DisplayMate, a company known for evaluating latest display technologies for consumers and manufacturers, has dubbed the Galaxy S5’s AMOLED display as “the best performing smartphone display ever tested”. The firm performed comprehensive display lab tests, measurements and analysis on a pre-release production unit of the Galaxy S5 provided to them by Samsung.
Contrary to common belief that Galaxy S5 essentially has the same display as the Galaxy S4, tests show that there have been significant display performance improvements in almost every category. “It has raised the bar for top display performance up by another notch”, DisplayMate notes. The tests reveal that Galaxy S5’s display has the lowest screen reflectance of any mobile device, and it uses the same amount of power, despite going considerably brighter, than last year’s model.
“For the Galaxy S5, Samsung has instead concentrated on improving the Maximum Brightness, Screen Reflectance, performance in High Ambient Light, Absolute Color Accuracy, Viewing Angles, display power efficiency, and running time on battery.
The variation of Brightness, Contrast, and Color with Viewing Angle is especially important for smartphones because of their larger screen and multiple viewers. The typical manufacturer 176+ degree specification for LCD Viewing Angle is nonsense because that is where the Contrast Ratio falls to a minuscule 10. For most LCDs there are substantial degradations at less than ±30 degrees, which is not an atypical Viewing Angle for smartphones and tablets.”
While Samsung claims that the S5 features a 27% improvement in power efficiency compared to the S4, one thing that could still use improvement in the OLED arena is power efficiency, an area where the Galaxy S5’s display still trails LCDs.
