Best of Android 2015: Display

We’re always asked which is the best smartphone on the market and which is the one to buy right now. To kick off our Best of Android 2015 series we are going to delve right on into every smartphone’s big upfront piece of tech – its display.

Our test subjects are (in no particular order) the Nexus 6P, Moto X Force, BlackBerry Priv, Xperia Z5 Premium, LG V10 and the Galaxy Note 5. This not only gives us a good look at how Sony’s 4K display stacks up against the QHD resolution that has become the norm in this year’s flagships, but also how the latest and greatest AMOLED panels fare against LCD.

Before we delve into all of the results, a quick word about our test. We paired up an X-rite’s i1 Display Pro spectrophotometer up with with CalMAN’s ColorChecker software and the MobileForge companion app, which is used to wirelessly sync up the test images between the phone and our PC software. We set the phone to our desired brightness for each test, attached the i1 Display Pro to the middle of the display, made sure that it was flush to the screen, and then ran the software.

As well as giving us luminance levels and a gamut plot, the software checks the colors produced by the display against an idealised set and gives us an error value (where 0 is perfect). We looked at the basic pure colors used in the reproduction of all other shades; red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow; along with white, to build a profile of how accurate each display is.

Display Luminance

To start with, we ramped up each phone to full brightness and measured a white light output with the i1 Display Pro. A higher peak brightness is very useful when trying to use your smartphone in bright sunlight, but this comes at the expense of additional battery drain.

The Xperia Z5 Premium is by far the brightest display with a whopping 629 nits, followed by the BlackBerry Priv at 527 nits and the Note 5 with 493 nits. The Moto X Force and the Nexus 6P are a fair bit darker at their peak settings, managing just 385 and 397 nits respectively.

We also thought that it would be interesting to see how each display adjusts between its minimum and maximum settings, to see if the 50 percent phone setting is actually half as bright as the maximum option.

What’s interesting about this result is that the AMOLED smartphones all exhibit pretty much straight lines, so your software brightness setting very closely follows the actual output. The LG V10 and Xperia Z5 Premium both opt for a curved setting, with very little change between 0 and 25 percent, but a much larger swing in the last 25 percent.

The Xperia Z5 Premium, the brightest phone, is actually one of the dimmest until you reach around the 85 percent setting on the handset. It’s the BlackBerry Priv that is actually by far the brightest display on average and the phone should make it easier to find the ideal manual brightness setting for your environment thanks to its linear adjustment.