Samsung Galaxy S5 crowned best performing smartphone display

Shawn Knight

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Samsung’s Galaxy S5 has picked up a laundry list of accolades from DisplayMate ahead of its April 11 debut. Company president, research scientist and display expert Raymond Soneira said in an in-depth analysis that the S5 is the best performing smartphone display they have ever tested.

As things like pixel count and screen size have played out as far as visually beneficial, it’s now time for the industry – manufacturers, customers and reviewers – to focus their attention on other even more important display performance metrics.

galaxy s5 samsung smartphone display

That’s exactly what Samsung has done with the S5. While the aforementioned pixel count and screen size won’t jump off the specifications page as terribly impressive, a number of other improvements push the display to new levels of awesome.

As such, the display set a long list of new records for best smartphone display including highest brightness, lowest reflectance, highest color accuracy, infinite contrast ratio, highest contrast rating in ambient light and smallest brightness variation with viewing angle.

Soneira praised the S5’s Cinema Mode as offering the most accurate colors for any smartphone or tablet ever tested despite the fact that image contrast and color saturation were slightly too high due to a slightly too steep intensity scale.

The screen was also celebrated for improvements in power efficiency. Specifically, the OLED panel on the S5 was 27 percent more efficient than the one on the S4. According to Samsung, this increase is a result of more efficient OLED materials and improvements in the display electronics and optics.

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27% improvement in efficiency from just new materials and internal improvements. Impressive.

Too bad the S5 is plagued with a hideous back :(.
 
As such, the display set a long list of new records for best smartphone display including highest brightness, lowest reflectance, highest color accuracy, infinite contrast ratio, highest contrast rating in ambient light and smallest brightness variation with viewing angle.

Yet another reason why we're all waiting for OLED TVs to be affordable before buying another one.

Regarding the infinite contrast ratio... Does that mean the blacks are infinitely dark and the whites are infinitely white? Reminds me of a black T-shirt my brother used to have.. it said 'I'm only wearing black until they make something darker.' Looks like Samsung did!
 
27% improvement in efficiency from just new materials and internal improvements. Impressive.

Too bad the S5 is plagued with a hideous back :(.
That's subjective JC. The rear cover is just simply dimpled, it's not 'WOW' neither is it 'YUCK' and it won't offend the majority of buyers. Personally speaking I'm much more interested in the S5 Mini than this one.
 
[/quote]I'm much more interested in the S5 Mini than this one.[/quote]

That's more interesting to me as well. Ever since the s3, the whole line has been far too big for my taste. The power efficiency gains are still really exciting though.
 
I guess to each his/her own; seeing how I'm more interested in the, soon to be, Note 4. :)
 
Honestly the screen on the S4 is beautiful. No need to go bigger right now. What good however does a screen do when you have bluetooth that is flaky as ever, the phone is so thin you sneeze and the screen wants to break, the speaker is terrible which I doubt they have fixed, data corruption issues with SD cards from even Samsung, etc. This list could go on. I paid full price for my S4 so that I could stay on my grandfathered unlimited plans with VZW and about the only good it has done me is save a heap on data charges. I do however have all kinds of issues otherwise that frustrates me so badly that I want to flush the darn thing down a toilet many days. I doubt as I said that Samsung has resolved the problems.
 
Honestly the screen on the S4 is beautiful. No need to go bigger right now. What good however does a screen do when you have bluetooth that is flaky as ever, the phone is so thin you sneeze and the screen wants to break, the speaker is terrible which I doubt they have fixed, data corruption issues with SD cards from even Samsung, etc. This list could go on. I paid full price for my S4 so that I could stay on my grandfathered unlimited plans with VZW and about the only good it has done me is save a heap on data charges. I do however have all kinds of issues otherwise that frustrates me so badly that I want to flush the darn thing down a toilet many days. I doubt as I said that Samsung has resolved the problems.
I had S4 and none of your problems.
 
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