Away from imaging, the iPhone 12 Pro Max wins on the display front

Published by at

Having already tested the iPhone 12 Pro Max's camera and found its image processing wanting (I'll return to this when iOS 14.3 hits, with ProRAW imaging finesse), I did wanted to acknowledge the immense quality of the phone's display. When taking test photos out and about, the 12 Pro Max's display is the clearest of any phone I've ever tested. It goes to 1200 nits in the sun and with incredible clarity and colour accuracy. So this Flow 'link-of-interest' is to DisplayMate, which tests every phone display and reports back. And it seems that the 12 Pro Max has been setting 'display performance records' there. See below. I'm not surprised.

From the (rather appallingly formatted) DisplayMate page:

The iPhone 12 Pro Max sets or matches 11 Smartphone Display Performance Records for:

The iPhone 12 Pro Max earns our Highest A+ Display Performance Assessment Rating

With consumers now spending rapidly increasing amounts of time watching content on their Smartphones, the shift in emphasis from primarily improving Display Hardware Performance to enhancing the overall display Picture Quality and Color Accuracy is an important step that DisplayMate Technologies has been pushing for many years in our Display Technology Shoot-Out article series, so it is great to see manufacturers improving and then competing on these DisplayMate Objective Lab Measurement Metrics.

Apple has concentrated on significantly raising the on-screen Absolute Picture Quality and Absolute Color Accuracy of the OLED display by implementing Precision Factory Display Calibration, moving the overall iPhone 12 Pro Max Display Performance up to Record Setting Outstanding Levels with close to Text Book Perfect Calibration Accuracy that is Visually Indistinguishable From Perfect.

Note that all the blue text is just... blue. And not hyperlinked. Bizarre, DisplayMate! 

But I can endorse their conclusions, the new iPhone screens are something special - and last year's were excellent too. I did enjoy DisplayMate's comments about 'clueless reviewers' raving about phones with 4K screens - they point out that, even at 6.7" here, going much beyond 1080p is essentially pointless since the human eye can't tell any difference. 

(This being cross-posted to AAWP, note that the Lumia 950 was QHD (1440p) at 5.2", which was already completely unnecessary. Interestingly, in the Android world, Samsung provides a setting whereby users can downgrade its QHD displays to 1080p to save processor and battery resources. It would have been nice to have such a setting on the Lumias.)

iPhone 12 Pro Max

Source / Credit: DisplayMate