Study Shows iPhone Display Is Superior To Nexus One’s

When Google launched Nexus One, it was touted to be a Superphone – a handset with apparently better features than what was seen on the smartphones. Disregarding the actual sale numbers, the debate over whether or not Google had launched an iPhone killer has continued among consumers.

One feature where the Nexus One appeared to have bettered the iPhone was in its OLED display which was without doubt brighter and had a higher resolution than iPhone’s LCD screen.

However, a recent study conducted by DisplayMate technologies, which intricately looked into the quality of the two displays throws light on some attributes that show how the iPhone’s display could actually be better than Nexus One’s.

Here are some points made by the study:

• Nexus One uses a PenTile sub-pixel layout that is used to improve brightness and pixel density. However, the layout is programmed to “share” the blue and red sub-pixels when necessary and this can cause the display to be greyed out in some areas. Readers who have used a Nexus One might have noticed “dotty” images not quite seen on iPhones

• The 18-bit color with dithering on iPhone helps the display to output smooth color gradients. On the other hand, the 16-bit color on Nexus One could result in banding as seen in the image below

• The scaling mechanism used to fit images on Nexus One’s 800×480 screen is said to be still in the primitive stages, which seems to affect the image quality and text readability. Also, with OLED technology still in the nascent stages, calibration standards have not been rightly set. The study claims that “if the Nexus One display were an LCD it would rank among the worst displays we have ever seen in a shipping product”

While it should be noted that most of the customers would not mind these minor aberrations with Nexus One’s display, the study is still a testament to the superior display that we have experienced on the iPhone. What are your thoughts?

[via MobileCrunch]

Tags: color gradients, Google, image quality, iphone, MobileCrunch, nexus, smartphones, text readability