Best daily deals

Affiliate links on Android Authority may earn us a commission. Learn more.

Samsung Galaxy S9 unseats iPhone X as the best smartphone display, says DisplayMate

Samsung's flagship series reclaims its crown with picture quality and color accuracy ratings.
By
March 1, 2018
The Samsung Galaxy S9.
Galaxy S9
TL;DR
  • DisplayMate awards Samsung Galaxy S9 its “highest ever A+ grade”.
  • Galaxy S9’s 5.8-inch panel the only display to receive “All Green” rating in every category.
  • Topples Apple’s iPhone X to become the highest rated smartphone display, according to DisplayMate‘s criteria.

The Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus are barely a week old, but the plaudits are already coming in thick and fast. Now, DisplayMate has chimed in on the praise by proclaiming that the Galaxy S9’s display is worthy of its “highest ever A+” grade.

The DisplayMate team even go as far as calling the device’s AMOLED panel the “most innovative and high performance smartphone display” it has ever tested, out-matching the reigning iPhone X on multiple fronts and becoming the only display to receive an “All Green” rating in all categories.

Top 9 Samsung Galaxy S9 features
Features

While the Galaxy S9’s 5.8-inch display shares many similarities with the Galaxy S8’s hardware, DisplayMate’s Dr. Raymond M. Soneira found that Samsung Display has managed to tweak its winning formula enough to provide a significant boost in picture quality and color accuracy.

As well as a color accuracy rating of “visually indistinguishable from perfect” across DCI-P3, RGB, and sRGB gamut standards, DisplayMate also highlighted the phone’s high brightness mode that is capable of hitting 1130 nits – 20 percent more than the Galaxy S8, but lower than the Note 8’s maximum output.

In addition, the Galaxy S9 recorded the lowest ever screen reflectance score of just 4.4 percent (compared to the iPhone X’s 4.5 percent) and the smallest color shift of any OLED display, with a negligible white shift of just 1.1 JNCD at 30 degrees.

Samsung’s improved accessibility modes for visually impaired users, support for HDR Premium, and the display’s overall power efficiency (which matched that of the Galaxy S8 and Note 8) also drew praise from the team.

You can read the full report here. We’ll be conducting our own analysis of the Galaxy S9’s display in an in-depth review at a later date, but for now, be sure to check out our first impressions of Samsung’s new flagship(s) here.