My iPhone 7 screen (and photos I take with the improved camera) does look noticeably sharper and brighter than my iPhone 6 screen. Hard to know how much of this is real versus my mind making it true.
Which perfectly illustrates the point that a 'perfect' screen is only one aspect of a somewhat more complicated picture.
However, i would really like the 4"7 to get Full HD, that is 1920 X 1080, and the 5"5 can get 2K . Basically that's what it would take for me to upgrade from my 6S
What's the point of a 4K ~5" screen anyway? As noted, there are many ways to make a better screen than just packing more pixels in there. Is 4K on a 5" screen really a droid/ Samsung feature? While I do like my 4k TV because I sit quite close. 10 Bit RGB color makes the bigger difference. I basically "can't see" the pixels on my iPhone as it is. Not sure how "MORE PIXELS" makes a better phone anyway except maybe for some one who doesn't know any better, bragging to another friend (who also doesn't know any better) that their phone is measurably superior to another. I don't even waste my disputing it with Droid fans. They go down that road of "well, droid does x better". And I just nod my head and say of course it does.
The only reason Samsung even uses 4k screens is because it uses a Pentile display which does not use full 4k resolution.
So if they made their screens 1080p it would not even be true 1080p
Do they still use Pentile? Anyway, good job Apple, leapfrogging the Note 7 that two weeks earlier the same source (DisplayMate) proclaimed as having "the most innovative and high performance Smartphone display that we have ever tested.... the Best Performing Smartphone Display ever."
In a nutshell all the newer flagships now have darn good and very accurate displays, something that couldn't be said just three years ago.
What's the point of a 4K ~5" screen anyway? As noted, there are many ways to make a better screen than just packing more pixels in there. Is 4K on a 5" screen really a droid/ Samsung feature? While I do like my 4k TV because I sit quite close. 10 Bit RGB color makes the bigger difference. I basically "can't see" the pixels on my iPhone as it is. Not sure how "MORE PIXELS" makes a better phone anyway except maybe for some one who doesn't know any better, bragging to another friend (who also doesn't know any better) that their phone is measurably superior to another. I don't even waste my disputing it with Droid fans. They go down that road of "well, droid does x better". And I just nod my head and say of course it does.
It's so frustrating when droid sheep talk about resolution because it's hard to explain to these morons.
There was an iPhoney user criticizing iPhone 7 because the small version was "still 720p" as if packing more pixels would make a visual difference.
However, i would really like the 4"7 to get Full HD, that is 1920 X 1080, and the 5"5 can get 2K . Basically that's what it would take for me to upgrade from my 6S
WHY? Can you explain? Because adding more pixels will not make a difference. Or do you think your vision will magically improve if Apple packs more pixels in?
P.S. The human eye is more sensitive to color than resolution.
However, i would really like the 4"7 to get Full HD, that is 1920 X 1080, and the 5"5 can get 2K . Basically that's what it would take for me to upgrade from my 6S
So you're saying that you won't upgrade to a visually better display and will use a visually inferior display. Makes sense¡
They need to show some display accuracy of known color values such as Barbie pink, or Klein blue etc. Just saying it is accurate without actual measurements is only subjective.
Who are you talking about? Displymate uses very expensive equipment to measure displays. They have developed the standards for this. If it shows proper calibration, then it will show all colors within that space properly. That's the way this works.
but taking the photos is something different. If the proper lighting isn't used, or the camera isn't properly calibrated, or the monitor used to color correct the images isn't properly calibrated, or the color corrector isn't using the proper color space, well, anything can happen.
All the screen that youre viewing these images images with can do, is to show what the images have to show. The iPhone 7 cameras can shoot DCI-P3 images, a first outside of expensive cinema video equipment. But if your lighting is off, so will be your pictures. You can correct for this using the RAW DNG, but it won't be exact. What we used to do was to use the Macbeth color chart the photogs would shoot before the actual product or models. That would give us a very close idea of what the balance needed to be. But we still needed to show them test prints so that they could affirm that. Sometimes, they would give us a sample of what they shot. But what color lighting is being used for the viewing?
so while an excellent pro level monitor, properly calibrated, will show the correct color and contrast, always, if the light in the viewing area isn't itself a problem, the images may not have that proper color or contrast. Remember this before commenting.
The main place LCD falls down at this point is black levels. Everything else is wonderful. Reflectivity is an issue, but black levels matter more to my use personally.
black levels mean very little in a lit area.
You're saying Apple Watch was designed only to be used in the dark? If lit areas aren't important then why is now, by a wide margin, Apple's brightest display?
black levels does not equal brightness of display
That doesn't even come close to address my questions.
The main place LCD falls down at this point is black levels. Everything else is wonderful. Reflectivity is an issue, but black levels matter more to my use personally.
Well, black levels are relative. Yeah, I know that they can be measured. But think of a movie watched at home. If the lights are on, black levels may look grey. If the lights are off, they look black. That's even though they measure as dark grey. The reason is that we can only see a certain amount of contrast, is that our irises open and close to see what our brain thinks is most important. So most of the time, when looking at an image on my phone, black looks black, because the contrast is causing my irises to close, and the black looks darker than it is. In fact, right now, typing on my iPad Pro, the Preview and Save Draft buttons look perfectly black. The Post Commemt button looks dark grey, they way it's supposed to. I'm sitting in my living room, with a light behind my head.
several years ago, black levels were a problem, but they really haven't been recently. I doubt I'd see a difference here if the iPad had an OLED display. Only in a really dim room would you see a practical difference. But the LCD display is much brighter overall in lighter areas.
anton zuykov said: What made you think "they" didn't measure color accuracy?
Are there any color calibration tools or software for an iPhone? The only way that I would trust is to visually compare known color values to a physical swatch, one swatch at a time. I've been calibrating monitors for prepress for many years and I don't trust calibration instruments.
Well, I've been calibrating pro monitors for years, and taught color management. If you have proper calibration instruments, and know how to use the software properly, you should trust the instruments. The entire commercial industry trusts the instruments, as they should.
in fact, most prepress work uses "soft proofing" and has for years. No more prepress prints. That's gone. We stopped making prepress prints for our clients around 2000. Fuji and Kodak don't even make the materials for them anymore.
apple calibrates their screens pretty well, though the white point has always been too high. From the results I see here, they've fixed that problem. My assumption is that the brighter screen has allowed them to use a real D65 white point. In the "old days", everything was D50, but the only monitors that could be calibrated to that were my Barcos. But at $16,000 a pop, not too many labs used them. That's a price from the mid '90's. They haven't made graphic monitors in a long time. The best monitors today aren't nearly as good, but they are cheap, from about $1,500 to about $6,000.
but yes, there is something, but it's a pain. I used it on my older iPads, before Apple calibrated them to sRGB. But the difference isn't enough to bother with, even for the white point.
Steve Jobs once said that Apple starts from user experience and works back to the technology that makes it happen, instead of starting from the technology and working towards user experience.
If only someone could get Apple to apply that philosophy to the terrible quality of their earbuds.
melgross said: in fact, most prepress work uses "soft proffing" and has for years. No more prepress prints. That's gone. We stopped making prepress prints for our clients around 2000. Fuji and Kodak don't even make the materials for them anymore.
Not sure what you are referring to but obviously no one makes film proofs, but we proof everything using Epson large format ink jet. Without that, the customer cannot sign off on the job. Our rip curves for the proofs are digitally linked to the plate maker and match the Komori presses precisely.
The main place LCD falls down at this point is black levels. Everything else is wonderful. Reflectivity is an issue, but black levels matter more to my use personally.
black levels mean very little in a lit area.
You're saying Apple Watch was designed only to be used in the dark? If lit areas aren't important then why is now, by a wide margin, Apple's brightest display?
What I believe he means, as it's what I said in an earlier post here, is that when light levels get bright, black levels look blacker. So, when outdoors, as long as the screen isn't being washed out by direct sun. The brightness of the screen, which is at its highest level, will make the black level seem darker because of the contrast.
but this really depends on the screen being clean. A lot of smudges will wipe out all of the benefits.
but taking the photos is something different. If the proper lighting isn't used, or the camera isn't properly calibrated, or the monitor used to color correct the images isn't properly calibrated, or the color corrector isn't using the proper color space, well, anything can happen.
I'm not talking about taking photos. I'm saying that we order color swatches from Pantone. Then you create a file in Photoshop with nothing but a rectangle filled with RGB values of 218, 24, 132. Compare it to the color swatch. If it doesn't match then it is not accurate color. Even so we mostly order our ink from Pantone and print using spot color. People who do not understand this do not get Barbie print work.
The main place LCD falls down at this point is black levels. Everything else is wonderful. Reflectivity is an issue, but black levels matter more to my use personally.
black levels mean very little in a lit area.
You're saying Apple Watch was designed only to be used in the dark? If lit areas aren't important then why is now, by a wide margin, Apple's brightest display?
What I believe he means, as it's what I said in an earlier post here, is that when light levels get bright, black levels look blacker. So, when outdoors, as long as the screen isn't being washed out by direct sun. The brightness of the screen, which is at its highest level, will make the black level seem darker because of the contrast.
but this really depends on the screen being clean. A lot of smudges will wipe out all of the benefits.
To me it read that he was saying that OLED is shit and Apple would never consider that technology on the iPhone.
VR and 360 degree cinema. 4K is the minimum you want and even that isn't good enough. The GoPro Odyssey camera can capture 360 stereoscopic 3D footage at 8K per eye. That means to fully view it you'd need a smartphone with a 16K screen!
The main place LCD falls down at this point is black levels. Everything else is wonderful. Reflectivity is an issue, but black levels matter more to my use personally.
black levels mean very little in a lit area.
You're saying Apple Watch was designed only to be used in the dark? If lit areas aren't important then why is now, by a wide margin, Apple's brightest display?
black levels does not equal brightness of display
That doesn't even come close to address my questions.
come on dude.
black levels are not that important if you are using your phone in lit areas. Like in an office or home with lights on, or outside when the sun is up. Since those lights will wash out near true black anyway.
The Watch is made with OLED because OLED is thinner.
OLED is more power efficient, especially if using a dark mode. That's probably of even more importance since the Apple Watch has a pretty small battery. For smallish devices there are a lot of advantages to OLED over LCD.
There are two things I'm unclear about:
1. Why are they conflating resolution and color accuracy? You could have a 4k display and STILL have perfect color accuracy. Having one doesn't negate any possible advantage of the other. Like others have said, I don't see the *point* of 4K on my phone - not that the Samsung display's aren't good looking (they are), but they aren't noticeably better to me either.
2. Why would other manufacturers need to play catch-up? Except for a certain subset of geeks that are excited about display technology (I count myself one), most people could not care less. As long as stuff looks good enough, it is. Nobody is doing professional photo-editing on their iPhone, or using it as a reference monitor. I hope.
Aside from that...go Apple go. I'm very happy with my 6S+ display, and glad to hear that my 7+ will look even "better".
Ok, well I get the confusion. Resolution and color accuracy are two different things. But to understand what is being said, you really need to go to Displaymate's site, and read the review in all of their own words, and look at all the charts.
that being said, I think they mentioned resolution, because a lot of people, including reviewers, writers, and posters keep bringing resolution up. They say that with Apple selling flagship phones, they should provide the same resolution as those of their competitors, most of whom are using OLED displays with Samsung's Pentile arrangement, or other OLED displays with a white sub pixel instead of the second green one Samsung uses. A few writers have an overactive imagination, and think that they can see improvements in sharpness, even though they can't. Because of the extra sub-pixel, these displays need to be about 30% higher in resolution in order to look as sharp as the lower resolution LCD display. So Samsung's 1440p display looks no sharper than Apple's 1080p display on the plus, and it's doubtful that there's much difference to the iPhone 7, with its 750p display on the smaller screen.
i believe that Displaymate brought it up to say that despite Apple using lower resolution, the display looks better because of the highly accurate calibration, and wide band color gamut. It's an acknowledgement that those higher resolutions bring little to the overall viewable quality of the display, but that Apple's color arrangement does.
why does it matter? Why does Adobe RGB 1998 matter? Why does professional cinema use DCI-P3? Because it's better, and the editing possibliities are greater, particularly when combined with the RAW DNG Apple is (finally!) making possible. Do people notice it? Well, standards keep moving upwards. Before the crappy sRGB was invented by Hp and Microsoft in the late '90's for cheap monitors, because before that, no color was ever the same on the web, people were happy with 256 color screens on Windows.
so the same question was asked about sRGB. Did we need it? Would people see, and care, about the difference? Old NTSC had about a million colors as possible. High def uses sRGB as standard with 16.7 million, though the cheap screens on TV sets and cheap monitors can't actually show 16.7 million colors at once, so they're dithered.
but high def has gone to wide color when seen on blue ray, and 4K has an even higher standard. We're seeing HDR, and other additional color improvements. Apple has always been in the middle of professional editing for movies and video, such as Tv shows. The only DCI-P3 monitors that I'm aware of until last year, with Apple adding it to the 27" iMac, were pro cinema monitors from Sony and Panasonic, selling for the high five, and low six figures. Dell just announced a DCI-P3 monitor, though I don't know how good it is.
i strongly believe that at some point, camera makers will add the DCI-P3 standard to their cameras, along with the sRGB and Adobe RGB 1998 they have now. The advantage to this standard is that unlike with the other standards, flesh tones, no matter what color you are, will be better, and that's a major, and good thing.
High def uses sRGB as standard with 16.7 million, though the cheap screens on TV sets and cheap monitors can't actually show 16.7 million colors at once, so they're dithered.
Even the best 4K monitor can only display 8,847,360 colors at once because that is all the pixels they have.
Comments
In a nutshell all the newer flagships now have darn good and very accurate displays, something that couldn't be said just three years ago.
There was an iPhoney user criticizing iPhone 7 because the small version was "still 720p" as if packing more pixels would make a visual difference.
WHY? Can you explain? Because adding more pixels will not make a difference. Or do you think your vision will magically improve if Apple packs more pixels in?
P.S. The human eye is more sensitive to color than resolution.
but taking the photos is something different. If the proper lighting isn't used, or the camera isn't properly calibrated, or the monitor used to color correct the images isn't properly calibrated, or the color corrector isn't using the proper color space, well, anything can happen.
All the screen that youre viewing these images images with can do, is to show what the images have to show. The iPhone 7 cameras can shoot DCI-P3 images, a first outside of expensive cinema video equipment. But if your lighting is off, so will be your pictures. You can correct for this using the RAW DNG, but it won't be exact. What we used to do was to use the Macbeth color chart the photogs would shoot before the actual product or models. That would give us a very close idea of what the balance needed to be. But we still needed to show them test prints so that they could affirm that. Sometimes, they would give us a sample of what they shot. But what color lighting is being used for the viewing?
so while an excellent pro level monitor, properly calibrated, will show the correct color and contrast, always, if the light in the viewing area isn't itself a problem, the images may not have that proper color or contrast. Remember this before commenting.
Well, black levels are relative. Yeah, I know that they can be measured. But think of a movie watched at home. If the lights are on, black levels may look grey. If the lights are off, they look black. That's even though they measure as dark grey. The reason is that we can only see a certain amount of contrast, is that our irises open and close to see what our brain thinks is most important. So most of the time, when looking at an image on my phone, black looks black, because the contrast is causing my irises to close, and the black looks darker than it is. In fact, right now, typing on my iPad Pro, the Preview and Save Draft buttons look perfectly black. The Post Commemt button looks dark grey, they way it's supposed to. I'm sitting in my living room, with a light behind my head.
several years ago, black levels were a problem, but they really haven't been recently. I doubt I'd see a difference here if the iPad had an OLED display. Only in a really dim room would you see a practical difference. But the LCD display is much brighter overall in lighter areas.
Well, I've been calibrating pro monitors for years, and taught color management. If you have proper calibration instruments, and know how to use the software properly, you should trust the instruments. The entire commercial industry trusts the instruments, as they should.
in fact, most prepress work uses "soft proofing" and has for years. No more prepress prints. That's gone. We stopped making prepress prints for our clients around 2000. Fuji and Kodak don't even make the materials for them anymore.
apple calibrates their screens pretty well, though the white point has always been too high. From the results I see here, they've fixed that problem. My assumption is that the brighter screen has allowed them to use a real D65 white point. In the "old days", everything was D50, but the only monitors that could be calibrated to that were my Barcos. But at $16,000 a pop, not too many labs used them. That's a price from the mid '90's. They haven't made graphic monitors in a long time. The best monitors today aren't nearly as good, but they are cheap, from about $1,500 to about $6,000.
but yes, there is something, but it's a pain. I used it on my older iPads, before Apple calibrated them to sRGB. But the difference isn't enough to bother with, even for the white point.
but this really depends on the screen being clean. A lot of smudges will wipe out all of the benefits.
I'm not talking about taking photos. I'm saying that we order color swatches from Pantone. Then you create a file in Photoshop with nothing but a rectangle filled with RGB values of 218, 24, 132. Compare it to the color swatch. If it doesn't match then it is not accurate color. Even so we mostly order our ink from Pantone and print using spot color. People who do not understand this do not get Barbie print work.
that being said, I think they mentioned resolution, because a lot of people, including reviewers, writers, and posters keep bringing resolution up. They say that with Apple selling flagship phones, they should provide the same resolution as those of their competitors, most of whom are using OLED displays with Samsung's Pentile arrangement, or other OLED displays with a white sub pixel instead of the second green one Samsung uses. A few writers have an overactive imagination, and think that they can see improvements in sharpness, even though they can't. Because of the extra sub-pixel, these displays need to be about 30% higher in resolution in order to look as sharp as the lower resolution LCD display. So Samsung's 1440p display looks no sharper than Apple's 1080p display on the plus, and it's doubtful that there's much difference to the iPhone 7, with its 750p display on the smaller screen.
i believe that Displaymate brought it up to say that despite Apple using lower resolution, the display looks better because of the highly accurate calibration, and wide band color gamut. It's an acknowledgement that those higher resolutions bring little to the overall viewable quality of the display, but that Apple's color arrangement does.
why does it matter? Why does Adobe RGB 1998 matter? Why does professional cinema use DCI-P3? Because it's better, and the editing possibliities are greater, particularly when combined with the RAW DNG Apple is (finally!) making possible. Do people notice it? Well, standards keep moving upwards. Before the crappy sRGB was invented by Hp and Microsoft in the late '90's for cheap monitors, because before that, no color was ever the same on the web, people were happy with 256 color screens on Windows.
so the same question was asked about sRGB. Did we need it? Would people see, and care, about the difference? Old NTSC had about a million colors as possible. High def uses sRGB as standard with 16.7 million, though the cheap screens on TV sets and cheap monitors can't actually show 16.7 million colors at once, so they're dithered.
but high def has gone to wide color when seen on blue ray, and 4K has an even higher standard. We're seeing HDR, and other additional color improvements. Apple has always been in the middle of professional editing for movies and video, such as Tv shows. The only DCI-P3 monitors that I'm aware of until last year, with Apple adding it to the 27" iMac, were pro cinema monitors from Sony and Panasonic, selling for the high five, and low six figures. Dell just announced a DCI-P3 monitor, though I don't know how good it is.
i strongly believe that at some point, camera makers will add the DCI-P3 standard to their cameras, along with the sRGB and Adobe RGB 1998 they have now. The advantage to this standard is that unlike with the other standards, flesh tones, no matter what color you are, will be better, and that's a major, and good thing.