There is a large demographic of people that use their smartphone to read ebooks and the daily news. The brand new iPhone XS Max has just won an award from DisplayMate for the best smartphone display for their Super Retina OLED screen technology.
The review says that Apple’s latest phone sets or matches a few records. The most important ones are the absolute color accuracy, highest full-screen brightness, screen reflectivity and brightness variation with viewing angle.
The absolute color accuracy, for example, is so high that it’s visually indistinguishable from perfect, while the full-screen brightness is high enough to ensure comfortable content consumption under direct sunlight. The measured peak brightness is 660 nits while on the home screen, DisplayMate measured a whopping 725 nits. The low screen reflectivity also helps with sunlight legibility.
Since the display is OLED, the contrast ratio is infinite while the color and brightness shift is minimal when looking at it at an angle. DisplayMate conducted an exhausted review and here are some of their key findings.
- Larger Full Screen Display
- 2.7K High Resolution Display
- Industry Standard Color Gamuts
- Automatic Color Management
- Very High Absolute Color Accuracy
- Color Accuracy and Intensity Scales Independent of APL
- High Screen Brightness and Performance in High Ambient Light
- High Dynamic Range Mobile HDR Display
- Night Shift mode for Better Night Viewing
- True Tone Viewing Mode
- Diamond Sub-Pixels
- Viewing Angle Performance
- Viewing Tests Performance
- Display Power Efficiency
- Display Related Enhancements
Some of the record results earned by the XS Max display include:
- Highest Absolute Color Accuracy (0.8 JNCD) – Visually Indistinguishable From Perfect.
- Smallest Shift in Color Accuracy with the Image Content APL (0.4 JNCD).
- Highest Full Screen Brightness for OLED Smartphones (660 nits at 100% APL).
- Highest Full Screen Contrast Rating in Ambient Light (140 at 100% APL).
- Highest Contrast Ratio (Infinite).
- Lowest Screen Reflectance (4.7 percent).
- Smallest Brightness Variation with Viewing Angle (25% at 30 degrees).
- Highest Visible Screen Resolution 2.7K (2688×1242) – 4K Does Not appear visually sharper on a Smartphone.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.