Galaxy S4 Display Technology Shoot-Out

Introduction
The Samsung Galaxy S Smartphones are by far the most popular Android Smartphones and are flagship products for Samsung to show off its latest and greatest OLED display technology. The display on the Galaxy S4 is a major enhancement and improvement over the Galaxy S III – it has a full HD 1920x1080 resolution display with 441 Pixels Per Inch. It is also better calibrated, brighter, and bigger. We’ll analyze the Galaxy S4 with an in-depth objective series of Lab tests and measurements included below.

Samsung provided DisplayMate Technologies with an early production unit to test and analyze for our Display Technology Shoot-Out article series. It is likely that the retail units will have additional display firmware and software tweaks and improvements over our test unit. If that is the case, we will update the article when our unit is upgraded by Samsung.

OLED Displays
While most mobile displays are still LCD based, OLEDs have been capturing a rapidly increasing share of the mobile display market. The technology is still very new, with the Google Nexus One Smartphone, launched in January 2010, as the first OLED display product that received widespread notoriety. In a span of just a few years this new display technology has improved at a very impressive rate, now challenging the performance of the best LCDs. Virtually all of the OLED displays used in mobile devices are produced by Samsung Display. We have provided an in-depth analysis on the evolution of OLEDs in our Galaxy S I, S II, and S III Display Technology Shoot-Out article.

The Shoot-Out
To examine the performance of the Samsung Galaxy S4 we ran our in-depth series of Mobile Display Technology Shoot-Out Lab tests and include the Galaxy S III in order to determine how OLED displays have improved, and the iPhone 5 to determine how it compares to a leading high-end LCD display. We take display quality very seriously and provide in-depth objective analysis side-by-side comparisons based on detailed laboratory measurements and extensive viewing tests with both test patterns and test images. To see how far Smartphones have progressed in just three years see our 2010 Smartphone Display Shoot-Out, and for a real history lesson see our original 2006 Smartphone Display Shoot-Out.

http://www.displaymate.com/Galaxy_S4_ShootOut_1.htm