It’s pretty clear by now that Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 5 and Samsung’s (005930) Galaxy S III will be the two biggest smartphone launches in 2012, with each device selling tens of millions of units by the end of the year. But in terms of the devices’ displays, a new analysis from the image quality experts at DisplayMate shows that Apple still has the edge when it comes to developing clear smartphone displays that deliver the highest-quality images and videos.
Neither the iPhone 5 nor the Galaxy S III has a “bad display,” of course, it’s just that DisplayMate found Apple’s display to be better. The reason is that Samsung decided to go with its own in-house OLED display technology that DisplayMate says “has not yet been refined to the same degree as LCDs, particularly the IPS LCDs on the iPhones, so it doesn’t objectively test or perform as well as the iPhone 5.”
Among other things, DisplayMate found that the Galaxy S III display had a brightness that was “about half of the iPhone 5 due to power limits from the lower power efficiency of OLEDs” and a color gamut that “leads to distorted and exaggerated colors… which adds a Green color caste to many images.”
DisplayMate’s advice to Samsung is to keep refining OLED technology and to consider using a smaller display in the future to avoid power consumption issues that have hurt display quality in the Galaxy S III. And of course, DisplayMate says Samsung should recalibrate the display’s color gamut to avoid giving all images too much of a greenish tint.