1)Battery life, battery life, battery life, battery life and Battery Life.
2) Size.
3) Outdoor visibility.
4) Battery life.
These are what consumers care about for screens.
Even if people cared about display calibration, hardly anyone is going to invest in the expensive hardware and software necessary to actually correct it.
There's been hundreds of studies showing that contrast is the most important thing for the subjective quality of a screen, followed by resolution (up to a point).
For the vast majority of people (although not me, I like colours to be as accurate as possible), as long as the colours are ok, then that's all they want.
Yes, “people care” but aside from not wanting to be one-upped by the guy with a higher-spec phone, maybe you could explain why.
Once you get to a certain level of contrast, an increase can only be appreciated where there are no screen reflections and the ambient light level is nearly non-existent. This is a use case that applies to watching a video in bed — and most of the videos that people play on phones are hardly art-house investigations into Van Gogh's use of the color palette. Yes, more is always better, but after a point, it's all perfectly good enough.
Ditto for resolution. I can't even focus on an object close enough to my eyes (about 3"/7cm) that my 20/20 vision should be able to distinguish individual 2K-rez pixels. If the phone is driving a HD screen, I am not sitting with the screen up close enough, either.
In isolation, a little overkill is fine, good engineering. But why people should pay anything extra, suffer higher battery drain, or need games to bloat artwork, or tax programmers to refresh all those pixels at decent framerates, is beyond me. Can you help?
There is obviously a limit to what is beneficial. We are there or just about there (or past it to lots of people, personally I feel like anything past 1080p is not worth it for a 5" screen) for resolution, however, we are several orders of magnitude away from that level of contrast (large increases in resolution aren't immediately noticeable, increases in contrast still very much are).
However, even with contrast although people will straight away be able to see the benefits, most high-end phones are "good enough". That is, although it's quite noticeable that something else is better - it's only noticeable when two displays are compared, which doesn't happen in your normal use of a phone.
Distinguishing pixels is not the best criterion to declare a resolution as high enough. Sampling, even with a physically perfect system, will reduce the contrast of an image modulated at Nyquist frequency to about 64%. Ideally you get a screen where there is no noticeable reduction in the Modulation Transfer Function of all frequencies which the human visual system can resolve. For that, you will need a pixel that is significantly smaller than the finest detail you can resolve.
Assuming the naked eye is at best able to resolve 1 arcminute, even a 0.25 arcminute screen has some impact on the contrast of resolvable details, and therefore a higher resolution screen could still improve the perceived image quality further:
People may think they want higher resolution, because it's what they've been told to look for. But I urge you to find an average user who not only *actually* wants, but can tell the difference between an FHD and QHD display on a 5" display, without staring super close at the pixels with their eyes 1" away.
The point is that if the display arrives well-calibrated then they don't have to make any additional investments... Also, at what point did Anandtech cater to ordinary consumers?
This only show why it is one of the top rated phones in terms of consumer satisfaction (seen at a consumer based website, such as http://www.topreport.org/phones/ for example...)
In some tests it walked around even kings of calibration (Apple) And this despite the fact that the iPhone is no ideal black, no ideal contrast, no ideal response time, no ideal viewing angle, because LCD display (IPS)
iPhone, 'no ideal black?' You said it yourself. It's LED/IPS. not AMOLED. When 'black' is the absence of light, AMOLED rules the roost. It's pixels are 'off'. LCD and LED/IPS doesn't have the luxury, nor do any other non AMOLED panels. That said, it doesn't suck. Apple's 'calibration' out of the box is and had been second to none. As a user of both a 5s and Note 3 I appreciate the differences, as well, how far Samsung has come in just a year with the technology. The Note 3 was the AMOLED display I finally found 'decent'. Still saturation challenges. Still gray scale, colors...and their ability to be semi controlled by Adapt screen's setting, it's the closest to an 'iPhone' as I've seem when it came down to ALL visual factors taken in combination. Apple's displays, that continue to stack up well to today's flagship Android devices are now a year old from their original production (5c/5s) and the Air, also a year old sits atop the best two or three. When it comes to viewing angle, it's hard to get better than iOS. iPad. iPhone. Latest generation iPods and MacBook retina displays. They're right at about 178°. That two degrees can get annoying but you're not going to get it with AMOLED. When you're talking response time, as an owner of the original Xoom, a half dozen Android phones, three other tablets and each iPhone and iPad I can honestly say, you're a bit 'off' when it comes to fact. Again, I own and enjoy them both. Love me for differ t things and flagship to flagship, iOS generation in, generation out, has ALWAYS been more responsive, faster and 'immediate' than ANY Android build. I'll admit, my Note3 is the fastest yet but I've got a half dozen 'cross platform' and different apps that show 'response time' and the real truth. Whether playing Asphalt 8 or Temple Run. Opening and accessing Dropbox or ANY browser on Android, from stock to Chrome, Dolphin to Opera, Mercury...I've got plenty. iOS trumps them all. And in spades. From launch to population of the screen, the iPhone 5s with ½ the cores @ 40% less clock speed and ⅓ the RAM absolutely SMOKES any of my Android devices I own and have used. It's sad, but it's the truth. GPS and location related applications (I'm a pilot and use ProPilot and ForeFlight as well as a half dozen others with up to date Jep charts, plates, weather and traffic conditions, even TCAS and 'moving map' ADS-B 'Next Gen' technology. Instantaneous lock. Amazing accuracy and phenomenal terrain, traffic and weather 'radar' on a retina iPad mini. That has replaced a 50lb flight bag (still in the plane JIC). And I fly in and all over the state of Alaska with amazing sunshine, around the clock these days...and my 'contrast' challenges, even on the mini are non existent. I'm not a fan of watching movies on my phone though and in that situation, I can see the appeal;)
I'm the type of person who noticed how dull the colours were on the iPad mini. (I think it was last year's?) It was still better than basically all other displays except that year's iPad and iPhone, but I'd had the opportunity to see the iPhone's screen before, and I did notice in casual viewing.
You can say that people don't care about this or that, and it's true that most won't really know why they don't enjoy a system that much, but when they see something better they can usually recognize it.
Back in the 90s, my mom had the good sense to get a very good monitor with her cheaper computer, because she knew the performance differences would be minor, but you'll be intimately familiar with what you see every day.
There's a typo in the title - should be Samsung, not Samsung. Otherwise, great read, glad to see the improvements in AMOLED. Still appears to be a bit greenish looking at the charts, no?
Oops. That was a pretty terrible typo, thanks for the catch.
It definitely is a little bit on the green side at times. While this tends to be acceptable to a certain extent near 100% white, it's quite obvious when closer to 50% white. It's definitely a lot better than the Galaxy S5, which had some shades of gray more green than gray...
Thanks for clarifying this, Josh, great to see Samsung improving this - it seems like that's the final step before truly great AMOLED screens. Morganf, yeah, saw the typo in my comment, but there's no edit option, and I didn't want to post again just for this.
The display will always have a green tint as long as they continue to cheat with PenTile matrix screens. The higher pixel density will definitely help due to being able to better hide the color errors via dithering, but there will always be a balance towards green until they use proper RGB screens again (instead of the PenTile RGBG).
Why, in the name of all that matters to anyone, are so many commenters on tech enthusiast sites bemoaning the arrival of displays like this?!?!? It's the best quality display, by every metric except for potentially power draw (and the jury is still out on that one) to ever grace an Android phone. It's insanely close to the holy grail of 4.9", 2560 x 1440 (easily pocketable, 600 ppi), and the only thing it might have sacrificed to get there is a little bit of the power budget. This is the direction ALL OEMs should go, so that in a couple generations they'll become even thinner, brighter and draw less power. Furthermore, accurate color is something that should be applauded whenever we encounter it, not simply dismissed with a hand wave.
I'm not sure if it's just people being uncomfortable with specs advancing this rapidly, but why is everyone trying to put the brakes on when we're so close to the end goal here? I've been waiting for literally 20 years for LCDs to get to this point! Being able to reproduce type on an LCD with no visible aliasing or blurriness from font "smoothing" is absolutely where we want to get to. Is everyone posting these comments too young to remember the laser printer (and, shortly thereafter, inkjet) revolutions? Do you not remember how awful printed documents looked before we got to resolutions of at least 600 dpi?
He said the reason right in the middle of the second paragraph.
"Being able to reproduce type on an LCD with no visible aliasing or blurriness from font "smoothing" is absolutely where we want to get to."
4.9" QHD isn't necessarily a "holy grail" but 600dpi is around the range where pixels are so small and close together that pixels cannot be distinguished from each other when viewed from a normal ~8-12" viewing distance unless you are holding a magnifying lens to it. Anti-aliasing and font smoothing "tricks" are no longer needed. repoman27 selected 4.9" as his example because it's a "large enough" screen for most while still being pocketable and easy to hold with one hand for the majority of people.
"4.9" QHD isn't necessarily a "holy grail" but 600dpi is around the range where pixels are so small and close together that pixels cannot be distinguished from each other when viewed from a normal ~8-12" viewing distance unless you are holding a magnifying lens to it"
I'm sorry, but that point comes WAY before 600DPI. I have 300DPI devices which I struggle to see individual pixels from only 2-3 inches away. 600DPI is overkill for today's world. Those extra pixels could be sacrificed at nearly no cost to the end user (visually) and provide drastic improvements to battery life and brightness settings for the display.
I'm with repoman27; your ability to distinguish pixels does not seem to be the same as mine.
Take an image with a freeform aliased solid 1px line zoomed at 100%. You should easily be able to see jaggedness. This is relevant in the ability to display high-quality text serifs.
My (rough) approximations are that I'll no longer be able to see jaggedness at normal distances (30 cm) from about 800ppi and up. That's the endgame.
Well yeah, when you create a scenario that explicitly has tons of jaggies, it's possible to notice. But I have not seen OS shell UI that does not use antialiased graphics since like, Windows XP.
While I agree with you for the most part, some east-asian scripts (the ones used in Japanese, Cantonese and Mandarin) do benefit from higher densities.
Characters like these are pretty dense:
影響・鑞・鼈・憂鬱
So I believe it is a bit early to suggest that the PPI race should stop when people in huge markets (like Japan and China) do benefit from the improvements.
Now OEMs need to strike a balance between increasing densities and increasing(or at least maintaining) battery life.
Yeah, the East Asian scripts really drive the point home, but you'd be astonished at how much effort goes into hinting and hand tweaking bitmapped "screen fonts" even for Roman scripts due to the low resolution LCD displays we've been enduring for decades. Pinstripe patterns are another common example of where it's not enough to simply cross the threshold where individual pixels are no longer distinct to the naked eye. Try checking out the Google Image results for "Ben Davis striped shirt" for examples of how bad the moiré patterns can get when you don't have enough resolution.
In addition to being a fontography nerd, I used to do some prepress work and spent enough time hanging out at service bureaus and print shops to get a pretty good idea of how much resolution was necessary to avoid problems with most text or line art. 300 dpi was definitely not enough, 600 was much better, and in most cases I couldn't tell the difference between 600 and 1200 without a loupe unless there were halftones involved. Obviously my opinions are just that, but they are based on some degree of empirical evidence at least.
And I believe Windows XP actually introduced ClearType font smoothing to try to make text on the color LCDs of the day as readable as it was on CRTs.
Your experience with printing is completely irrelevant. Print has only two levels of darkness and so has to use some form of spatial dithering to fake grey levels. Mobile screens have 8 bits of grey level and can use anti-aliasing to avoid the worst sorts of artifacts that plague print.
Now if you're on some sort of bizarre jihad that says everything should be displayed everywhere without using anti-aliasing techniques, you're welcome to your theological opinion, but it's not clear why that is a more useful goal than using technology (anti-aliasing) that exists and works well and, in return getting longer battery life.
My experience with printing is 100% relevant. The whole point of going to higher resolutions is to avoid the visible artifacts of aliasing in the first place so we don't need to rely so heavily on techniques such as... "anti-aliasing". The pixels in an LCD matrix are locked in a fixed grid, if the image you're trying to display has more spatial resolution than that grid, aliasing can and often does occur. Anti-aliasing techniques do not make text on todays LCD screens look even remotely as good as print to the naked eye, and hand tweaked screen fonts are still de rigueur for complex scripts.
Incidentally, continuous tone digital printing has been with us since the late 80's, so basically the "Retina" display on the iPhone 4 finally brought us on par with output from an Iris 3024 back in 1987.
Anti-aliasing techniques do not actually solve the problem of aliasing, they simply attempt to mitigate the extent to which the aliasing is noticed. Higher resolutions on the other hand really can solve the problem of aliasing.
I'd very much like to see the actual power usage numbers for this display panel, because I'm betting I can find at least 6 other design decisions which had a greater impact on battery life than giving it an industry leading display. Furthermore, the power draw of these components is constantly being driven lower. As long as the delta between the power usage of the other suitable panels and this one isn't enough to completely blow the power budget, then there's no reason not to use it. I mean, it's not like we're talking about a small phone with a non-removeable battery and no microSD card slot here. It's a freakin' huge phone with a 2.5 GHz quad-core CPU, 3GB of RAM and a discrete LTE-A modem. Where I live, I probably won't see LTE-A lit up before this phone is several generations old, so that's nothing but design inefficiency to me. On the other hand, I do tend to read black and white text, on my phone, for hours, every day.
Anti-aliasing is required even with a very high dpi. If you have a line slightly slanted at very small angle, e.g. 1 degree, the aliasing will be sorely visible. Try drawing a line in MS paint at a small angle on a 2k/4k monitor, and even at a distance you will be able to notice it. Anti-aliasing blur the transition over a few adjacent pixels and there is nothing evil about this technique.
JDI had a small panel (2" or so) that had density of 651 poi and it was pretty great for Japanese characters, so probably the good enough number is around ~650.
funny enough I ask myself why Microsoft stopped using ClearType in Modern in favor of your standard grey-scale anti-aliasing.
However, to be honest, while reading Japanese I kind of prefer the Standard solution as opposed to ClearType (Modern IE vs Desktop IE, I.E)
Interestingly, DisplayMate found the S5 maximum brightness in auto mode when put under harsh lights a record-setting 698cd/m2, compared to the maximum manual brightness of 429cd/m2, which is 259cd/m2 extra, triggered under the sunlight. While I never had the chance to check it on the S5, I measured a 65% increase in brightness in auto mode when I did the testing under the sunlight. Of course the testing equipment needs to be tightly placed on the screen, and some thick black paper, cloth or plastic cut and put around it so external light doesn't influcence the max brightness.
I'm pretty sure the S5 LTE-A should rise above 500 nits, would you care to measure it under the sunlight, with auto-brightness +5?
The difference here is likely because DisplayMate is testing a scenario where the lit area of the display is as small as the sampled area by measuring equipment. Samsung's display driver reduces or increases maximum luminance according to the average picture level of the content displayed. Only very low average picture level will make it possible to reach 700 nits.
That is certainly possible, Joshua. I did notice with the K Zoom though that the "special brightness" (using a fullscreen pure white image) is only available under direct sunlight, no phone flashlight or or bright spotlight was able to get the K Zoom to "special maximum". I'm curious to hear how you tested auto maximum, or if you can retest it under the Sun's power!
Inverse square law helps quite a bit in this regard. It's possible to get 40,000 lux registered on the sensor just using an LED flashlight, you just have to place the LED carefully.
From a technical perspective, would it be possible to use 1/4 of the pixels when in a low power mode, so you effectively have a 720p display therefore at ~1/4 brightness and using 1/4 power?
Would be an interesting feature from a low light use or power saving scenario, e.g. watching a 720p video on your phone when it's dark. Kind of odd use cases, but conceptually.
No. 720p pixels at that display size are larger than the 1440p pixels at the same size. Therefore, if you only illuminate a quarter of the 1440p pixel, you end up with more black space around the lit pixels which would introduce all sorts of issues I bet.
Actually, this gives you a better contrast, from that point of view you would ideally want all your pixels to be spots instead of extended areas. The only reason you will never do this is that you can't get reasonable amounts of light through a much smaller area. So the fundamental idea would be quiet possible, but I don't know if a quarter of the pixels used at 4 times the intensity will actually save power versus the full resolution at a quarter intensity.
And it would probably be a bit complex to constantly switch the screen resolution, and expect OS and software to handle it.
Hmmm, do you mean ¼ of the pixels? Or a ¼ pixel? The former is what would amount to 720p. One of four pixels 'lit'. Not ¼. AMOLED displays aren't 'lighting' the black/dark pixel, hence the extreme contrast scores. One of the incredible attributes of AMOLED vs LCD. LCD and LED/IPS displays are constantly lighted, each pixel. AMOLED shuts them down of they're black. Hence a good idea for power savings at a still excellent resolution @ 5.5"
Asian people and other cultures with squiggly lines and shapes for characters will probably appreciate a higher res screen as it makes their text Mich easier to read. Less zooming and scrolling for those guys. As an English speaker and reader I wouldn't mind the higher rez's if we could scale back manually like our desktop monitors. That would alleviate the resources needed to support all those pixels and right now AFAIK, android is the only is that can circumvent it partially with DPI changes. It still taxes the GPU/CPU like the native rez AFAIK. I wouldn't mind if smartphone users had the option to scale down their 1080p screens to 720p. It would save on battery everywhere and make some older pass usable again where developers haven't updated or abandoned whatever app. What say you Google? Sigh. And apple and Microsoft? Let us change our resolutions to save battery and appease the cultures that would benefit from this when reading.
While changing to a lower resolution might be beneficial in reducing the amount of GPU power needed to render the picture, it will do absolutely nothing for the fact that a larger number of physical pixels will result in a higher power draw. You can't change the number of physical pixels on an LCD screen. For AMOLED, this means there will still be the same number of pixels lit up, and so the same power draw. For regular LCD technologies, you'll still need a stronger backlight.
Also, the argument that Asian languages need a higher PPI due to them being more complex is off-base. There's a really simple solution to reading them on lower PPI screens: increase the font size.
Though a lot of Asians sites don't support it yet, and from the end user POV it really doesn't matter if it's because of the Web or the Phone it just doesn't work.
But you do have a point that if Safari supported it, Web developers would be more likely to implement it.
Uh... Text reflow isn't something a website "supports". It's a feature of a browser. You zoom in on a web page until text has gone past the screen border, then double tap your screen and all the text automatically reflows to fit within your phone's window do view while maintaining the same zoomed in font size.
I should mention EVERY Browser I use in iOS as well as Android use reflow. I'm not familiar with Windows phones, but each browser bakes it into their code. Safari has had it since day one. I prefer iCab and Mercury or Chrome...but all four use reflow in their iOS browsers. Same as Android (I own both the 5s and Note3)
*facepalm* You obviously don't know what text reflow (aka text wrap) is. I'm using an iPad right now and none of the browsers have it. When you zoom in on a web page until the sentences flow past your screen border you can't automatically reformat the line width of the text so that it fits within your phone's view window. In fact Chrome on Android doesn't implement this feature either.
Some iOS browsers let you increase font size but more often than not this destroys the website's formatting and lines start to overlap. Text reflow is a far more elegant solution.
OLED technology has evolved a lot. The last time I saw burn-ins on a OLED screen was on my Google Nexus One. And then only just slightly after a year of intensive use.
Hmm, I got a feeling this S5 would leave the LG G3 in the dust. I think OLED is better fit for high resolution displays since it probably won't reduce power efficiency, only lower maximum brightness.
I have to correct it, not maximum brightness of the whole screen but local/pixel brightness. I also don't see anything bad with higher resolution displays as long it doesn't affect too much image quality, performance, power efficiency and price. The PPI of the Nexus 5 is well enough for me, it just needs AMOLED type of image quality since the "blacks" are pretty washed out.
Helps it has the quicker SoC, GPU and more RAM as well, I would assume. I was kinda shocked the G3 went with the 801/320 combo myself. The S5 going to the 805/420 was a smart move by Samsung, of course TouchWiz can use a few extra resources than 'other' OEM's UI
Isn't it weird to look at saturation accuracy over hue accuracy? We're much more sensitive to hue inaccuracies and *relative* saturation inaccuracies, but not really to *absolute* saturation inaccuracies.
In fact, because newer displays have the capability to show greater saturations, I can well imagine I'd prefer an inaccurate (but accurate in relative sense) screen that was oversaturated.
It certainly looks like saturated screens are possibly preferred by some if you look at the TV market.
Given the small gamut that sRGB actually covers, I'd prefer an analysis that emphasizes hue and relative saturation accuracy, and not absolute accuracy (as in, it's nice to know how saturated a screen is, but not to conflate that with accuracy in areas where it matters).
Although true perceptual quality does correlate with accuracy, it's far from a perfect correlation. More useful measurements (such as hue and grayscale accuracy) would make it easier to get a good picture of how good a screen actually is.
I completely agree regarding the race for unnecessary pixels in a phone display, but I will say that we actually do need a 4k display in 5.1" or 5.5" for devices like the Oculus rift. This 2560x1440 display means only 1280x1440 resolution per eye, were it to go inside the Oculus version 3. With some really good AA, that's not bad but it's still not great.
Make ridiculous nerd-phones with the highest resolution possible if you want, but I would still like some 720p devices with smaller sized screens (4.7 inches is good) so I can actually use the phone in one hand.
Currently Sony is the only company making "mini" versions with the same powerful silicon as the full-size flagships. Why Samsung and HTC have to nerf their minis is beyond me.
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Hairs_ - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
1)Battery life, battery life, battery life, battery life and Battery Life.2) Size.
3) Outdoor visibility.
4) Battery life.
These are what consumers care about for screens.
Even if people cared about display calibration, hardly anyone is going to invest in the expensive hardware and software necessary to actually correct it.
althaz - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
People also care about resolution and contrast.There's been hundreds of studies showing that contrast is the most important thing for the subjective quality of a screen, followed by resolution (up to a point).
For the vast majority of people (although not me, I like colours to be as accurate as possible), as long as the colours are ok, then that's all they want.
WaltFrench - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Yes, “people care” but aside from not wanting to be one-upped by the guy with a higher-spec phone, maybe you could explain why.Once you get to a certain level of contrast, an increase can only be appreciated where there are no screen reflections and the ambient light level is nearly non-existent. This is a use case that applies to watching a video in bed — and most of the videos that people play on phones are hardly art-house investigations into Van Gogh's use of the color palette. Yes, more is always better, but after a point, it's all perfectly good enough.
Ditto for resolution. I can't even focus on an object close enough to my eyes (about 3"/7cm) that my 20/20 vision should be able to distinguish individual 2K-rez pixels. If the phone is driving a HD screen, I am not sitting with the screen up close enough, either.
In isolation, a little overkill is fine, good engineering. But why people should pay anything extra, suffer higher battery drain, or need games to bloat artwork, or tax programmers to refresh all those pixels at decent framerates, is beyond me. Can you help?
althaz - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
There is obviously a limit to what is beneficial. We are there or just about there (or past it to lots of people, personally I feel like anything past 1080p is not worth it for a 5" screen) for resolution, however, we are several orders of magnitude away from that level of contrast (large increases in resolution aren't immediately noticeable, increases in contrast still very much are).However, even with contrast although people will straight away be able to see the benefits, most high-end phones are "good enough". That is, although it's quite noticeable that something else is better - it's only noticeable when two displays are compared, which doesn't happen in your normal use of a phone.
ShieTar - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
Distinguishing pixels is not the best criterion to declare a resolution as high enough. Sampling, even with a physically perfect system, will reduce the contrast of an image modulated at Nyquist frequency to about 64%. Ideally you get a screen where there is no noticeable reduction in the Modulation Transfer Function of all frequencies which the human visual system can resolve. For that, you will need a pixel that is significantly smaller than the finest detail you can resolve.Assuming the naked eye is at best able to resolve 1 arcminute, even a 0.25 arcminute screen has some impact on the contrast of resolvable details, and therefore a higher resolution screen could still improve the perceived image quality further:
http://snag.gy/1vpYH.jpg
inighthawki - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
People may think they want higher resolution, because it's what they've been told to look for. But I urge you to find an average user who not only *actually* wants, but can tell the difference between an FHD and QHD display on a 5" display, without staring super close at the pixels with their eyes 1" away.TedKord - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
From the article :"... It's still possible to see the difference... "
Maybe you should ask the author.
andy o - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
I wonder how much the Pentile matrix has to do with that. Pentile basically cuts pure blue and pure red resolution in half.Spunjji - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
The point is that if the display arrives well-calibrated then they don't have to make any additional investments... Also, at what point did Anandtech cater to ordinary consumers?craighamilton - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
This only show why it is one of the top rated phones in terms of consumer satisfaction (seen at a consumer based website, such as http://www.topreport.org/phones/ for example...)jwh635 - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
I thought OLEDs consumed less power than LCDs?frostyfiredude - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Displaying dark colours they do, bright ones have AMOLEDs using more power with current technologies.xmen77 - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
In some tests it walked around even kings of calibration (Apple)And this despite the fact that the iPhone is no ideal black, no ideal contrast, no ideal response time, no ideal viewing angle, because LCD display (IPS)
akdj - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
iPhone, 'no ideal black?' You said it yourself. It's LED/IPS. not AMOLED. When 'black' is the absence of light, AMOLED rules the roost. It's pixels are 'off'. LCD and LED/IPS doesn't have the luxury, nor do any other non AMOLED panels. That said, it doesn't suck. Apple's 'calibration' out of the box is and had been second to none. As a user of both a 5s and Note 3 I appreciate the differences, as well, how far Samsung has come in just a year with the technology. The Note 3 was the AMOLED display I finally found 'decent'. Still saturation challenges. Still gray scale, colors...and their ability to be semi controlled by Adapt screen's setting, it's the closest to an 'iPhone' as I've seem when it came down to ALL visual factors taken in combination. Apple's displays, that continue to stack up well to today's flagship Android devices are now a year old from their original production (5c/5s) and the Air, also a year old sits atop the best two or three. When it comes to viewing angle, it's hard to get better than iOS. iPad. iPhone. Latest generation iPods and MacBook retina displays. They're right at about 178°. That two degrees can get annoying but you're not going to get it with AMOLED. When you're talking response time, as an owner of the original Xoom, a half dozen Android phones, three other tablets and each iPhone and iPad I can honestly say, you're a bit 'off' when it comes to fact. Again, I own and enjoy them both. Love me for differ t things and flagship to flagship, iOS generation in, generation out, has ALWAYS been more responsive, faster and 'immediate' than ANY Android build. I'll admit, my Note3 is the fastest yet but I've got a half dozen 'cross platform' and different apps that show 'response time' and the real truth. Whether playing Asphalt 8 or Temple Run. Opening and accessing Dropbox or ANY browser on Android, from stock to Chrome, Dolphin to Opera, Mercury...I've got plenty. iOS trumps them all. And in spades. From launch to population of the screen, the iPhone 5s with ½ the cores @ 40% less clock speed and ⅓ the RAM absolutely SMOKES any of my Android devices I own and have used. It's sad, but it's the truth. GPS and location related applications (I'm a pilot and use ProPilot and ForeFlight as well as a half dozen others with up to date Jep charts, plates, weather and traffic conditions, even TCAS and 'moving map' ADS-B 'Next Gen' technology. Instantaneous lock. Amazing accuracy and phenomenal terrain, traffic and weather 'radar' on a retina iPad mini. That has replaced a 50lb flight bag (still in the plane JIC). And I fly in and all over the state of Alaska with amazing sunshine, around the clock these days...and my 'contrast' challenges, even on the mini are non existent. I'm not a fan of watching movies on my phone though and in that situation, I can see the appeal;)mkozakewich - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
All generalizations are wrong.I'm the type of person who noticed how dull the colours were on the iPad mini. (I think it was last year's?) It was still better than basically all other displays except that year's iPad and iPhone, but I'd had the opportunity to see the iPhone's screen before, and I did notice in casual viewing.
You can say that people don't care about this or that, and it's true that most won't really know why they don't enjoy a system that much, but when they see something better they can usually recognize it.
Back in the 90s, my mom had the good sense to get a very good monitor with her cheaper computer, because she knew the performance differences would be minor, but you'll be intimately familiar with what you see every day.
victorson - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
There's a typo in the title - should be Samsung, not Samsung. Otherwise, great read, glad to see the improvements in AMOLED. Still appears to be a bit greenish looking at the charts, no?morganf - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
There's a typo in your comment. Should be "not Samung" not "not Samsung".JoshHo - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Oops. That was a pretty terrible typo, thanks for the catch.It definitely is a little bit on the green side at times. While this tends to be acceptable to a certain extent near 100% white, it's quite obvious when closer to 50% white. It's definitely a lot better than the Galaxy S5, which had some shades of gray more green than gray...
victorson - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Thanks for clarifying this, Josh, great to see Samsung improving this - it seems like that's the final step before truly great AMOLED screens. Morganf, yeah, saw the typo in my comment, but there's no edit option, and I didn't want to post again just for this.gonchuki - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
The display will always have a green tint as long as they continue to cheat with PenTile matrix screens. The higher pixel density will definitely help due to being able to better hide the color errors via dithering, but there will always be a balance towards green until they use proper RGB screens again (instead of the PenTile RGBG).saru44 - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
'That' is a solid improvement ! Have to give due credit to sammy here for the screen..saru44 - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Though I really wish they (and every other manufacturer out there for that matter) stick with FHD for the mobiles..repoman27 - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Why, in the name of all that matters to anyone, are so many commenters on tech enthusiast sites bemoaning the arrival of displays like this?!?!? It's the best quality display, by every metric except for potentially power draw (and the jury is still out on that one) to ever grace an Android phone. It's insanely close to the holy grail of 4.9", 2560 x 1440 (easily pocketable, 600 ppi), and the only thing it might have sacrificed to get there is a little bit of the power budget. This is the direction ALL OEMs should go, so that in a couple generations they'll become even thinner, brighter and draw less power. Furthermore, accurate color is something that should be applauded whenever we encounter it, not simply dismissed with a hand wave.I'm not sure if it's just people being uncomfortable with specs advancing this rapidly, but why is everyone trying to put the brakes on when we're so close to the end goal here? I've been waiting for literally 20 years for LCDs to get to this point! Being able to reproduce type on an LCD with no visible aliasing or blurriness from font "smoothing" is absolutely where we want to get to. Is everyone posting these comments too young to remember the laser printer (and, shortly thereafter, inkjet) revolutions? Do you not remember how awful printed documents looked before we got to resolutions of at least 600 dpi?
victorson - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
And could you please kindly elaborate on why suddnely 4.9" Quad HD with ~600ppi is the holy grail?WithoutWeakness - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
He said the reason right in the middle of the second paragraph."Being able to reproduce type on an LCD with no visible aliasing or blurriness from font "smoothing" is absolutely where we want to get to."
4.9" QHD isn't necessarily a "holy grail" but 600dpi is around the range where pixels are so small and close together that pixels cannot be distinguished from each other when viewed from a normal ~8-12" viewing distance unless you are holding a magnifying lens to it. Anti-aliasing and font smoothing "tricks" are no longer needed. repoman27 selected 4.9" as his example because it's a "large enough" screen for most while still being pocketable and easy to hold with one hand for the majority of people.
inighthawki - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
"4.9" QHD isn't necessarily a "holy grail" but 600dpi is around the range where pixels are so small and close together that pixels cannot be distinguished from each other when viewed from a normal ~8-12" viewing distance unless you are holding a magnifying lens to it"I'm sorry, but that point comes WAY before 600DPI. I have 300DPI devices which I struggle to see individual pixels from only 2-3 inches away. 600DPI is overkill for today's world. Those extra pixels could be sacrificed at nearly no cost to the end user (visually) and provide drastic improvements to battery life and brightness settings for the display.
Veedrac - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
I'm with repoman27; your ability to distinguish pixels does not seem to be the same as mine.Take an image with a freeform aliased solid 1px line zoomed at 100%. You should easily be able to see jaggedness. This is relevant in the ability to display high-quality text serifs.
My (rough) approximations are that I'll no longer be able to see jaggedness at normal distances (30 cm) from about 800ppi and up. That's the endgame.
inighthawki - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Well yeah, when you create a scenario that explicitly has tons of jaggies, it's possible to notice. But I have not seen OS shell UI that does not use antialiased graphics since like, Windows XP.Vi0cT - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
While I agree with you for the most part, some east-asian scripts (the ones used in Japanese, Cantonese and Mandarin) do benefit from higher densities.Characters like these are pretty dense:
影響・鑞・鼈・憂鬱
So I believe it is a bit early to suggest that the PPI race should stop when people in huge markets (like Japan and China) do benefit from the improvements.
Now OEMs need to strike a balance between increasing densities and increasing(or at least maintaining) battery life.
inighthawki - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Fair point.repoman27 - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Yeah, the East Asian scripts really drive the point home, but you'd be astonished at how much effort goes into hinting and hand tweaking bitmapped "screen fonts" even for Roman scripts due to the low resolution LCD displays we've been enduring for decades. Pinstripe patterns are another common example of where it's not enough to simply cross the threshold where individual pixels are no longer distinct to the naked eye. Try checking out the Google Image results for "Ben Davis striped shirt" for examples of how bad the moiré patterns can get when you don't have enough resolution.In addition to being a fontography nerd, I used to do some prepress work and spent enough time hanging out at service bureaus and print shops to get a pretty good idea of how much resolution was necessary to avoid problems with most text or line art. 300 dpi was definitely not enough, 600 was much better, and in most cases I couldn't tell the difference between 600 and 1200 without a loupe unless there were halftones involved. Obviously my opinions are just that, but they are based on some degree of empirical evidence at least.
And I believe Windows XP actually introduced ClearType font smoothing to try to make text on the color LCDs of the day as readable as it was on CRTs.
name99 - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Your experience with printing is completely irrelevant.Print has only two levels of darkness and so has to use some form of spatial dithering to fake grey levels. Mobile screens have 8 bits of grey level and can use anti-aliasing to avoid the worst sorts of artifacts that plague print.
Now if you're on some sort of bizarre jihad that says everything should be displayed everywhere without using anti-aliasing techniques, you're welcome to your theological opinion, but it's not clear why that is a more useful goal than using technology (anti-aliasing) that exists and works well and, in return getting longer battery life.
repoman27 - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
My experience with printing is 100% relevant. The whole point of going to higher resolutions is to avoid the visible artifacts of aliasing in the first place so we don't need to rely so heavily on techniques such as... "anti-aliasing". The pixels in an LCD matrix are locked in a fixed grid, if the image you're trying to display has more spatial resolution than that grid, aliasing can and often does occur. Anti-aliasing techniques do not make text on todays LCD screens look even remotely as good as print to the naked eye, and hand tweaked screen fonts are still de rigueur for complex scripts.Incidentally, continuous tone digital printing has been with us since the late 80's, so basically the "Retina" display on the iPhone 4 finally brought us on par with output from an Iris 3024 back in 1987.
Anti-aliasing techniques do not actually solve the problem of aliasing, they simply attempt to mitigate the extent to which the aliasing is noticed. Higher resolutions on the other hand really can solve the problem of aliasing.
I'd very much like to see the actual power usage numbers for this display panel, because I'm betting I can find at least 6 other design decisions which had a greater impact on battery life than giving it an industry leading display. Furthermore, the power draw of these components is constantly being driven lower. As long as the delta between the power usage of the other suitable panels and this one isn't enough to completely blow the power budget, then there's no reason not to use it. I mean, it's not like we're talking about a small phone with a non-removeable battery and no microSD card slot here. It's a freakin' huge phone with a 2.5 GHz quad-core CPU, 3GB of RAM and a discrete LTE-A modem. Where I live, I probably won't see LTE-A lit up before this phone is several generations old, so that's nothing but design inefficiency to me. On the other hand, I do tend to read black and white text, on my phone, for hours, every day.
AnnihilatorX - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Anti-aliasing is required even with a very high dpi. If you have a line slightly slanted at very small angle, e.g. 1 degree, the aliasing will be sorely visible. Try drawing a line in MS paint at a small angle on a 2k/4k monitor, and even at a distance you will be able to notice it. Anti-aliasing blur the transition over a few adjacent pixels and there is nothing evil about this technique.Vi0cT - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
JDI had a small panel (2" or so) that had density of 651 poi and it was pretty great for Japanese characters, so probably the good enough number is around ~650.funny enough I ask myself why Microsoft stopped using ClearType in Modern in favor of your standard grey-scale anti-aliasing.
However, to be honest, while reading Japanese I kind of prefer the Standard solution as opposed to ClearType (Modern IE vs Desktop IE,
I.E)
Vi0cT - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
had a density*Really Anandtech needs an edit option.
saru44 - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
+100saru44 - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
completely agree with you. Hope they dont forget the all important battery life while they strive towards the holy grail ppi..BoneAT - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Interestingly, DisplayMate found the S5 maximum brightness in auto mode when put under harsh lights a record-setting 698cd/m2, compared to the maximum manual brightness of 429cd/m2, which is 259cd/m2 extra, triggered under the sunlight. While I never had the chance to check it on the S5, I measured a 65% increase in brightness in auto mode when I did the testing under the sunlight. Of course the testing equipment needs to be tightly placed on the screen, and some thick black paper, cloth or plastic cut and put around it so external light doesn't influcence the max brightness.I'm pretty sure the S5 LTE-A should rise above 500 nits, would you care to measure it under the sunlight, with auto-brightness +5?
BoneAT - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
65% increase with the K Zoom.JoshHo - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
The difference here is likely because DisplayMate is testing a scenario where the lit area of the display is as small as the sampled area by measuring equipment. Samsung's display driver reduces or increases maximum luminance according to the average picture level of the content displayed. Only very low average picture level will make it possible to reach 700 nits.BoneAT - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
That is certainly possible, Joshua. I did notice with the K Zoom though that the "special brightness" (using a fullscreen pure white image) is only available under direct sunlight, no phone flashlight or or bright spotlight was able to get the K Zoom to "special maximum". I'm curious to hear how you tested auto maximum, or if you can retest it under the Sun's power!JoshHo - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Inverse square law helps quite a bit in this regard. It's possible to get 40,000 lux registered on the sensor just using an LED flashlight, you just have to place the LED carefully.sheh - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
How indicative are review samples compared with retail products?coburn_c - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Your G2 numbers don't agree with gsmarena's, I wonder who is closer to the truth. You know there are two different G2 panels.GTRagnarok - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
This bodes well for the Note 4. 2560x1440 on a 5.7" screen, especially one with a digitizer, has more tangible benefits.Lonyo - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
From a technical perspective, would it be possible to use 1/4 of the pixels when in a low power mode, so you effectively have a 720p display therefore at ~1/4 brightness and using 1/4 power?Would be an interesting feature from a low light use or power saving scenario, e.g. watching a 720p video on your phone when it's dark.
Kind of odd use cases, but conceptually.
Death666Angel - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
No. 720p pixels at that display size are larger than the 1440p pixels at the same size. Therefore, if you only illuminate a quarter of the 1440p pixel, you end up with more black space around the lit pixels which would introduce all sorts of issues I bet.ShieTar - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
Actually, this gives you a better contrast, from that point of view you would ideally want all your pixels to be spots instead of extended areas. The only reason you will never do this is that you can't get reasonable amounts of light through a much smaller area. So the fundamental idea would be quiet possible, but I don't know if a quarter of the pixels used at 4 times the intensity will actually save power versus the full resolution at a quarter intensity.And it would probably be a bit complex to constantly switch the screen resolution, and expect OS and software to handle it.
akdj - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
Hmmm, do you mean ¼ of the pixels? Or a ¼ pixel? The former is what would amount to 720p. One of four pixels 'lit'. Not ¼. AMOLED displays aren't 'lighting' the black/dark pixel, hence the extreme contrast scores. One of the incredible attributes of AMOLED vs LCD. LCD and LED/IPS displays are constantly lighted, each pixel. AMOLED shuts them down of they're black. Hence a good idea for power savings at a still excellent resolution @ 5.5"pukemon1976 - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Asian people and other cultures with squiggly lines and shapes for characters will probably appreciate a higher res screen as it makes their text Mich easier to read. Less zooming and scrolling for those guys. As an English speaker and reader I wouldn't mind the higher rez's if we could scale back manually like our desktop monitors. That would alleviate the resources needed to support all those pixels and right now AFAIK, android is the only is that can circumvent it partially with DPI changes. It still taxes the GPU/CPU like the native rez AFAIK. I wouldn't mind if smartphone users had the option to scale down their 1080p screens to 720p. It would save on battery everywhere and make some older pass usable again where developers haven't updated or abandoned whatever app. What say you Google? Sigh. And apple and Microsoft? Let us change our resolutions to save battery and appease the cultures that would benefit from this when reading.kyuu - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
While changing to a lower resolution might be beneficial in reducing the amount of GPU power needed to render the picture, it will do absolutely nothing for the fact that a larger number of physical pixels will result in a higher power draw. You can't change the number of physical pixels on an LCD screen. For AMOLED, this means there will still be the same number of pixels lit up, and so the same power draw. For regular LCD technologies, you'll still need a stronger backlight.Also, the argument that Asian languages need a higher PPI due to them being more complex is off-base. There's a really simple solution to reading them on lower PPI screens: increase the font size.
Vi0cT - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Yeah but that isn't always practical.Some sites (at least in my experience with Japanese) can't be zoom comfortably without having to do horizintal scroll, which is annoying.
Also zooming reduces the amount of text displayed.
Vi0cT - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Horizontal scrolling*sonicmerlin - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
A problem completely solved by text reflow. Unfortunately, only Android browsers have that feature. No other mobile OS does it.Vi0cT - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Yeah, but many sites in Asia simply don't support it yet, and while you could argue that it is the sites' fault but end users simply don't knowVi0cT - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
Though a lot of Asians sites don't support it yet, and from the end user POV it really doesn't matter if it's because of the Web or the Phone it just doesn't work.But you do have a point that if Safari supported it, Web developers would be more likely to implement it.
sonicmerlin - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
Uh... Text reflow isn't something a website "supports". It's a feature of a browser. You zoom in on a web page until text has gone past the screen border, then double tap your screen and all the text automatically reflows to fit within your phone's window do view while maintaining the same zoomed in font size.Vi0cT - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
Then I am rather unlucky because for me it works in a per site basis :/akdj - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
Fortunately you're wrong. iOS uses reflow as well.akdj - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
I should mention EVERY Browser I use in iOS as well as Android use reflow. I'm not familiar with Windows phones, but each browser bakes it into their code. Safari has had it since day one. I prefer iCab and Mercury or Chrome...but all four use reflow in their iOS browsers. Same as Android (I own both the 5s and Note3)sonicmerlin - Sunday, July 20, 2014 - link
*facepalm* You obviously don't know what text reflow (aka text wrap) is. I'm using an iPad right now and none of the browsers have it. When you zoom in on a web page until the sentences flow past your screen border you can't automatically reformat the line width of the text so that it fits within your phone's view window. In fact Chrome on Android doesn't implement this feature either.Some iOS browsers let you increase font size but more often than not this destroys the website's formatting and lines start to overlap. Text reflow is a far more elegant solution.
dwade123 - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Too bad they can't test burn-ins, because OLED is full of them.janderk - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
OLED technology has evolved a lot. The last time I saw burn-ins on a OLED screen was on my Google Nexus One. And then only just slightly after a year of intensive use.zodiacfml - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
Hmm, I got a feeling this S5 would leave the LG G3 in the dust. I think OLED is better fit for high resolution displays since it probably won't reduce power efficiency, only lower maximum brightness.zodiacfml - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
I have to correct it, not maximum brightness of the whole screen but local/pixel brightness. I also don't see anything bad with higher resolution displays as long it doesn't affect too much image quality, performance, power efficiency and price. The PPI of the Nexus 5 is well enough for me, it just needs AMOLED type of image quality since the "blacks" are pretty washed out.akdj - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
Helps it has the quicker SoC, GPU and more RAM as well, I would assume. I was kinda shocked the G3 went with the 801/320 combo myself. The S5 going to the 805/420 was a smart move by Samsung, of course TouchWiz can use a few extra resources than 'other' OEM's UIemn13 - Sunday, July 20, 2014 - link
Isn't it weird to look at saturation accuracy over hue accuracy? We're much more sensitive to hue inaccuracies and *relative* saturation inaccuracies, but not really to *absolute* saturation inaccuracies.In fact, because newer displays have the capability to show greater saturations, I can well imagine I'd prefer an inaccurate (but accurate in relative sense) screen that was oversaturated.
It certainly looks like saturated screens are possibly preferred by some if you look at the TV market.
Given the small gamut that sRGB actually covers, I'd prefer an analysis that emphasizes hue and relative saturation accuracy, and not absolute accuracy (as in, it's nice to know how saturated a screen is, but not to conflate that with accuracy in areas where it matters).
Although true perceptual quality does correlate with accuracy, it's far from a perfect correlation. More useful measurements (such as hue and grayscale accuracy) would make it easier to get a good picture of how good a screen actually is.
AbRASiON - Saturday, August 2, 2014 - link
I completely agree regarding the race for unnecessary pixels in a phone display, but I will say that we actually do need a 4k display in 5.1" or 5.5" for devices like the Oculus rift.This 2560x1440 display means only 1280x1440 resolution per eye, were it to go inside the Oculus version 3. With some really good AA, that's not bad but it's still not great.
Sb87 - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link
Can you please add black level tests to the Mobile 14 Bench for both GS5 and this new display? Thanks!synaesthetic - Wednesday, August 20, 2014 - link
Make ridiculous nerd-phones with the highest resolution possible if you want, but I would still like some 720p devices with smaller sized screens (4.7 inches is good) so I can actually use the phone in one hand.Currently Sony is the only company making "mini" versions with the same powerful silicon as the full-size flagships. Why Samsung and HTC have to nerf their minis is beyond me.