Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4 has one of the best smartphone displays ever, according to Dr. Raymond Soneira, the president of DisplayMate Technology. His exhaustive display shootout compares the recently-announced phablet device and its counterpart, the smartly curved Galaxy Edge, and he concedes that the Galaxy Note 4 is an incredibly impressive improvement over its predecessors.
The Galaxy Note 4 scored highly for its color accuracy, peak brightness, screen viewability in high ambient light, and display power efficiency. The phablet-sized device’s Quad HD display also received accolades for having the highest display resolution on the market—almost double the amount of a modern HDTV—and the sharpest of all smartphones currently for sale. Dr. Soneira adds:
The Galaxy Note 4 delivers uniformly consistent all around Top Tier display performance: it is the first Smartphone display to ever get all Green (Very Good to Excellent) Ratings in all test and measurement categories (except one Yellow for a Brightness Variation with Average Picture Level) since we started the Display Technology Shoot-Out article Series in 2006, an impressive achievement for a display. The Galaxy Note 4 has again raised the bar for top display performance up by another notch.
If you’re worried about the Super AMOLED making your photos and videos look too saturated, DisplayMate adds that while the Note 4’s Adaptive Display mode delivers significantly higher color saturation, it also features a broader color gamut—about 130 percent more than most standard smartphone or tablet displays. “Some people like the extra saturated vibrant colors,” wrote Dr. Soneira. ”Plus it is useful for special applications, and for viewing the display in medium to high levels of ambient light, because it offsets some of the reflected light glare that washes out the on-screen image colors.”
The Galaxy Edge, on the other hand, isn’t as much of a gimmick as I’d previously thought. The Edge screen apparently helps reduce display power to extend the running time on the battery, and DisplayMate adds, “the OLED display on a flexible plastic substrate for the Galaxy Note Edge is now essentially the same as on a traditional glass substrate for the Galaxy Note 4, even at 500+ pixels per inch and 2560×1600 resolution.”
You can read the display shootout in its entirety over at DisplayMate. I personally can’t wait to see how the Galaxy Note 4 performs in everyday use—and how it compares visually to some of its major competitors, like the LG G3.
