There was no news of Apple’s iPhone 7 display at the recent launch event for the iPhone 7 series. The new display components introduced two new benchmarks for mobile LCD displays, with the lowest screen reflectance available in a mobile device, and recording the highest contrast ratio IPS (in plane switching) LCD ever, according to new lab findings from DisplayMate Labs.
But that’s not all, the new display either matches or breaks performance records in eight display metric categories described by Dr. Ray Soneira in his recent published findings. Oh and just one more thing… The displays offers support for two color gamuts including a new wide DCI-P3 used by 4K UHD TVs.
In the words of Dr. Ray Soneira, founder and principal at DisplayMate Labs, “The iPhone 7 fully supports two important standard color gamuts, the new DCI-P3 wide color gamut that is used in 4K UHD TVs* and in Digital Cinema, and also the traditional smaller sRGB / Rec.709 color gamut that is used for most existing consumer content for digital cameras, TVs, the internet, and computers, including photos, videos, and movies. All of the other recent model iPhones and almost all other smartphones and tablets just support sRGB / Rec.709. The new DCI-P3 color gamut is 26 percent larger,” he said in the recent iPhone 7 Display Shoot-out
Shows the measured color gamuts for the main Apple iPhone 7 color gamuts along with the Standard DCI-P3 color gamut in yellow and the standard sRGB / Rec.709 color gamut in black. The outermost white curve is the limits of human color vision – the horseshoe is the pure spectral colors and the diagonal is the ‘line of purples’. A given display can only reproduce the colors that lie inside of the triangle formed by its primary colors. Source: DisplayMate
This is pretty big news, that somehow got past the marketing machine over at Apple, I think, as not a peep of these ground breaking improvements made it to the stage. This is interesting, as at the recent iPhone 7 launch event of the new incrementally improved devices, Apple was searching for reasons for consumers to upgrade. Initially, the new devices were panned in the news because of the modest improvements including waterproofing and longer battery life, but these were seen as not enough to warrant buying a new phone. Take a second look, says Soneira, this display, while not the 4K resolution buster (2560×1440 pixels) found in the Samsung OLED rivals, is simply the best LCD ever made for a mobile device.
For the record here’s the short list of the top features in the newest iPhone 7 upgrade series:
- The highest absolute color accuracy for any display (1.1 JNCD) – visually indistinguishable from perfect
- The highest absolute luminance accuracy for any display (±2%) – visually indistinguishable from perfect
- Very accurate image contrast and intensity scale (with gamma 2.21) – visually indistinguishable from perfect
- The highest peak brightness smartphone for any average picture level APL (602 to 705 cd/m²)
- The highest contrast ratio for any IPS LCD display (1,762:1)
- The lowest screen reflectance for any smartphone display (4.4%)
- The highest contrast rating in high ambient light for a smartphone for any APL (137 to 160)
- The smallest color variation with viewing angle (2.1 JNCD or less)
Apple has been ‘under the gun’ of late with iPhone sales falling for two consecutive quarters, compounded by missed Apple Watch shipping targets, sagging sales (falling over the last two consecutive quarters) mainly due to a maturing smartphone market and increased domestic competition in mainland China. At the iPhone 7 product launch event, the company even created a bit of a controversy by eliminating the headphone jack from the new device, moving wired phone connectivity to the Lightning port via an adapter (no biggie to me, but some folks gotta complain.)
Incremental or not, those who upgrade to the iPhone 7 series will be looking at a world-class LCD display with both inside and outside image performance matched by few other mobile components on the market today. But rumor has it that Apple will be moving to the higher resolution OLED displays possibly as soon as next year and Soneira summarises the advantages that OLED has, despite the great LCD used by Apple this time. So this may be the best last LCD display module we see on a new iPhone from Cupertino.
Oh, and be sure to get the full shoot-out details over on the DisplayMate web site. – Steve Sechrist
* Although Ray suggests that UltraHD sets have P3 gamuts, and Steve has quoted this, I don’t think that is the case at the moment. At IFA, there were only one or two TVs that meet the P3 gamut fully. The majority of sets have a subset of P3 and even the UltraHD Alliance Premium logo only requires 90% of P3. One of the reasons for this is that widening the gamut typically reduces the power efficiency and that goes against the desires of makers, Energy Star and the European Commission. It is true to say that DCI digital cinema content is nearly all in P3. (BR)
