Friday 10 October 2014
Introduction
Whenever a new major flagship smartphone comes out, we tend to stage an in-depth screen comparison in order to determine if the manufacturer has managed to leapfrog the stiff competition in this all so important aspect. Of course, the just-released Apple iPhone 6 is major enough to justify a new screen comparison, especially since Apple prides itself in producing some of the very best displays in the industry.
So here's how this is going to go down. We'll be examining all essential components of the phones' displays, including brightness and outdoor visibility, color quality, and resolution. There will be images in each section, illustrating the devices' performances, and in the color quality part, we'll also be taking a look at our extensive display benchmark data in order to figure out which mobile display currently brings the most accurate and pleasing image quality, and, naturally, the place of the iPhone 6 in the whole picture. Last year's iPhone 5s had one of the best all-around displays – a true benchmark for the industry, so you can imagine how interesting it'll be to see if Apple has managed to surpass its own effort with the iPhone 6. Let's hope that it has, because... you know, things have to keep moving forward.
Brightness and visibility
We thought the small size of the iPhone 5s' screen had a hand in it achieving that impressive brightness output of 580 nits, but it turns out this wasn't so, because the iPhone 6's screen is now way bigger, but can actually reach the spectacular 600 nits! That's one truly enviable brightness output, however, we've found out that the screen actually appears just a notch dimmer than that of the 5s, when viewed under bright sunlight. We can't be sure if it's due to slightly worse reflectivity or something else, but the fact is that even with a stronger brightness output, the iPhone 6 remains just ever so slightly dimmer outdoors, compared to its predecessor. Nevertheless, 600 nits are 600 nits, so the brightness of Apple's latest gadget is still to be considered top-notch, especially when it can hardly be challenged by most of the high-end Android smartphones out there.
The volatile Galaxy S5, however, reminds us that it still packs quite a punch. It can consistently reach about 450 nits when displaying pure white, but its brightness actually goes up when there are darker areas in the screen (i.e. when it's not perfectly white), and as you can imagine, most content does include items of wildly varying colors, so more often than not, the Galaxy S5's image manages to surpass the 500 nits mark. When outdoors, the Galaxy S5 tends to be ever so slightly easier to view than the iPhone 6, and on par with the iPhone 5s. Trailing behind these three are the HTC One (M8) (490 nits) and the LG G3 (455 nits). The HTC manages to trump its LG counterpart, but remains slightly behind the top three.
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