To me, maximum brightness would imply that you would test at the lowest APL percentage that you could reach. Since this was not done at anandtech, I think it both explains the difference and confirms the accuracy of anandtech's reading.
It is this kind of testing (APL 1% vs APL 100% to generate max/min brightness) that got us "Dynamic Contrast Ratio" in computer LCDs. This in turn lead to a race to see who could generate the biggest number based on how high the backlight could be pumped under certain circumstances, and how low it could be driven under others. Seeing a 100,000,000:1 DCR on a panel when the native contrast ratio is 1000:1 is misleading to the uninformed buyer and laughable to anyone who knows better. Although the analogy doesn't entirely carry with AMOLED since the luminance of black/off pixels should remain relatively constant I still feel like it's the same slippery slope. How hot can we drive 16 pixels? 4 pixels? 1 pixel? I'd rather see what the maximum achievable brightness is for a "realistic" workload. Without reasonable and universal standards for measurement the best we can do is look for some other data point.
When shopping for a phone, particularly the panel in a phone, I want to know how usable the display is going to be when I'm outside or under bright lights. That is better delivered through the current testing methodology. With the current brightness measurements I get a "worst case" brightness. I'd always rather be pleasantly surprised when a product over delivers than disappointed when it under delivers. As long as the reader/consumer knows that this is how AMOLED panels work (the purpose of the above article) I don't see anything wrong with measuring max brightness at 100% APL.
The increase in brightness for AMOLEDs at 80% APL rather than 100% APL is not very significant, and changing testing to accommodate AMOLED's idiosyncrasies doesn't seem like a good idea either. To put it in perspective, even if I had tested the Nexus 6 at 80% APL in the review my conclusion about the brightness being sub-par would have been exactly the same. Additionally, dark UIs are also becoming less and less common. It's been happening for some time on the iOS side, and if developers actually follow Google's guidelines it will happen on Android.
By default, yeah. You can set it to a light theme though. Not sure how many do, it looks good dark IMO and saves power too. The start screen is likewise configurable (including the option of using a photo as the background behind the tiles).
Yeah, and even there the dark theme doesn't carry through to everything. On my 928 I leave it on white because I prefer it, and I'm not usually looking at the start menu/settings anyway.
I have an OLED screen phone, and most of time my screen is in low APL apps. This includes naturally black apps, but also apps with a dark/night theme (there are lots of them, and I aways pester the developers if there isn't), inverted/night mode for pdfs and web (the UC browser is good for that), etc. So your 100% APL is very far from my common use cenario, and apps with dark themes as an option will probably only increase.
Just kinda sucks you've got to make that sacrifice. There's plenty of excellent apps with less than dark UIs, environments and templates for productivity. 'Creative' type apps; photo and video manipulation, DAWS, NLEs, Even sketch types often have the darker interface so as to 'disappear' behind your canvas. Unfortunately, Play Store isn't the 'investment' someone into video, audio or productivity (Word processing & spread sheets), even PowerPoint/Keynote, collage creating, etc are SOL on Android. iOS is absolutely a creative's one stop shop regardless of their skill-set, gear they use to 'capture' or 'create'. IF this paradigm shifts some (I'd really enjoy the DAW, NLE & still editing options on my Note4, ESPECIALLY with four, high speed cores and a load of RAM, it seems like it would be a no brainer. dJay making its way over, VERY cool. Hopefully others will follow suit. As cases are rare those quads are used 'in-app', music and motion manipulation and post would be perfect to take advantage of BOTH, the speed of the processors and darker UIs. I enjoy both iOS & Android because of this and always have. The 6+ as my personal, Note 4 my business phone...it's amazing how far we've seen cell comms advance over twenty years now. Kinda a disservice to even call em 'phones' --- event 'smartphones' as today we're pocketing actual computers! With faster and higher quality 'guts' than just a couple years ago in a laptop that lasted 90 minutes off 110. NAND storage on the phones is quicker than most folks' (not us geeks with the newest, latest and baddest PCIe SSDs ;)) HDDs, and these displays, regardless of AMOLED, IPS{LC/ED}, even TFT panels on cheap, $250 computers at Wal Mart are a big step up from CRTs, and the nastiness that came with owning a bulbous display! Hard to believe Best Buy had more CRT TVs ten years ago. And today's phones and tablets continue to push the goal posts further forward, supplemented with silicon that runs them, their 2, 3 or 5 million pixels at frame rates that, at least for the most part in parity on iOS and Android providing a fluidity we've never seen. Not even on desk or laptops. Coupled with high speed broadband and advancements in wireless, AC in particular ...as well as LTE radios make these things incredibly fast wen accessing anything online Again, an area of the phone commonly used and whether it's Chrome, Andy's stock browser, FF or Safari...there's a whole lotta white area. Tough compromise, especially with how well these AMOLED displays have proven themselves with bettering their colors, saturation & white points, incredible pixel density and ...of course the 'blacks'. Can't beat em! Thanks for sharing. J
I don't see why you cannot report both. I.e. like they do on notebookcheck minimum fps and avg. fps. It works in one simple bar. Solid until 20% APL -> striped until 80% APL That offers all the relevant information. And the high effective contrast is relevant. I do use Spotify most of the time I am running and that is the main sun use my phone gets. Spotify UI is probably below 20%. There are also various apps that allow optional dark themes. Sunlight legibility is very relevant. Just going over that characteristic is misleading.
Just like the focus on sRGB anandtech has. I read some reviews here that claim bad color accuracy when comparing a color setting that aims to provide AdobeRGB (Samsung Photomode) to sRGB. But of course Apple is always right because all they offer is one setting and that is sRGB. I am hoping the Apple bias is leaving with certain people, but still for architecture related content you guys are THE BEST. Just reviews is a bit of a weak spot. I also said it before look at how computerbase.de does diagrams and graphs. They have done it for years but most others still use the old school images. Must be the CMS.
While it's not the highest number possible, it is a more useful benchmark if you're using the information to make a buying decision since it's closer to what you can expect from real-world use.
Testing with the lowest APL would get you a higher number is about as useful a metric as when hardware manufacturers optimize their drivers for common benchmarks. It produces a more favorable score, but it doesn't tell you anything about how the hardware actually performs outside of that benchmark.
but the concern is the fairness between AMOLED vs LCD.
When you crank the brightness on LCD, every pixel is at 100% regardless of the content of the screen. This is not so on AMOLED in fairness you have to test AMOLED on a screen that utilizes every pixel... right?
Err...that's just it, it isn't fair to give a brightness number for AMOLED that it won't ever actually reach, while LCD actually can be as bright as any test shows.
I've found that I have to crank up my 1 phone with an AMOLED screen to max brightness to see any details on darker scenes on shows, which I don't have to do with LCD...which is ironic given the claims about blacks on AMOLED lol
Or he is using the AMOLED phone in a real world, not in pitch black testing chamber where the infinite contrast figures of OLED's are quoted.
Try a 80% APL contrast test in sunny conditions with a modern LCD and OLED displays and you might be surprised what "infinite contrast" OLED's means in practice.
Agreed. Google shouldn't have made Android so white. I felt this bad news coming miles away when I got the Galaxy Nexus with the white Ice Cream Sandwich messaging app. Samsung used to give dark TouchWiz though; but they're going all bright coloured in the newer versions of that too.
Oh I forgot to mention... if you're using a phone with an AMOLED display, changing the background color to a light scheme changes the description in the start+theme subsection of settings. When running a light background it points out that your display is optimized for dark colors (again I believe only when you're using an AMOLED display) and notes that the light background will use up more battery power. Smart and unobtrusive.
Oh, I never noticed that before on my Lumia 925. That's pretty nice of them. Plus, I don't think it's too hard to offer an optional inverted colour UI in an OS. Google could give a similar option and I imagine it would considerably improve the rather unimpressive battery life of the N6.
IMO dark themes don't look good, and it's silly to design a UI around a display technology's weirdness. LCD doesn't have these limitations and is in wider use, and either way I don't like the compromises Android's U.I. has made in the past to baby AMOLED.
"IMO dark themes don't look good, and it's silly to design a UI around a display technology's weirdness. "
Here's some examples that can show you how wrong you are: Photoshop CS6+ Lightroom Most of the rest of the adobe suite (except indesign for the same reason though) Visual Studio Windows Phone Zune Aircraft control panels In car navigation systems
ALL display technologies have limitations, and UIs are designed with those limits in mind (if the UI is worth considering at all, lollipop is not). You'll see UIs meant for LCD screens generally pump up the contrast to exaggerated levels, and those for use in cold places minimize animations. There's a lot to consider when making a UI.
Plus the majority of CLIs thru the first couple decades of personal computing... When's the last time you saw a DOS prompt with a white background? :p There's pros/cons for either approach, I'd just like to see more choices in the matter.
No, black themes don't look good. What you want is an actual 'dark' theme, which will probably contain more brown or (lighter) navy than actual black. There are some very nice darker colour themes.
to me, they are not supposed to look good. They are supposed to let your eyes rest, and in fact i hate how on anandtech the background is white- it burns my eyes.
The background on this website is not pure white, it is f6f6f6 in hex, which is about 96% white. You should calibrate or turn down the brightness on your monitor.
This is one downside of Material Design, at least currently where it only has a light theme - you use more power driving the display, or have an overall dimmer display (at similar power use).
Maybe there isn't a lot of real world savings to be had from having a dark theme rather than light theme these days for OLED... it would be interesting to see how much battery life is saved from using a 30% APL UI versus as 80% APL UI.
From the applications APL list, it seems to me 80% is about the average, and would be a good one to aim for in reviews.
This article could be written better, I am still a little bit confused why lower APL means higher brigtness. Surely, as the screen has more dark content, the brightness will drop? Also, the acronym APL was mentioned first before it was defined, that's bad editing!
I thought the article was a bit rough as well, especially the APL acronym showing up before the definition.
I think it is also confusing why brightness increases with lower APL. Consider the 100% APL situation... let's say it produced 100 nits. Now consider a 1% APL situation. If the PIXEL brightness is kept the same, we should see 1 nit. Now we consider the fact that we can increase the TOTAL brightness because we have power headroom. The only way we could increase beyond 100 nits is if we can increase the PIXEL brightness by a factor of more than 100.
So what is not very clear is how having a lower APL leads to higher TOTAL brightness. In the 1% APL situation, is the pixel being driven more than 100x brighter than normal??? That seems pretty absurd. So either we don't understand how the brightness measurement is being performed or it is not clear that each pixel has >100x brightness headroom.
"With a pure white image, every pixel must be lit, while with a pure black image every pixel is off. As the display typically has a maximum power use set for a mobile device, this opens up the capability for AMOLED displays to allocate more power per pixel (i.e. higher maximum luminance) when not displaying a full-white image."
Josh wrote this but I don't really know how to explain it any clearer, it seems to explain itself fine to me.
It's not about a higher total brightness of every pixel of the display, it is about higher per pixel and perceived brightness.
Display calibration and measurement tools don't take in all of the light from the display at once. You're effectively placing a small camera onto the screen, not placing the entire display into an enclosed box. These tools only measure a small section of the display at a time.
You're looking at this from the wrong perspective. OLED screens are more capable than the phones they are in will allow them to be since there is a cap placed on power consumption because of their designed mobile use. Let's say that a given OLED screen is capable of 1000 nits, but that would consume 10W of power. The phone manufacturer wants to limit the screen's overall power consumption and caps it at 4W instead. But one half of the screen could be using 3Ws while the other half only uses 1W.
There are two things that can change the perceived and measured brightness - the fact that individual white pixels can become brighter if portions of the display are dimmer as well as the fact that OLED panels are inefficient when it comes to illuminating more/all of the screen at once compared to smaller portions.
So if two different reviewers placed their light sensor on a white portion of the screen, but one of the testers had their screen displaying all white, and the other reviewer only had a partially white screen, the latter is going to get a higher brightness reading. Even if measuring over text (which is mostly empty/white space) any ad on a website or colorful banner is going to allow more power to be used by the white pixels, increasing brightness.
So the "real world" testing of other sites can absolutely report more nits than the 100% testing done here.
I too see this as a bit confusing. I understand the basic concept that driving few pixels allows them to drive the remaining pixels to a higher output.
Where I'm confused is that brightness is being measured in cd/m^2. As others have noted, if part of the screen is not illuminated, you would imagine the brightness would go down when you average in the non-illuminated area. The only way I see this not happening is if your measuring device is measuring a sample spot on the screen (say 25pix x 25 pix) and basing the calculation on that sample. This calculation would seem inaccurate to me. I would say a better calculation is to measure the total cd emitted from the screen and dived by area to get cd/m2
To me it would seem that measuring the screen at full white (100%APL) would make more sense now, because you do not need to try to average in the dark areas. Its also easier to compare to an LCD which would achieve max brightness when all white.
I think the article is a good start, but could be fleshed out more. I also agree with users who state that instead of arguing over which APL to measure at, just present the chart from 0-100%, so users have all the information needed. If that is too time consuming, then I think showing the 100% APL figure makes more sense to me.
I can save them the trouble. On my Galaxy Note II, there's unmistakable evidence of screen burn-in; namely, a plainly visible bright strip at the top of the display where the dark gray status bar is displayed in portrait mode.
Yeah...this is one of the reasons I'm just not really buying in to OLED. From my real world use of both OLED and LCD, good LCD IMO looks better and (ironically) handles dark scenes better, AND it doesn't have all these obnoxious limitations that CRT and other technologies had. I'd need a really, REALLY good reason to have to go back to worrying about burn in and the like.
Weirdly my new HP monitor (which I bought only because I needed built in speakers in this location) claims it can suffer from burn in...
CRT Burn-In eventually became pretty much a myth though. It was nearly impossible to burn in a CRT within 8 or so years of use by the late 90ies.
After 8 years of office type use, the backlight of an LCD monitor with CCFL is absolutely useless, it's faded to half its nominal brightness and the colours have shifted.
New LCD monitors no longer use CCFL, obsoleted by solid-state LED. It remains to be seen how well they fare with time, the estimates lie between 3 and 30 years of useful life.
For OLED burn in to set in, we're talking months, not years though!
This is one of the reasons I feel that Material Design is a step backwards. I prefer darker themes and find them easier on my eyes but Material goes the way of Apple and makes everything super bright which is detrimental to anyone with an AMOLED display. As mentioned there really ought to be an option for a dark theme - including for webpages.
Just look at the Battery Life charts of the S5 or Galaxy Tab S on webpages vs playing videos. They're lackluster for web content (just look at all that white screen!) but champs when you're not wasting power to create empty white space. What would battery life be in those numbers were reversed? 86% in Messenger becomes more like 14% or even 20-25%. That would have pretty serious Battery life implications. You could even preserve the design - just get rid of all that wasted whiteness.
Thanks for the deep dive into the technology and it's measuring. What confuses me though is that (the abbreviation) APL is used before it is defined/explained (as "Average Picture Level") and never are the two really linked (i.e. "Average Picture Level (APL)).
Has anybody done testing to measure the SOT difference Material Design creates on Lollipop vs the standard Kitkat dark theme. Scenario: Switching between a few commonly used apps, the gallery and mild browsing. 3g on .A Regular use scenario. Or, at least a crude random fixed app battery drain to zero. Averaged over a few common apps. Anandtech's list: Messenger, Calculator, Settings, Calendar, Phone, Reddit Is Fun (Light), Reddit Is Fun (Dark), Chrome New Tab, Wikipedia, Twitter, My bias: I reckon Material Light on lollipop steals a substantial time off SOT. Keeping brightness constant around 50% for both tests. Maybe Project Volta should have aimed for ipad idle battery drainage.
I have a question. Your plot of APL vs nits goes down. A nit is a measurement of luminance per area. Is the area being measured *only* the area covered by the illuminated pixels, or is it the entire screen?
Alternatively, one might ask, "is the Y axis roughly luminance per screen area, or luminance per pixel?"
The Y axis is the luminance of the white pixels that are being lit up. Since it's a white test pattern, pixels will either be entirely black or white, so the brightness of all the lit pixels will be the same and the brightness of all the non-lit pixels will be zero.
Surely oled aging is largely irrelevant in a mobile phone. Even if u have your screen on for three hours a day for 2years - thats only 2000 hours. The often stated min brightness life for blue (the shortest lived) is 10 times that at around 20,000 hours.
The AMOLED problem lies with uneven aging, not total life-span.
When looking at a blank white page on my AMOLED Lumia 1020, there is significant and noticable static in what should be otherwise an even colored page. For comparison, this is not an issue on the iPhone 5, although there is some slight macro-level variations across the screen.
What's so frustrating seeing the trend of increasing APLs on smartphone content is darker screens are easier on the eyes. If I have the option to look at a high APL versus a low APL version of the same content, I'll choose the low APL version every time. For example, ArsTechnica has a very easy reading layout on mobile devices with a nice grey text on black background style, whereas Anandtech can be rather harsh to read, especially in a dim environment.
I can understand that the new light themes are less power efficient for OLED screens than dark themes, but it seems that the situation is pretty much reversed for IPS panels. For LCD screen, high APL content could allow for lower back light levels and still be readable, which would save battery. There is also power consumption to drive the pixels to block the light, if I recall, but that's probably minor compared to the back light.
So the question is, what percentage of the market is occupied by OLED? It would be nice if Google could have a light and a dark theme to let the users choose. Then everyone can save battery.
You have zero credibility as to anything about smart phones, but that is doubly so when it comes to display. You go such a length to "appreciate" a pedestrian trick ("Dual Domain Pixels," rofl) that have been used forever elsewhere, because Apple used it for the first time. You have been telling us that iPhones have 100% sRGB for years yet somehow they "improve" every year. 6500K white balance? My ass. All iPhones I saw on store shelves have blue tint, worse than anything else in 2014. I am sure you will tell us somehow your sample may have been an exception. But surely you would have posted a corrective evaluation had it been a different phone?
What a bunch of crooks you are. Now of course you are out to "educate" the public about AMOLED so that you can claim "AMOLED done right" when the inevitable Apple stuff with AMOLED comes.
My personal iPhone 6 is close to D65, I forget the exact measurement. Also, their calibration improves, not their gamut coverage. You can have 100% sRGB coverage and still improve your color accuracy.
Yeah they will, because Apple really cares for display quality. They don't use AMOLED's because they propably aren't meeting their yelds targets, for whatever reason. Or because they just aren't good enough for Apple to swith from current retina HD displays (which are amazing).
We well see what amazing things they can do with AMOLED technology in the Apple Watch.
I did not learn or understand a thing. How do you measure brightness, is it a small area in a screen or do you take account the screen size since a larger display can put out more light? Why not separate the brightness comparisons between AMOLED and LCD displays from now on since this puts OLED displays on a bad position in terms of max brightness.
When do you start to use your eyes as evaluation method?
Try read on the phone when its dark in bed. Outside. With different colors and lightning in context. The real world.
And ofcource you test at 100% APL. Why do you use so many words for it? - we can write it for you next time. Not that say 20%-40% matters here, but its just that this nonsense is part of the loads of 6500k nonsense you focus on. Why do you try to use numbers for something that is not easy to measure?
With semi professional calibration tool in the house, and every screen from pls to ips to projector calibrated, i can safely say, everything written on Anandtech about screen technology is useless from brightness to overdone remarks about 6500k balance. The picture we get, doesnt resemble reality that meets our eyes.
A modern Oled beat modern Apple screen - or whatever ips is used. Loads of words can not change it.
And i have to say, i am also predicting the oled - apple - done right. Please surprice us.
Your methology and reviews make people buy the wrong stuff.
"While an AMOLED display can technically have a maximum brightness of 750 nits, it’s unlikely that people will look at images effectively equivalent to 1% of the display lit up with white."
And it is quite likely that people will look at a 600 nit white LED backlight in a pitch-black darkness? Sure, if you are suicidal and want to go blind. That would be one way.
You pick and choose data to suit your agenda. (not that they are correct - see 6515K nonsense and ever more perfect Apple's sRGB in your yearly charts) You do not explain your methodologies clearly, so that you can mislead readers while maintaining a (im)plausible deniability. Sorry, but it no longer works.
You should explain that you are measuring things in a cave and that things do change the moment you walk out. For example, you might explain that AMOLED screen do not need as high a brightness as LCD thanks to the nature of tech (lower reflectance, superior viewing angles, infinitely higher contrast, to name a few) - but you choose not to. Just because. I know we will have to wait for those until Apple's AMOLED stuff arrives. Instead, we now hear about this "APL" just in time when Lollipop arrived. Convenient, eh?
That is how you operate. There are countless examples like these. Data and commentary deliberately chosen with ulterior motives. When I pointed them out to your predecessors they sure enough denied everything and anything less than pure-minded. And.. guess what? Tada.. A job at Apple's office! B'bye~~
AnandTech should hire someone who truly loves and actually uses Android devices daily to write Android device reviews. Let these two have fun with Apple stuff - I could care less. But this nonsense has gone way too long and you no longer can hide behind invisible clothes because the people can see through.
An old galaxy s4 screen still beats the crap out of a brand new ips screen. If people actually used their eyes its very simple.
An example. Using an s4+ qulity oled screen its obvious to tell the dynamic difference of camera sensors from apc to fullframe. The same goes for eg the punchy colors of good zeis lenses vs cheap stuff.
A good oled shows the dynamics and punch of the real world.
Samsung have chosen crappy standard settings but choose a more realistic setting (for bright sourroundings thats standard or else movie) and you get a lifelike picure even the best ips can get close. Its not even close. In my eyes its like the difference between a mechanical hd and a ssd.
Since using pentile the issue of longevity is a non issue for new oled.
There is no perspective in lcd. It has always given a bad picture. Ips made things kind of acceptable but even old crt still have advantages to ips.
One of the things oled lacks big time in my eyes is shadow detail. That is worth improving.
Since s4 eg whitebalance have been accetable and with note 3 brightness was not a practical issue any more. It does not make any sence to focus more on it. Now its about battery life, shadow detail and especially get cost down.
So, are you saying that while a small area can be very bright they don't let it for very long nor the whole screen go very bright at the same time to reduce heat and save power ??
Would have been better to see the numbers based on the newest AMOLED tech, specifically the Note 4, and not the Nexus 6 which seems to be using last gen tech. The rate of progress in AMOLEDs makes this doubly important.
The Nexus 6 seems to be closer to the Note 3 (which was the first good enough AMOLED) and not the Note 4, which is the first AMOLED I feel gives up nothing to the best LCDs in all use cases - even bright sunlight.
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grahaman27 - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
To me, maximum brightness would imply that you would test at the lowest APL percentage that you could reach. Since this was not done at anandtech, I think it both explains the difference and confirms the accuracy of anandtech's reading.Thanks for explaining though!
grahaman27 - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
*inaccuracyMrCommunistGen - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
I think I have to disagree.It is this kind of testing (APL 1% vs APL 100% to generate max/min brightness) that got us "Dynamic Contrast Ratio" in computer LCDs. This in turn lead to a race to see who could generate the biggest number based on how high the backlight could be pumped under certain circumstances, and how low it could be driven under others. Seeing a 100,000,000:1 DCR on a panel when the native contrast ratio is 1000:1 is misleading to the uninformed buyer and laughable to anyone who knows better. Although the analogy doesn't entirely carry with AMOLED since the luminance of black/off pixels should remain relatively constant I still feel like it's the same slippery slope. How hot can we drive 16 pixels? 4 pixels? 1 pixel? I'd rather see what the maximum achievable brightness is for a "realistic" workload. Without reasonable and universal standards for measurement the best we can do is look for some other data point.
When shopping for a phone, particularly the panel in a phone, I want to know how usable the display is going to be when I'm outside or under bright lights. That is better delivered through the current testing methodology. With the current brightness measurements I get a "worst case" brightness. I'd always rather be pleasantly surprised when a product over delivers than disappointed when it under delivers. As long as the reader/consumer knows that this is how AMOLED panels work (the purpose of the above article) I don't see anything wrong with measuring max brightness at 100% APL.
Wolfpup - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Actually the way Anandtech is doing it is the accurate way to do it. A theoretical number that it can't actually reach in real life is worthless.krutou - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
It would be better to report the two common use scenarios: 80-85% (bright UI) and 25% (dark UI).As much as 1% APL figures are wrong because they don't represent common use scenarios, 100% APL doesn't make sense either.
Brandon Chester - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
The increase in brightness for AMOLEDs at 80% APL rather than 100% APL is not very significant, and changing testing to accommodate AMOLED's idiosyncrasies doesn't seem like a good idea either. To put it in perspective, even if I had tested the Nexus 6 at 80% APL in the review my conclusion about the brightness being sub-par would have been exactly the same. Additionally, dark UIs are also becoming less and less common. It's been happening for some time on the iOS side, and if developers actually follow Google's guidelines it will happen on Android.krutou - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Windows PhoneAlexvrb - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
By default, yeah. You can set it to a light theme though. Not sure how many do, it looks good dark IMO and saves power too. The start screen is likewise configurable (including the option of using a photo as the background behind the tiles).Wolfpup - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Yeah, and even there the dark theme doesn't carry through to everything. On my 928 I leave it on white because I prefer it, and I'm not usually looking at the start menu/settings anyway.Manabu - Sunday, December 28, 2014 - link
I have an OLED screen phone, and most of time my screen is in low APL apps. This includes naturally black apps, but also apps with a dark/night theme (there are lots of them, and I aways pester the developers if there isn't), inverted/night mode for pdfs and web (the UC browser is good for that), etc. So your 100% APL is very far from my common use cenario, and apps with dark themes as an option will probably only increase.MrSpadge - Thursday, January 1, 2015 - link
Offering a dark and a light theme seems to be the best for everybody. And not that difficult to do.akdj - Sunday, January 4, 2015 - link
Just kinda sucks you've got to make that sacrifice. There's plenty of excellent apps with less than dark UIs, environments and templates for productivity.'Creative' type apps; photo and video manipulation, DAWS, NLEs, Even sketch types often have the darker interface so as to 'disappear' behind your canvas. Unfortunately, Play Store isn't the 'investment' someone into video, audio or productivity (Word processing & spread sheets), even PowerPoint/Keynote, collage creating, etc are SOL on Android. iOS is absolutely a creative's one stop shop regardless of their skill-set, gear they use to 'capture' or 'create'. IF this paradigm shifts some (I'd really enjoy the DAW, NLE & still editing options on my Note4, ESPECIALLY with four, high speed cores and a load of RAM, it seems like it would be a no brainer. dJay making its way over, VERY cool. Hopefully others will follow suit.
As cases are rare those quads are used 'in-app', music and motion manipulation and post would be perfect to take advantage of BOTH, the speed of the processors and darker UIs. I enjoy both iOS & Android because of this and always have. The 6+ as my personal, Note 4 my business phone...it's amazing how far we've seen cell comms advance over twenty years now.
Kinda a disservice to even call em 'phones' --- event 'smartphones' as today we're pocketing actual computers! With faster and higher quality 'guts' than just a couple years ago in a laptop that lasted 90 minutes off 110. NAND storage on the phones is quicker than most folks' (not us geeks with the newest, latest and baddest PCIe SSDs ;)) HDDs, and these displays, regardless of AMOLED, IPS{LC/ED}, even TFT panels on cheap, $250 computers at Wal Mart are a big step up from CRTs, and the nastiness that came with owning a bulbous display!
Hard to believe Best Buy had more CRT TVs ten years ago. And today's phones and tablets continue to push the goal posts further forward, supplemented with silicon that runs them, their 2, 3 or 5 million pixels at frame rates that, at least for the most part in parity on iOS and Android providing a fluidity we've never seen. Not even on desk or laptops. Coupled with high speed broadband and advancements in wireless, AC in particular ...as well as LTE radios make these things incredibly fast wen accessing anything online
Again, an area of the phone commonly used and whether it's Chrome, Andy's stock browser, FF or Safari...there's a whole lotta white area. Tough compromise, especially with how well these AMOLED displays have proven themselves with bettering their colors, saturation & white points, incredible pixel density and ...of course the 'blacks'. Can't beat em!
Thanks for sharing.
J
Cailey1100 - Tuesday, March 10, 2015 - link
When you said super AMOLED display, you can get better glimpse of your screen when using your phone in a direct sunlight?dusk007 - Sunday, January 4, 2015 - link
I don't see why you cannot report both. I.e. like they do on notebookcheck minimum fps and avg. fps. It works in one simple bar.Solid until 20% APL -> striped until 80% APL
That offers all the relevant information. And the high effective contrast is relevant. I do use Spotify most of the time I am running and that is the main sun use my phone gets. Spotify UI is probably below 20%. There are also various apps that allow optional dark themes. Sunlight legibility is very relevant. Just going over that characteristic is misleading.
Just like the focus on sRGB anandtech has. I read some reviews here that claim bad color accuracy when comparing a color setting that aims to provide AdobeRGB (Samsung Photomode) to sRGB. But of course Apple is always right because all they offer is one setting and that is sRGB. I am hoping the Apple bias is leaving with certain people, but still for architecture related content you guys are THE BEST. Just reviews is a bit of a weak spot.
I also said it before look at how computerbase.de does diagrams and graphs. They have done it for years but most others still use the old school images. Must be the CMS.
Wolfpup - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Seems to make sense to me given as they point out AMOLED fades, and most stuff is close to 100% anyway.erc - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
While it's not the highest number possible, it is a more useful benchmark if you're using the information to make a buying decision since it's closer to what you can expect from real-world use.Testing with the lowest APL would get you a higher number is about as useful a metric as when hardware manufacturers optimize their drivers for common benchmarks. It produces a more favorable score, but it doesn't tell you anything about how the hardware actually performs outside of that benchmark.
grahaman27 - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
but the concern is the fairness between AMOLED vs LCD.When you crank the brightness on LCD, every pixel is at 100% regardless of the content of the screen. This is not so on AMOLED in fairness you have to test AMOLED on a screen that utilizes every pixel... right?
Wolfpup - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Err...that's just it, it isn't fair to give a brightness number for AMOLED that it won't ever actually reach, while LCD actually can be as bright as any test shows.I've found that I have to crank up my 1 phone with an AMOLED screen to max brightness to see any details on darker scenes on shows, which I don't have to do with LCD...which is ironic given the claims about blacks on AMOLED lol
basroil - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
"I've found that I have to crank up my 1 phone with an AMOLED screen to max brightness to see any details on darker scenes on shows, "Either you didn't calibrate your screen or the app you're using was made on uncalibrated devices and never bothered to distinguish between gammas
zepi - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
Or he is using the AMOLED phone in a real world, not in pitch black testing chamber where the infinite contrast figures of OLED's are quoted.Try a 80% APL contrast test in sunny conditions with a modern LCD and OLED displays and you might be surprised what "infinite contrast" OLED's means in practice.
edzieba - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Ideally, the best way to present the information would be an APL curve like in the current article.Hairs_ - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Also confirms that software designers are actively sabotaging an easy way for many hardware manufacturers to decrease display power use.Yay for "return to 1983" "modern" UI's!
Murloc - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
except for windows phone. There's so much black it's great for AMOLEDs.kspirit - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Agreed. Google shouldn't have made Android so white. I felt this bad news coming miles away when I got the Galaxy Nexus with the white Ice Cream Sandwich messaging app.Samsung used to give dark TouchWiz though; but they're going all bright coloured in the newer versions of that too.
At least WP8 gives us a choice.
Alexvrb - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Yeah WP defaults to dark and you can change that to light (or vice versa) in about 3 seconds.Alexvrb - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Oh I forgot to mention... if you're using a phone with an AMOLED display, changing the background color to a light scheme changes the description in the start+theme subsection of settings. When running a light background it points out that your display is optimized for dark colors (again I believe only when you're using an AMOLED display) and notes that the light background will use up more battery power. Smart and unobtrusive.kspirit - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Oh, I never noticed that before on my Lumia 925. That's pretty nice of them. Plus, I don't think it's too hard to offer an optional inverted colour UI in an OS. Google could give a similar option and I imagine it would considerably improve the rather unimpressive battery life of the N6.Wolfpup - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
IMO dark themes don't look good, and it's silly to design a UI around a display technology's weirdness. LCD doesn't have these limitations and is in wider use, and either way I don't like the compromises Android's U.I. has made in the past to baby AMOLED.basroil - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
"IMO dark themes don't look good, and it's silly to design a UI around a display technology's weirdness. "Here's some examples that can show you how wrong you are:
Photoshop CS6+
Lightroom
Most of the rest of the adobe suite (except indesign for the same reason though)
Visual Studio
Windows Phone
Zune
Aircraft control panels
In car navigation systems
ALL display technologies have limitations, and UIs are designed with those limits in mind (if the UI is worth considering at all, lollipop is not). You'll see UIs meant for LCD screens generally pump up the contrast to exaggerated levels, and those for use in cold places minimize animations. There's a lot to consider when making a UI.
Impulses - Thursday, December 25, 2014 - link
Plus the majority of CLIs thru the first couple decades of personal computing... When's the last time you saw a DOS prompt with a white background? :p There's pros/cons for either approach, I'd just like to see more choices in the matter.mkozakewich - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
No, black themes don't look good. What you want is an actual 'dark' theme, which will probably contain more brown or (lighter) navy than actual black. There are some very nice darker colour themes.sireangelus - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
to me, they are not supposed to look good. They are supposed to let your eyes rest, and in fact i hate how on anandtech the background is white- it burns my eyes.DiHydro - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
The background on this website is not pure white, it is f6f6f6 in hex, which is about 96% white. You should calibrate or turn down the brightness on your monitor.dylan522p - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
That Chart you made with Brightness and APL is something you need in EVERY AMOLED device's review.psychobriggsy - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
This is one downside of Material Design, at least currently where it only has a light theme - you use more power driving the display, or have an overall dimmer display (at similar power use).Maybe there isn't a lot of real world savings to be had from having a dark theme rather than light theme these days for OLED... it would be interesting to see how much battery life is saved from using a 30% APL UI versus as 80% APL UI.
AnnihilatorX - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
From the applications APL list, it seems to me 80% is about the average, and would be a good one to aim for in reviews.This article could be written better, I am still a little bit confused why lower APL means higher brigtness. Surely, as the screen has more dark content, the brightness will drop? Also, the acronym APL was mentioned first before it was defined, that's bad editing!
krutou - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
The article reads just fine.Lower APL (% of pixels lit) on an AMOLED means the display can disable some pixels and turbo (much like on a CPU), the remaining pixels.
3DoubleD - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
I thought the article was a bit rough as well, especially the APL acronym showing up before the definition.I think it is also confusing why brightness increases with lower APL. Consider the 100% APL situation... let's say it produced 100 nits. Now consider a 1% APL situation. If the PIXEL brightness is kept the same, we should see 1 nit. Now we consider the fact that we can increase the TOTAL brightness because we have power headroom. The only way we could increase beyond 100 nits is if we can increase the PIXEL brightness by a factor of more than 100.
So what is not very clear is how having a lower APL leads to higher TOTAL brightness. In the 1% APL situation, is the pixel being driven more than 100x brighter than normal??? That seems pretty absurd. So either we don't understand how the brightness measurement is being performed or it is not clear that each pixel has >100x brightness headroom.
Brandon Chester - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
"With a pure white image, every pixel must be lit, while with a pure black image every pixel is off. As the display typically has a maximum power use set for a mobile device, this opens up the capability for AMOLED displays to allocate more power per pixel (i.e. higher maximum luminance) when not displaying a full-white image."Josh wrote this but I don't really know how to explain it any clearer, it seems to explain itself fine to me.
Minion4Hire - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
What are you talking about?It's not about a higher total brightness of every pixel of the display, it is about higher per pixel and perceived brightness.
Display calibration and measurement tools don't take in all of the light from the display at once. You're effectively placing a small camera onto the screen, not placing the entire display into an enclosed box. These tools only measure a small section of the display at a time.
You're looking at this from the wrong perspective. OLED screens are more capable than the phones they are in will allow them to be since there is a cap placed on power consumption because of their designed mobile use. Let's say that a given OLED screen is capable of 1000 nits, but that would consume 10W of power. The phone manufacturer wants to limit the screen's overall power consumption and caps it at 4W instead. But one half of the screen could be using 3Ws while the other half only uses 1W.
There are two things that can change the perceived and measured brightness - the fact that individual white pixels can become brighter if portions of the display are dimmer as well as the fact that OLED panels are inefficient when it comes to illuminating more/all of the screen at once compared to smaller portions.
So if two different reviewers placed their light sensor on a white portion of the screen, but one of the testers had their screen displaying all white, and the other reviewer only had a partially white screen, the latter is going to get a higher brightness reading. Even if measuring over text (which is mostly empty/white space) any ad on a website or colorful banner is going to allow more power to be used by the white pixels, increasing brightness.
So the "real world" testing of other sites can absolutely report more nits than the 100% testing done here.
Magictoaster - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
I too see this as a bit confusing. I understand the basic concept that driving few pixels allows them to drive the remaining pixels to a higher output.Where I'm confused is that brightness is being measured in cd/m^2. As others have noted, if part of the screen is not illuminated, you would imagine the brightness would go down when you average in the non-illuminated area. The only way I see this not happening is if your measuring device is measuring a sample spot on the screen (say 25pix x 25 pix) and basing the calculation on that sample. This calculation would seem inaccurate to me. I would say a better calculation is to measure the total cd emitted from the screen and dived by area to get cd/m2
To me it would seem that measuring the screen at full white (100%APL) would make more sense now, because you do not need to try to average in the dark areas. Its also easier to compare to an LCD which would achieve max brightness when all white.
I think the article is a good start, but could be fleshed out more. I also agree with users who state that instead of arguing over which APL to measure at, just present the chart from 0-100%, so users have all the information needed. If that is too time consuming, then I think showing the 100% APL figure makes more sense to me.
Magictoaster - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
some one explained this later in the comments. The APL is measuring luminescence per pixel in nits not per area. This clarifies things for me now.I still vote for a full APL graph in test data!
krutou - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Reading between the lines, for the AMOLED/APL analysis, brightness is measured as brightness density (e.g. nits/pixel), not total brightness.Death666Angel - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
"LCD display"No. :D
Pissedoffyouth - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Great article. I love Anandtech because of this type of reporting, it's easy to read.Quick question, could you perhaps do an article on so called "burn in" and see if it actually happens on AMOLED or if it's a myth. Thanks
Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
I can save them the trouble. On my Galaxy Note II, there's unmistakable evidence of screen burn-in; namely, a plainly visible bright strip at the top of the display where the dark gray status bar is displayed in portrait mode.grahaman27 - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
burn-in is certainly not a myth.FunBunny2 - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Welcome back, CRT!!!Wolfpup - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Yeah...this is one of the reasons I'm just not really buying in to OLED. From my real world use of both OLED and LCD, good LCD IMO looks better and (ironically) handles dark scenes better, AND it doesn't have all these obnoxious limitations that CRT and other technologies had. I'd need a really, REALLY good reason to have to go back to worrying about burn in and the like.Weirdly my new HP monitor (which I bought only because I needed built in speakers in this location) claims it can suffer from burn in...
Siana - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
CRT Burn-In eventually became pretty much a myth though. It was nearly impossible to burn in a CRT within 8 or so years of use by the late 90ies.After 8 years of office type use, the backlight of an LCD monitor with CCFL is absolutely useless, it's faded to half its nominal brightness and the colours have shifted.
New LCD monitors no longer use CCFL, obsoleted by solid-state LED. It remains to be seen how well they fare with time, the estimates lie between 3 and 30 years of useful life.
For OLED burn in to set in, we're talking months, not years though!
blzd - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
As much as a myth as Plasma burn in was a myth, in other words not a myth.Impulses - Thursday, December 25, 2014 - link
Find a carrier store with some old year+ AMOLED display models in use, it shows.c.nachiappan - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
color output from ips lcd does not just depend on the voltage applied, but also on the color phosphors. voltage will change the intensity i think.jkostans - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
I was also initially confused about the term APL. At least we got a definition, even if it was a bit late in the article.Poik - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
This is one of the reasons I feel that Material Design is a step backwards. I prefer darker themes and find them easier on my eyes but Material goes the way of Apple and makes everything super bright which is detrimental to anyone with an AMOLED display. As mentioned there really ought to be an option for a dark theme - including for webpages.Just look at the Battery Life charts of the S5 or Galaxy Tab S on webpages vs playing videos. They're lackluster for web content (just look at all that white screen!) but champs when you're not wasting power to create empty white space. What would battery life be in those numbers were reversed? 86% in Messenger becomes more like 14% or even 20-25%. That would have pretty serious Battery life implications. You could even preserve the design - just get rid of all that wasted whiteness.
Conficio - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Thanks for the deep dive into the technology and it's measuring. What confuses me though is that (the abbreviation) APL is used before it is defined/explained (as "Average Picture Level") and never are the two really linked (i.e. "Average Picture Level (APL)).Conficio - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Thanks, apparently the paragraphs got already swapped, but only on the website. The RSS feed (my primary reading mode) does not benefit from that.rezurect - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Has anybody done testing to measure the SOT difference Material Design creates on Lollipop vs the standard Kitkat dark theme.Scenario: Switching between a few commonly used apps, the gallery and mild browsing. 3g on .A Regular use scenario. Or, at least a crude random fixed app battery drain to zero. Averaged over a few common apps.
Anandtech's list: Messenger, Calculator, Settings, Calendar, Phone, Reddit Is Fun (Light), Reddit Is Fun (Dark), Chrome New Tab, Wikipedia, Twitter,
My bias: I reckon Material Light on lollipop steals a substantial time off SOT. Keeping brightness constant around 50% for both tests. Maybe Project Volta should have aimed for ipad idle battery drainage.
mcrumiller - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Hi Brandon or Joshua--I have a question. Your plot of APL vs nits goes down. A nit is a measurement of luminance per area. Is the area being measured *only* the area covered by the illuminated pixels, or is it the entire screen?
Alternatively, one might ask, "is the Y axis roughly luminance per screen area, or luminance per pixel?"
Brandon Chester - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
The Y axis is the luminance of the white pixels that are being lit up. Since it's a white test pattern, pixels will either be entirely black or white, so the brightness of all the lit pixels will be the same and the brightness of all the non-lit pixels will be zero.JoshHo - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
If one looks at luminous intensity per screen area, luminance would go down overall. We're looking at luminance per pixel.madwolfa - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
To be honest, I hate abundance of "white" in Lollipop. KitKat was cleaner and easier on the eyes. What are they thinking?edsib1 - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Surely oled aging is largely irrelevant in a mobile phone. Even if u have your screen on for three hours a day for 2years - thats only 2000 hours. The often stated min brightness life for blue (the shortest lived) is 10 times that at around 20,000 hours.edsib1 - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
That should of course read half brightness life not min brightness lifekrutou - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
The AMOLED problem lies with uneven aging, not total life-span.When looking at a blank white page on my AMOLED Lumia 1020, there is significant and noticable static in what should be otherwise an even colored page. For comparison, this is not an issue on the iPhone 5, although there is some slight macro-level variations across the screen.
krutou - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Since wear is related to use, and use is dependent on content that is pseudo-random, this static slowly degrades image quality over time.Wolfpup - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Interesting! And obviously the 1020 isn't very old either.garadante - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
What's so frustrating seeing the trend of increasing APLs on smartphone content is darker screens are easier on the eyes. If I have the option to look at a high APL versus a low APL version of the same content, I'll choose the low APL version every time. For example, ArsTechnica has a very easy reading layout on mobile devices with a nice grey text on black background style, whereas Anandtech can be rather harsh to read, especially in a dim environment.hammer256 - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
I can understand that the new light themes are less power efficient for OLED screens than dark themes, but it seems that the situation is pretty much reversed for IPS panels. For LCD screen, high APL content could allow for lower back light levels and still be readable, which would save battery. There is also power consumption to drive the pixels to block the light, if I recall, but that's probably minor compared to the back light.So the question is, what percentage of the market is occupied by OLED? It would be nice if Google could have a light and a dark theme to let the users choose. Then everyone can save battery.
PC Perv - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
You have zero credibility as to anything about smart phones, but that is doubly so when it comes to display. You go such a length to "appreciate" a pedestrian trick ("Dual Domain Pixels," rofl) that have been used forever elsewhere, because Apple used it for the first time. You have been telling us that iPhones have 100% sRGB for years yet somehow they "improve" every year. 6500K white balance? My ass. All iPhones I saw on store shelves have blue tint, worse than anything else in 2014. I am sure you will tell us somehow your sample may have been an exception. But surely you would have posted a corrective evaluation had it been a different phone?What a bunch of crooks you are. Now of course you are out to "educate" the public about AMOLED so that you can claim "AMOLED done right" when the inevitable Apple stuff with AMOLED comes.
Disgusting creatures.
Small Bison - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
This comment is best read in Alfrid Lickspittle's voice.Brandon Chester - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
My personal iPhone 6 is close to D65, I forget the exact measurement. Also, their calibration improves, not their gamut coverage. You can have 100% sRGB coverage and still improve your color accuracy.PC Perv - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Yah and your Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 has an RGBW Pentile AMOLED screen. XDHopeless.
GC2:CS - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Yeah they will, because Apple really cares for display quality. They don't use AMOLED's because they propably aren't meeting their yelds targets, for whatever reason. Or because they just aren't good enough for Apple to swith from current retina HD displays (which are amazing).We well see what amazing things they can do with AMOLED technology in the Apple Watch.
PC Perv - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
I suggest AnandTech to hire fresh talents to write. People who are less jaded and not so biased like these two.Rezurecta - Monday, December 22, 2014 - link
Amazing explanation. Thank you.zodiacfml - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
I did not learn or understand a thing.How do you measure brightness, is it a small area in a screen or do you take account the screen size since a larger display can put out more light?
Why not separate the brightness comparisons between AMOLED and LCD displays from now on since this puts OLED displays on a bad position in terms of max brightness.
victorson - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Great work on putting those exact numbers to paper, this type of articles is exactly why we love AnandTech.krumme - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
When do you start to use your eyes as evaluation method?Try read on the phone when its dark in bed. Outside. With different colors and lightning in context. The real world.
And ofcource you test at 100% APL.
Why do you use so many words for it? - we can write it for you next time.
Not that say 20%-40% matters here, but its just that this nonsense is part of the loads of 6500k nonsense you focus on. Why do you try to use numbers for something that is not easy to measure?
With semi professional calibration tool in the house, and every screen from pls to ips to projector calibrated, i can safely say, everything written on Anandtech about screen technology is useless from brightness to overdone remarks about 6500k balance. The picture we get, doesnt resemble reality that meets our eyes.
A modern Oled beat modern Apple screen - or whatever ips is used. Loads of words can not change it.
And i have to say, i am also predicting the oled - apple - done right. Please surprice us.
Your methology and reviews make people buy the wrong stuff.
PC Perv - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
"While an AMOLED display can technically have a maximum brightness of 750 nits, it’s unlikely that people will look at images effectively equivalent to 1% of the display lit up with white."And it is quite likely that people will look at a 600 nit white LED backlight in a pitch-black darkness? Sure, if you are suicidal and want to go blind. That would be one way.
You pick and choose data to suit your agenda. (not that they are correct - see 6515K nonsense and ever more perfect Apple's sRGB in your yearly charts) You do not explain your methodologies clearly, so that you can mislead readers while maintaining a (im)plausible deniability. Sorry, but it no longer works.
You should explain that you are measuring things in a cave and that things do change the moment you walk out. For example, you might explain that AMOLED screen do not need as high a brightness as LCD thanks to the nature of tech (lower reflectance, superior viewing angles, infinitely higher contrast, to name a few) - but you choose not to. Just because. I know we will have to wait for those until Apple's AMOLED stuff arrives. Instead, we now hear about this "APL" just in time when Lollipop arrived. Convenient, eh?
That is how you operate. There are countless examples like these. Data and commentary deliberately chosen with ulterior motives. When I pointed them out to your predecessors they sure enough denied everything and anything less than pure-minded. And.. guess what? Tada.. A job at Apple's office! B'bye~~
AnandTech should hire someone who truly loves and actually uses Android devices daily to write Android device reviews. Let these two have fun with Apple stuff - I could care less. But this nonsense has gone way too long and you no longer can hide behind invisible clothes because the people can see through.
blzd - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Woah what was that, the 3rd comment on the article? Calm down and get back to work at the OLED consortium lol.Maybe if you guys can solve those burn in issues and blue longevity, Apple might actually consider using an OLED panel in one of their devices.
krumme - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
An old galaxy s4 screen still beats the crap out of a brand new ips screen. If people actually used their eyes its very simple.An example. Using an s4+ qulity oled screen its obvious to tell the dynamic difference of camera sensors from apc to fullframe. The same goes for eg the punchy colors of good zeis lenses vs cheap stuff.
A good oled shows the dynamics and punch of the real world.
Samsung have chosen crappy standard settings but choose a more realistic setting (for bright sourroundings thats standard or else movie) and you get a lifelike picure even the best ips can get close. Its not even close. In my eyes its like the difference between a mechanical hd and a ssd.
krumme - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
Since using pentile the issue of longevity is a non issue for new oled.There is no perspective in lcd. It has always given a bad picture. Ips made things kind of acceptable but even old crt still have advantages to ips.
One of the things oled lacks big time in my eyes is shadow detail. That is worth improving.
Since s4 eg whitebalance have been accetable and with note 3 brightness was not a practical issue any more. It does not make any sence to focus more on it. Now its about battery life, shadow detail and especially get cost down.
tygrus - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
So, are you saying that while a small area can be very bright they don't let it for very long nor the whole screen go very bright at the same time to reduce heat and save power ??dawheat - Tuesday, December 30, 2014 - link
Would have been better to see the numbers based on the newest AMOLED tech, specifically the Note 4, and not the Nexus 6 which seems to be using last gen tech. The rate of progress in AMOLEDs makes this doubly important.The Nexus 6 seems to be closer to the Note 3 (which was the first good enough AMOLED) and not the Note 4, which is the first AMOLED I feel gives up nothing to the best LCDs in all use cases - even bright sunlight.