Lab tests on the recently released iPhone X[1] put Apple’s new flagship in the highest tiers of quality when it comes to the display and camera, but it’s only in the former category that it truly leaves the competition behind. Of course, what’s the point of having great images if your screen can’t show them properly?
Apple doesn’t tend to make their own displays; but while LG, Sharp, and in the iPhone X’s case Samsung rightfully deserve credit for making them, Apple doesn’t just snatch them off the shelf. A ton of money and time is spent customizing and tweaking them, and phones are individually calibrated before they ship to account for variation in the manufacturing process.
DisplayMate’s battery of tests[2] aims at testing the absolute color accuracy, brightness, and other objective measures of a display. And by those measures the latest iPhone beats out even the latest OLED displays from Samsung, their parent company, as it were.
OLEDs naturally excel in a number of categories, from contrast to color accuracy, and Apple’s software emphasizes these strengths. Its color accuracy in particular is the best DisplayMate has tested. And conveniently, it switches to the correct color profile or gamut depending on the content, meaning you won’t see images intended for display in sRGB shown through the lens of Adobe or DCI-P3.
The iPhone X pretty much nails the whole expanded gamut with no weaknesses in any area whatsoever.
If that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry — the whole point is you don’t need to be aware of it, and instead can simply be sure that photos, movies, games and so on will be seen exactly as they should be. All the...