

The iPhone 5 Display: Thoroughly Analyzed - 001sky
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6334/iphone-5-screen-performance

======
rustynails77
This article reminds me just how much Apple has driven technology forward.

For clarification for Android lovers... This doesn't mean that Apple invented
all of this.. It's a recognition that without someone driving expectations of
the smartphone industry, it stagnates - Apple is the driver.

For clarification for Apple lovers... This doesn't mean that Apple invented
all of this.. It's a recognition that without someone driving expectations of
the smartphone industry, it stagnates - Apple is the driver.

~~~
iLock
The upcoming nokia 920 is expected to have a display even better than this.
Atleast that is what they claim. It will be interesting to see it validated by
Anand.

------
yread
I'm not sure I crave for sRGB gamut and perfect color accuracy in a
smartphone. Isn't more important that it has eye-popping contrast? When was
the last time you needed sRGB and compare that to how often you look at the
phone with a lot of ambient light or possibly reflections. It seems that Nokia
here is much more focused on the relevant innovation here:

[http://i.nokia.com/blob/view/-/1824216/data/2/-/PuremotionHD...](http://i.nokia.com/blob/view/-/1824216/data/2/-/PuremotionHD.pdf)

~~~
rickmode
I believe you are right that contrast is more important than both gamut and
color accuracy, but a higher gamut will make images feel more alive and give
them more "pop", especially in the reds and yellows (as the article
discusses).

A high contrast ratio helps prevent banding artifacts in dark shades of gray.

A high gamut does the same for color.

With a high contrast display with a low gamut (a display that can't output a
very wide range of colors) you might see banding in reds or yellows even. The
brain will compensate for lower gamuts but the image will look more washed
out. As an example, a color photo in on newspaper is clearly less vibrant than
the same image in a glossy magazine or online.

Also, color accuracy and gamut are not necessarily the same thing. The typical
human eye can see far wider range of colors - a wider gamut - than is possible
in any display or print technology. Displays are a compromise. sRGB is far
less than the human eye can see, which is why image editors use the wider
ProPhoto RGB or Adobe RGB gamut (color spaces) and then after editing cleverly
compress down to sRGB (or for particular applications, the exact color space
of a particular printer / paper combination or of a particular display).

Low-gamut means some colors are missing and compressed to colors that can be
shown - so the richest red becomes an orangish-red. While inaccurate, this
isn't quite the same the same thing color-shifting all colors in an image,
such as the yellow-cast you might see with indoor lighting, or blue-cast with
outdoor shadows. All displays introduce color-shifting inaccuracies as well.
High-gamut displays have a wider color pallet and are generally tuned better
at the factory.

I expect high-gamut displays will just "feel" better in the same way retina /
high-res displays do.

[edited for clarity]

------
paulerdos
I like how detailed AnandTech analysis are. Good to see that they persist.

------
tomkinstinch
Does anyone know if there is a way in iOS to apply a color profile to the
display? Even if the displays are well-calibrated for accuracy out of the box,
there are other reasons to mess with the color rendering (colorblind users,
etc.).

~~~
carterschonwald
i'm only aware of methods that require jailbreaking your ios device (eg, the
f.lux app can be installed via cydia).

Would love a non jailbroken approach myself though!

------
DeepDuh
What I'd like to see is this exact analysis done to the S III, even just to
have some no bullshit data when the 'my phone is better than your phone' comes
up again.

~~~
css771
Talking purely from a consumer perspective, you want to argue that one phone
reproduces accurately the full RGB spectrum and another blows it out of
proportion and that makes one phone better? Isn't that a matter of subjective
taste? How does that make one phone better than another? For eg. I may like to
turn the color all the way up on my TV. That doesn't mean my TV's picture is
objectively bad or the other way around.

~~~
chrisheinonen
From my perspective, the issue with selling a phone that is over-saturated
versus one that is accurate is that in one case a company is just shipping
something that meets the standard, and in another case they are making that
subjective choice about what looks better for you.

With monitors and displays this isn't as big of a deal, as you can adjust it
yourself to what you want, but with smartphones and tablets there are few or
no adjustments available so if you receive a display that is purposely over-
saturated, you are stuck with that. Perhaps it catches eyeballs in the store
and gets you more sales, but it also means you are stuck with it. If a company
isn't going to provide a way to adjust the display (such as including presets
that are calibrated, vivid, and so on) then I'd prefer they just ship
something that tries to conform to the standards that exist (sRGB or AdobeRGB
in these cases).

------
pooriaazimi
Also see
[http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2012/09/iphone-5-dis...](http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2012/09/iphone-5-display-
vs-iphone-4-display/) that shows the boost in saturation even more clearly.

Though, I'm not sure if it's such a good thing (might be a little _too_
saturated for all I know, but probably isn't).

(via daringfireball.net/linked/2012/09/25/iphone-5-vs-4s-display)

~~~
chrisheinonen
You can look at the results at different saturation levels for the iPhone 5
and see that all the intermediate saturations are almost spot on. It's not too
saturated (which the Galaxy 3 appears to be), but accurately saturated where
what you see on the screen accurately reflects what is in the source content.

------
BadassFractal
The money I'd pay to have that as a 24" desktop monitor.

------
kristofferR
What is the real-life difference between saturation cranked up via software
compared to a screen with inherent high saturation?

~~~
kevingadd
Cranking up saturation in software is likely to introduce artifacts due to the
precision of the data being sent to the panel. For example, most framebuffers
are still at most represented with 24 (color) bits per pixel, and the signals
being sent from the GPU to the display may not have much more precision than
that either (how much precision they have can depend on a variety of factors).
The immediate consequences of this:

User-mode software is unlikely to be able to increase saturation without
hardware assistance, because it ultimately has to send 24bpp pixel data to the
GPU. The dynamic range possible in 24bpp is pretty limited when you factor in
what happens to it after it goes through the rest of the pipeline.

Kernel-mode code, drivers, and firmware on a GPU can potentially adjust
saturation more accurately by sending higher-precision color values out to the
display, if it supports it. Not many displays today support higher than 24bpp
precision, but such displays do exist. Unfortunately, the inputs from user-
mode software were 24bpp, so some accuracy has already been lost and any lost
accuracy will be compounded by saturation changes produced at this level.

Finally, the display itself may actually be reducing the quality of input
signals - many panels have less than 8 bits per channel (24bpp = 3 channels)
of precision and represent higher accuracy signals with dithering and other
techniques. This can make the result of adjusting saturation in software even
worse.

So, in practice, adjusting saturation in software will produce visible
artifacts for images that need high dynamic range or high precision.

------
NeilRShah
Jl

------
lut4rp
I don't see the point of submitting this to HN. It isn't a review of all high-
end device displays, or something else generic like that.

~~~
overcyn
I enjoyed it. Not out of any interest in the iPhone 5. But as a (somewhat)
technical article about how displays are measured.

One of the more interesting articles of the day imo.

