iPhone 5 – something that could be an important factor for those considering whether to upgrade. In every category that we measure (except Brightness Decrease with Viewing Angle), the performance of the iPhone 5 display has improved over the iPhone 4, sometimes by a bit and sometimes by a lot. Everyone knows about the 18 percent increase in screen area, but here are 3 major display enhancements on the iPhone 5 that we will discuss in detail below:

Screen Reflectance on the iPhone 5 has decreased substantially – the iPhone 4 has 52 percent brighter reflections than the iPhone 5. This means you won’t be distracted as much by reflections that appear on the screen. The iPhone 5 has among the lowest Reflectance values we have ever measured on a Mobile device.

The iPhone 5 has the highest Contrast Rating for High Ambient Light for any Mobile device we have ever tested, and it’s 57 percent higher than the iPhone 4. This means screen readability in bright ambient lighting has improved substantially – both the image colors and contrast won’t appear as washed out outdoors as on other Smartphones, including the iPhone 4.

The color quality and color accuracy have improved substantially. The iPhone 5 received a Color Gamut and Factory Display Calibration upgrade similar to the new iPad. While it’s not quite as accurate as the Excellent calibration on the new iPad, it is still Very Good and probably more accurate than any consumer display you own (including your HDTV), unless you have a new iPad.

[...]
The Galaxy S III has a PenTile OLED display, which has only half of the number of Red and Blue sub-pixels as in standard RGB displays, like those on the iPhones. The eye’s resolution for color image detail is lower, so this works well for photographic and video image content, but NOT for computer generated colored text and fine graphics because it produces visible pixelation, moiré, and other very visible artifacts, so a PenTile display is not as sharp as its pixel Resolution and PPI would indicate. PenTile technology does have advantages in manufacturing, aging and cost. For a more detailed analysis see our Samsung Galaxy S OLED Display Technology Shoot-Out.

[...]

Using our extensive library of challenging test and calibration photos, we compared the Smartphones to a calibrated professional studio monitor and to the new iPad, which has a virtually perfect Factory Calibration and Color Gamut. As expected from the Lab measurements, the iPhone 5 produced beautiful picture quality, much better than the iPhone 4, which has a much smaller Color Gamut, and comparable to the new iPad, but with slightly greater image contrast and color saturation due to its steeper Intensity Scale and larger Gamma. See these Color Gamut and Intensity Scale figures for details and explanations.

[...]
The Color Gamut of the Galaxy S III is significantly larger than the Standard Color Gamut so it produces over saturated colors that can appear comic book like and gaudy in some instances. Photos appear with way too much color. It’s similar to turning the Color Control way up on your HDTV. If the images have relatively low color saturation to begin with then they look more vibrant but not objectionable. However, if the images have vibrant colors to begin with, like a fire engine, then the images can be visually painful to look at. When compared side-by-side to the accurately calibrated iPhone 5 and new iPad, the Galaxy S III looked gaudy.

Here are the biggest issues we found in our extensive Lab measurements and viewing tests of the Galaxy S III: the Brightness is about half of the iPhone 5 due to power constraints resulting from the lower OLED power efficiency and concerns regarding premature OLED aging. As a result the image contrast and screen readability in high ambient lighting is much poorer than the iPhone 5. The Color Gamut is not only much larger than the Standard Color Gamut, which leads to distorted and exaggerated colors, but the Gamut is quite lopsided, with Green being a lot more saturated than either Red or Blue, which adds a Green color caste to many images. And for some reason Samsung has not bothered to calibrate the Color Gamut on any of its OLED displays, so they are wildly inaccurate and produce inaccurate and over saturated colors."
 

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