How to distinguish a good screen in a smartphone from a bad one before buying. And what manufacturers are deceiving you about

Manufacturers stuff you with marketing terms so that you buy their products, which

certainly better than the competition.At the same time, they often “cheat”, substituting concepts or openly misleading. But thanks to reviews on Ferra.ru, you can distinguish fact from fiction, and in this article I will tell you what you really need to pay attention to when it comes to the quality of a smartphone screen. Discuss

Matrix type

Most smartphones todaythere is either an AMOLED or IPS matrix. At the heart of AMOLED are organic light emitting diodes, which themselves emit light of various brightnesses, and in IPS there are translucent filters with backlight behind them. This is a basic design difference that can cause a pixel on an AMOLED screen to not light up at all, resulting in infinite contrast—since. the brightness of black is essentially zero, and whatever you divide by zero, you get infinity.

That is why manufacturers of such smartphonesthey can write a contrast ratio of at least 1,000,000: 1 - and they will be formally right, but this information will not tell you anything. In general, AMOLED matrices are preferable today than IPS: due to the “deep blacks”, they have higher contrast, they are easier to use in sunny weather, even if the overall brightness is lower than that of similar models with IPS (we’ll talk about this below), they have advanced colors, and the battery is generally consumed more slowly, especially if you choose a dark theme.

However, manufacturers also like to think about matrices sometimes. For example, Samsung has its own IPS mod/subspecies called PLS. As they say - the same eggs, only in profile.

Brightness (minimum and maximum)

Maximum brightness is quite an important parameter,thanks to which you can understand how much information on the phone screen remains readable on the street on a sunny day. In the C system, brightness is measured in candela per square meter, but some write "nit". 500 nits is equal to 500 candela per square meter (500 cd/m2).

We are also at Ferra.en in the reviews we indicate the minimum brightness to let you know how convenient it is to read something in the dark on this phone. To be precise, it's more like "maximum display brightness at minimum backlight brightness." Those. the brightness of the whitest color when the brightness slider is set to minimum.

The brighter the screen, the easier it is to read from it in sunny weather

Comfortable maximum screen brightness forviewing information on a sunny day - from 400, and even better - from 500 cd / m2. But here it is worth considering that AMOLED screens in general require less brightness - precisely because they have infinite contrast, while on IPS screens under sunlight, white areas can merge with black and gray.

Also keep in mind that manufacturers tend toto lie and write some unthinkable numbers of brightness. It happens that the phone reaches maximum brightness only in extreme conditions (direct sunlight), and then not for long. Therefore, I would talk about the “nominal maximum brightness” that we measure with a colorimeter - this is a guaranteed maximum that you will definitely get. And everything that is higher (if the manufacturer claims) - maybe yes, or maybe not, or maybe, as the classics say, go fuck yourself, because the automation decided not to twist the brightness in specific conditions.

Well, that same minimum brightness no one at allwriting in advertisements. However, if it is important for you to comfortably read from the smartphone screen in the dark, then I recommend not to take those models where this brightness is higher than 2.0 cd/m2 according to our measurements.

White temperature (white balance)

White temperature is a measure ofhow “blue” or “yellow” the screen is. The abundance of blue, generally speaking, is harmful to vision, especially before bedtime. Usually smartphones have a setting to lower the white temperature at a certain time, but not all of them (budget smartphones may not have it). Some other smartphones allow you to adjust the white balance even in “normal” mode, but there are even fewer of them.

Color "temperature" in Kelvin

So know that the ideal white temperature- 6500K. Acceptable - up to 7500K. From 8000 K to 9000 K is undesirable, and above is generally a disaster. Unfortunately, our editorial colorimeter does not measure above 9000K, however, some smartphones (for example, Infinix or some budget Motorola / Lenovo smartphones) most likely raise the white temperature even higher.

By the way, the very concept of “white temperature” means the temperature to which a substance must be heated in order for it to glow in that particular color.

And here's how the same picture will look different on screens with different white temperatures

Screen refresh rate

It is measured in hertz and means the numberscreen updates per second. Not to be confused with animation frame rate (fps) - they are not exactly the same thing. Let's say a screen with a refresh rate of 60 Hz is always updated 60 times per second, even if there is no animation on it at all (0 frames per second), or the animation runs at a frequency of 15 or 30 frames per second.

Hence the consequence.Just because a manufacturer claims a screen refresh rate of, say, 120Hz doesn't mean everything will run just that smoothly. Sometimes it happens (for example, Oppo Find X2) that only built-in applications work with high-frame animation, and all others work with normal, 60 frames per second. But the screen itself is updated 120 times per second - and you can't fault it. At the same time, the same applications on another smartphone will work with 120 fps animation in 120 Hz mode. So, again, it's important to read the reviews.

Many games for smartphones run at a maximum of 60 or even 30 FPS. So don't be fooled by these ads.

Also today, smartphones often receive“dynamic refresh rate” of the screen. During periods of inactivity or when the battery is low, the screen refresh rate is reduced, and this is not always possible for the user to influence.

Well, even any screen refresh rate does not save you from jamming and freezing caused by weak hardware, a small amount of RAM, or an abundance of running “heavy” applications.

In short, a smartphone with a 120Hz screen will not always run smoother than one with a 90Hz or even 60Hz screen.

Color rendering

Perhaps the most subjective parameter of the screen iscolor rendering quality. It is expressed in color gamut (we measure the coverage of the sRGB range, in percent), and in deviation from the specified color - Delta E. In an ideal world, an ideal screen has a minimum of 100% sRGB coverage and Delta E equal to one. But here there are several nuances.

First, there are color spacesseveral. For example, the NTSC color space is wider than sRGB, which is 72% of NTSC. However, not everything that is 72% NTSC is 100% sRGB. Therefore, if the phone has problems with color reproduction, it is more profitable for the manufacturer to write that the color gamut is 72% NTSC than, say, 80% or 90% sRGB.

Different color spaces - clearly

There is also a DCI-P3 color space,"invented" for cinema. It is wider than sRGB but narrower than NTSC. In this case, in contrast to the notation “72% NTSC”, the P3 space is uniquely defined on the coordinate plane of the spectrum. And so his measurements are more credible.

As for color accuracy, then ... Whatwell, in my memory, when measuring with a colorimeter, not a single smartphone has yet shown Delta E = 1.0. But this, however, does not matter - the average user prefers “acidic” oversaturated colors rather than accurate and soft color reproduction. In addition, on a smartphone, you are unlikely to process RAW photos for cool magazines or edit videos for film distribution, and therefore you don’t really need color accuracy, as long as it’s beautiful. So, here it’s rather suspicious if the manufacturer presses on a low Delta E (close to one) - it’s quite possible that he wants to hide much more important jambs.

Resolution

Here, it seems, everything is clear, but... There are also nuances.So today they try not to make resolutions higher than Full-HD - there’s simply no need, but sometimes for marketing purposes manufacturers boast of QHD or even 4K screens. However, for the same Samsung smartphones with QHD screens, the maximum refresh rate is directly related to the resolution. In FHD resolution, the smartphone can operate at 120 Hz, but in QHD it can only operate at 60 Hz. And Samsung, even on smartphones with QHD screens, likes the “out of the box” resolution. set to FHD, and many users don’t even notice (example: Galaxy S10, S20).

Sony was even cooler - the company boastedA 4K screen, which turned out to be, firstly, not 4K at all, and secondly, in this resolution only photos and videos were displayed, and the entire interface, applications and games were in FHD. What the manufacturer, of course, kept silent about.

If anything, we are talking about the Sony Xperia Pro smartphone (andXperia Pro-I), which have a resolution of 3840x1644. The manufacturer took the same “4K” from the horizontal resolution (higher value), which, on the one hand, can be explained - this is how the 4K designation arose. But any resolution imposes strict requirements primarily on a smaller value, and for 4K it should be 2160 pixels, while the Xperia Pro had only 1644 pixels. Otherwise, 3840×1080 monitors can be called 4K monitors, whereas they are only FHD with double the width.

In general, the higher the resolution, the moreAll other things being equal, the picture is clearer. But, firstly, our eye has a limit when we can still distinguish two points exactly as two points, and this limit changes with the distance to the screen (and visual acuity decreases with age, well, you yourself know). Actually, that same Apple Retina is precisely an indicator of the border after which we no longer distinguish separate points. Therefore, the pixel density per inch (PPI) of MacBooks may be lower than that of iPhones, but both are Retina. It's just that the laptop screen is usually further from the eyes.

In my opinion, in the current realities in resolutionabove FHD on screens less than 10 inches does not make much sense. You can take QHD for the sake of show-off, but the battery will also be consumed faster, and system resources will be more actively consumed.