Galaxy Note 4’s Display Offers the Most Realistic Colors, Study Shows
A lot of factors go into making a good display, and color accuracy is one of the most important. After all, no one wants to watch a movie where the protagonist has a slightly unhealthy blueish hue (unless, you know, he’s dying of hypothermia or something). With that in mind, DisplayMate’s Ray Soneira decided to pit this year’s six best mobile displays against one another to see which one actually offered the most true-to-life color reproduction.
DisplayMate tested six devices: The Apple iPhone 6 Plus, the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, the Galaxy Tab S 10.5, the iPad Air 2, the Microsoft Surface Pro 3, and the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 8.9. On these products they measured for five areas of color accuracy: full color gamut, facial skin tone (for a wide range of races and ethnic groups), organic color, blue region, and white point.
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All the displays exhibited fairly good accuracy for general viewing, but the hands-down winner in the study was the Galaxy Note 4. The Note 4 scored or tied for the highest ranking in each of the areas tested. In close second were the Surface Pro 3 and Galaxy Tab S 10.5. The iPad Air 2 and iPhone 6 Plus, while scoring highly for skin tone accuracy, ended up ranking last and second to last, respectively, while the 2013 Kindle Fire HDX ranked fourth.
But there’s still plenty of room for improvement for all of these mobile displays in the future. Using software, companies can adjust color filters on OLED or LCD displays to get even better color accuracy (right now, this is done almost exclusively using hardware and display material chemistry). For example, displays could offer different color modes when text is primarily onscreen versus when images are onscreen since a bluish white hue that’s amenable for reading text isn’t ideal for photographs. Adjusting the display calibration depending on the amount of ambient light will also improve the experience.
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For more details on DisplayMate’s research, you can visit its website.
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