The OnePlus One Review
by Joshua Ho on November 19, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Android
- Mobile
- OnePlus
Display
Within the past few years, smartphone displays have improved immensely. Color rendition, peak brightness, contrast, resolution, viewing angles, and power draw have all improved since the first modern smartphones that appeared in 2007. Of course, while it was once possible to judge relative quality in displays by subjective comparison, most smartphones no longer have TN displays or poor maximum brightness. In order to better test displays, we turn to SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 with a custom workflow.
In the basics, we see that the OnePlus One has a reasonably bright display and acceptable display contrast, although there's room to improve in both. OnePlus has also done a good job of making sure that their display gets dim enough for night time reading, as minimum brightness is around 4.2 nits. Viewing angles are also great. While contrast with viewing angle changes isn't as good as AMOLED panels, I don't see any color shifting with viewing angle changes. This seems to remain an advantage of IPS panels for now.
In grayscale, we see that the white balance is just a bit blue, but there really isn’t a big issue there. The OnePlus One sets a record for grayscale accuracy. I would like to see a bit better color balance at the higher scales, but it's really just nitpicking. Specifically, red needs to be bumped up to be in line with green and blue. It's understandable why this is done though, as the display's backlight will be the weakest in red in general.
In the saturation sweep, OnePlus has done a great job to make sure that colors are as accurate as possible. The only issue here is that the red, magenta, and blue is a bit weaker than it should be. Some extra saturation would definitely tighten up the accuracy here in addition to making the display more appealing than it is now. However, the display is still incredibly well-calibrated, and will be more than accurate enough for general use.
The strong showing in the saturation sweep helps carry the OnePlus One through to do well in the ColorChecker. For the most part, we see that much of the error comes from the issues previously discussed with grayscale. The display overall is great, and while it isn’t perfect, it’s really just nitpicking at this point. The OnePlus One manages to display colors more accurate than almost everything on the market. The only real issue I've noticed with this display is that there's a bit more IPS glow than I'd like when shifting viewing angles.
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Harry_Wild - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I saw many interviews were Android App developers were ask what personal phone they are using responded shyly - "iPhone #*". So, that explains many things here!grayson_carr - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I am an iOS developer and my current phone of choice is the Nexus 5.Conficio - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Care to link to at least three of these "interviews"coburn_c - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Why do your custom screen and battery tests never line up with gsmarena? Their screen results always have different white brightness levels then yours, and their battery tests are always more in line with synthetic scores than yours. They put the contrast of this things screen at 800:1 and the battery life below the G3.2kfire - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Re: battery, GSMArena uses 50% instead of a fixed luminance.Cinnabuns - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Just to add to what 2kfire pointed out, the author states:"200 nits on a phone can be as low as 50% and as high as 90%, so setting a standardized brightness percentage would not be an effective method of controlling for display brightness."
I would not trust GSMArena's battery tests as they do not understand how to perform a controlled test.
coburn_c - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Their test was in-line with what the synthetic said here and in line with the common sense of less throttling and less software optimization don't make for more battery life.Master_Sigma - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Very pleased to see Anandtech coming around to reviewing this phone. While I disagree with the opinion that too many options are a negative, especially given the target audience for this device, I pretty much agree with the assessment of the hardware and software.FreakTM - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I think the opinion was more towards the fact that the options were causing some sacrifice on the user-friendliness of the experience, which I think is a fair opinion. Many options, good; many options presented in a confusing way, bad.mrex - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
Better to have options than not having them. You dont need to use them if you dont want to, but if they dont exist at all, you could only dream about them... the phone is very user friendly, imo.