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The Samsung Galaxy S5's screen turned out so controversial when the phone came out last month, that fans were instantly split between those who held that it's the best mobile screen ever, and those who believed that the screen was good, but could be a lot better. We ended up in the latter group, and while we've explained our reasons time and time again, we think this topic deserves one final and conclusive post, just to make things extra clear.
We know some readers like to point at a fairly popular source of screen analysis, who recently claimed that the GS5 has the most accurate phone screen ever. Shortly afterwards, numerous reports, including ours, stated the opposite. In short - no, the Galaxy S5 does not have the most accurate screen, and it's actually very far from that. Here's why...
The GS5 offers you a number of 'screen modes', which tweak the color reproduction characteristics of its Super AMOLED screen. We've measured them all (using gear and software designed for this purpose), and have concluded that none of its screen modes offer image that could be considered accurate or true-to-life. Note that all of our measurements have been made at 200 nits, but we've also made sure to check if things don't get better if we crank the brightness all the way up - they don't.
Color temperature
The default mode of the GS5's display is 'Standard mode', and it has a very high color temperature of about 8100 K. With the reference point for screen color temperature being 6500 K, this means that the Samsung Galaxy S5 will display colors that are decidedly bluish (cold). This is so, because the blue color, reproduced by the display, has a higher intensity than the other main colors - red and green. Meanwhile, handsets equipped with quality IPS LCD screens exhibit color temp that's much closer to the standard, often gravitating around the 7000 K mark. If you set the Galaxy S5 to the so-called Cinema mode, its color temperature gets considerably better at around 7300 K, but there's still a lot of red color lacking, making for visuals that we'd describe as 'lifeless'.
In the series of greyscale charts right below, you can easily see how the color temperature of the Galaxy S5's different screen modes differs from the reference one. In the fifth image, you'll see the Nexus 5's greyscale - we've put the measurements of its IPS LCD display for reference. Obviously, the measured levels of grey in the Nexus 5's image are much closer to the reference ones than any of the Galaxy S5's.
Standard mode - the white balance has a decidedly bluish tint
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Delta E
Another component is Delta E, which represents the average amount of 'color error' exhibited by the display in question. This is another area where it gets obvious that there's quite a bit of room for improvement for Samsung's Super AMOLED screens. In short, Delta E values have to be as low as possible to indicate a more color-accurate display. It's believed that Delta E values below 2 basically mean a level of color inaccuracy that's pretty much undetectable by the human eye. For the Galaxy S5 in Standard mode, these figures stand at 5.08 (when measuring the three primary plus three secondary colors (red, green, blue + cyan, magenta, yellow)), and 7.38 when measuring a grayscale (depends on the balance between the three primary colors). These numbers are quite high, when you take into account the significantly lower Delta E values of IPS LCD handsets like the iPhone 5s or One (M8). For the 5s, these same numbers stand at 3.36 and 2.66, and for the M8, they are 4.33 and 4.82. In the greyscale Delta E measurement, the Galaxy S5's 7.38 value is so high, because the measurement is detecting a massive imbalance between the primary colors - blue and green are much more intensive than red.
Switching to the overly-hyped Cinema mode, things get slightly better on paper (Delta E greyscale of 5.86). because all colors get desaturated a bit, pulling them closer towards the reference values. Still, this doesn't really cut it here, because it all just makes for an undersaturated red, as well as blue and green colors that are still beyond the desired intensity. So, yeah, things start looking a bit better on paper, but in reality, the picture that comes out appears dull and mostly greenish.
Keep in mind that the following color charts are designed to show how big the differences are between the measured and reference colors, and not to depict how any of these colors should actually look in reality.
Standard mode
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In the following images, we're comparing the color reproduction of the Galaxy S5 to that of the Nexus 5, which we've chosen for a reference display. The Nexus 5 has a way more accurate display and better color balance. Take a look at the visual differences below!
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