iPhone LCD Is Superior to Nexus One AMOLED Display

DisplayMate president Dr. Raymond M. Soneira has conducted a scientific experiment in which he claims that Apple’s iPhone 3G-S LCD is better than the much touted AMOLED display on Google’s Nexus One. OLED is inherently a far superior technology than LCD, but execution is crucial. Just because one form of technology is more advanced, it does not mean that everything that uses it will exceed the performance of an inferior approach. For example, not every rear-wheel-drive car will out-handle every front-wheel-drive auto.


Mathematically, the Nexus One has the better display. Its 800 x 480 resolution is far higher than the iPhone’s 480 x 320; OLED has substantially higher contrast ratios, faster response times, better viewing angles, and more accurate color than traditional LCD; however, OLED is still a new technology, whereas LCD has been in mass consumer development for decades. The Nexus One’s display does not quite do OLED justice. Once manufacturers gain more experience making OLED displays, it should clearly surpass LCD –but that is the future, so what about now?

The Nexus One’s display “uses a PenTile pixel arrangement, where there are only two sub-pixels per pixel instead of the usual three,” so that a 800 x 480 PenTile display has only two-thirds of the number of sub-pixels as an equivalent LCD. As the above picture shows, the Nexus One’s screen contains lots of noise and color banding not found on higher-end TN LCDs like the iPhone’s.

As for color, the Nexus One is only 16-bit, while the iPhone is 18-bit and can emulate 24-bit depth with dithering. Soneira remarks that when displaying high quality images, the Nexus One presents “over-saturated colors, bad color and gray-scale accuracy, large color and gray-scale tracking errors, calibration errors, lots of image noise from excessive edge and sharpness processing, and many artifacts.”

The OLED screen has fairly low maximum brightness at 229 cd/m2, but its black levels are an outstanding 0.0035 cd/m2 (darker than an abyss). Although the Nexus One’s 65,415:1 dynamic contrast ratio under low ambient lighting is superb, the same cannot be said about its terrible high ambient lighting contrast. When viewed in daylight or in brighter environments, the Nexus One’s display is washed out and dim.

Of course, the iPhone’s LCD has many problems too (low contrast, so-so viewing angles, low color gamut, etc.), and part two of DisplayMate’s article will cover this in detail, but the Nexus One’s screen is a sorry maiden attempt at OLED.

Source: DisplayMate