Ray Soneira of DisplayMate has conducted one of his in-depth reviews of the display on the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 which was launched globally last week (Samsung Unpacked 2018: The Galaxy Note 9 is Here). Needless to say, if you have seen his previous comments on Samsung’s displays in its flagship smartphones (he doesn’t bother with the cheaper ones!), he was impressed by the new display which once again raises the bar on performance.
The absolute colour accuracy is within 0.5 JNCD, so is visually indistinguishable from perfect. The display also has 27% better brightness and 32% better contrast than the Note 8 released last year and even though DisplayMate has raised the levels needed to get its best ratings, the display gets an A+ rating.
Highlights of the report are
- there is full coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut (it reaches 113% of P3) and a larger native colour gamut that exploits a new deep red OLED material. This also improves the performance in high ambient light.
- Brightness in full screen mode reaches 710 cd/m², 27% higher than the Note 9
- The new display boosts HDR performance and quality in high ambient light situations.
- Samsung has included a ‘video enhancer’ that provides HDR-like expanded dynamic range for all videos that don’t have HDR coding.
- Viewing angle colour shifts are also the lowest that DisplayMate has seen, including the display of white
- There are a number of adjustments available to improve visibility for those with visual impairments.
- Features include dual ambient light sensors for improved automatic brightness setting, a night mode with adjustable blue light and a user-adjustable white point.
In conclusion, Soneira said that this is the “most innovative and high performance Smartphone display that we have ever Lab tested, breaking and establishing many new Display Performance Records” and the display has earned DisplayMate’s Best Performing Smartphone Display Award, and receiving its highest ever A+ grade.
You can see the exhaustive report here. (BR)
Analyst Comment
Soneira has been showing the very low errors in JNCD which means ‘visually indistinguishable from perfect’ for some time now. Clearly we have got to ‘good enough’ if you look at the top displays from the top providers in that metric. Once again, he also complains about the high pixel density which he sees as a marketing gimmick, having not got on-board with either the arguments from Candice Brown-Elliot (the inventor of the pentile matrix and a human factors expert) or the fact that higher pixel count helps VR as that is not an important application, in his view. (BR)
The Note 9 has wide colour gamut – beyond P3. Image:DisplayMate
