DisplayMate Technologies has declared that Galaxy S7, the newest smartphone from Samsung improves in every area that could be improved upon from the Galaxy S6, and even manages to earn the publication’s “Best Smartphone Display” award for all of its improvements.
The improvements start with the brightness, which Display Mate says is 24 percent better than the brightness found in the Galaxy S6’s display. On top of that, the Galaxy S7’s display has better visibility within bright environments, and even manages to consume power better than its predecessor. And comparing Samsung’s newest flagship to the Galaxy Note 5 of last year, Display Mate found that it matches, or exceeds, the bigger handset in color accuracy, contrast rating, and other categories.
The Galaxy S7 also uses sub-pixel rendering, which improves image sharpness by treating red, green, and blue sub-pixels as individual image elements. DisplayMate says the technology can make the screen appear to have up to 3 times the resolution of traditional pixel rendering.
Display Mate, for its part, is not shy about stating that OLED has become the “premium mobile smartphone display technology”, noting that while LCD is still better when it comes to display white backgrounds, OLED is better in mixed usage cases.
Many of the OLED performance advantages result from the fact that every single sub-pixel in an OLED display is individually directly powered, which results in better color accuracy, image contrast accuracy, and screen uniformity.
Because of their very flexible power management capabilities, OLEDs are not only more power efficient than LCDs for most image content, but they now deliver much higher peak Brightness than LCDs because of this. However, for mostly all white screen content LCDs are likely to remain brighter and more power efficient for a while.
iPhones have used various LCD display technologies since the original model launched in 2007, but multiple reports claim that the first OLED-based iPhone will be released by the end of 2018. By then, the display technology will likely have advanced even further, making it a suitable option for Apple.
The results here are certainly interesting, not just because Samsung has made another smartphone with a great display, but because the rumors of Apple using OLED for future iPhones have recently spiked. With the technology obviously much improved over the years, and with results like the one that Display Mate has reached in their own testing, it stands to reason that Apple isn’t ignoring all of this.
Samsung Galaxy S7 has the ‘best smartphone display’ ever tested