Samsung Galaxy S10 OLED Display Takes The Crown With Unmatched DisplayMate A+ Rating
We have long felt that Samsung makes some of the best and most vibrant displays in the business, and have been particularly enamored with the Super AMOLED panels that it uses on its flagship phones. If you do not want to just take our word for it, though, check out DisplayMate's evaluation of the Galaxy S10.
DisplayMate is one of the definitive sources of panel testing, and many sites (HotHardware included) use the company's tests when evaluating monitors. Following the launch of the Galaxy S10 series, the company subjected the regular Galaxy S10 to its battery of display benchmarks, which now includes new tests and even tougher grading systems than before.
Even so, the Galaxy S10 receive DisplayMate's highest-ever A+ grade, as it finished every test with a Very Good to Excellent rating.
"The display has Diamond Pixels and Sub-Pixel Rendering with 550 pixels per inch (ppi), providing significantly higher image sharpness than can be resolved with normal 20/20 Vision at the typical viewing distances of 10 inches or more for Smartphones, so the display appears perfectly sharp," DisplayMate notes.
Source: DisplayMate via Samsung
What Samsung calls a Diamond Pixels arrangement can be seen in the image above. DisplayMate notes that the Red, Green, and Blue sub-pixels are sized very differently, with Blue being by far the largest because it has the lowest light emission efficiency. Likewise, Green is the smallest because it has the highest efficiency.
"The alternating Red and Blue sub-pixel arrangement leads to a 45 degree diagonal symmetry in the sub-pixel layout. This allows vertical, horizontal, and particularly diagonal line segments and vectors to be drawn with reduced aliasing and artifacts. In order to maximize the sub-pixel packing and achieve the highest possible pixels per inch (ppi), that leads to diamond rather than square or stripe shaped Red and Blue sub-pixels," DisplayMate says.
However, the Green pixels are oval-shaped because they need to fit between two much bigger and different sized Red and Blue sub-pixels. DisplayMate is enamored by this design, calling it "a form of high-tech display art."
The Galaxy S10 impressed at every turn, setting records in the process. Not only did it achieve the highest A+ grade, it also boatsed the highest full screen brightness for an OLED phone at 804 nits (17 percent higher than the Galaxy S9), and highest peak display brightness at 1,215 nits, which helped it excel with HDR content.
It also achieved DisplayMate's highest Absolute Color Accuracy (visually indistinguishable from perfect) and smallest brightness variation with viewing angle (23 percent at 30 degrees), while setting records in various other categories as well.
This testing obviously reflects well on Samsung and its Galaxy S10 lineup, but also OLED display technology in general.
