Much has been said about the Samsung Galaxy S4. Many things might have been said out of too much excitement or other factors could have been involved. However, few professional reviews actually put the emphasis on what really matters. DisplayMate, one of the heavier names in the screen review business, actually put out their opinion of the screen. While this screen is great, it’s not perfect and it has a long way to go if it wants to get there. A factor that should be taken into consideration is also the over saturation of colors that Samsung implements in their AMOLED screens. While from an objective point of view, it’s wrong and something to be avoided, from a subjective point of view, people seem to like it and are also in favor of it. After all, there’s nothing wrong with colors looking, well, colorful and vibrant.
Getting down to it, the 5 inch 1080p display has a 441 ppi pixel density. Since it is a PenTile Matrix, the density for subpixels of different color is different. There are as many Green subpixels as there are Red and Blue ones combined. Even that considered, the 312 Red and Blue subpixels per inch are almost enough to match the 326 ppi Retina display of the iPhone 5.
As far as color accuracy is concerned, the AMOLEDs are notorious for their over saturation, as I previously stated. However, if you’re a lunatic for COLOR CORRECTNESS, the phone offers multiple screen modes. On one side, there is the Movie mode which seems to be the most accurate ( it’s quite close to the sRGB/Rec.709 spec), but it still has a bit of over saturation as far as Green is concerned. The Professional Photo mode is fairly close to the Adobe RGB standard.
As far as brightness goes, if you leave the phone in Auto mode, the screen can go to as much as 34% more than the maximum manual mode. That adds up to 68% brighter than the maximum of the Galaxy S3 ( the S4 in manual is 25% brighter than its predecessor ). All this has been achieved while improving power efficiency ( believe it or not ). DisplayMate says that fi the S3 and S4 screens were the same size and set at the same brightness, the S4 will use 20% less power. Also, looking at it from an angle, the screen of the S4 experiences less brightness decrease than the S3 and the iPhone. Also, the screen of the S4 is a bit less reflective than the iPhone’s.
Compared to the iPhone 5’s screen, the S4’s screen is bigger, has a higher resolution, has deeper blacks and a better screen uniformity, where as the iPhone 5 is brighter, a bit more power-efficient and has more accurate colors ( if you care for such things ). Comparing the S4 screen to that of the Galaxy S3 really gives you a reason to upgrade. There is up to 68% more brightness and up to 44% more pixel density. Let us not forget about the better power-efficiency and color accuracy as well.
