Dr. Ray Soneira over at DisplayMate Labs is at it again. You may remember his controversial comments found in these pages, on LCD motion blur where he concluded there was no "notable difference" between top of the line (120Hz) LCD TV models and standard (60Hz) refresh sets - both handle full motion video equally well. (See Oct 27, 2009 Display Daily for more details.)

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

Now the discriminating eye of Dr. Soneira has turned toward smaller displays, this time the notable iPhone LCD (3Gs model) and a new OLED display found in the Nexus One Android based phone. The "Display Showdown Part III" covers these two displays in the popular applications with some surprising results that published last week.

First, the scorecard that ranked by points (win/loss) per display category:

iPhone 3Gs - 12 points
Nexus One - 7 points

Yep, good old LCD beat out OLED, the Cinderella display technology by almost two to one given Soneira’s strict scientific measurements… but that’s just the beginning of the story.

The display specifications are a good place to gain an understanding of what’s going on here. For example, even though the OLED display has a higher display resolution (840 x 480 pixels vs. the iPhone’s 480 x 320) the Nexus One lost points on its limited 16-bit color depth (vs. the 18-bit Apple that dithers to mimic 24-bit.) Also, the measured peak brightness of the OLED (229 cd/m2) was almost half of the iPhone’s (428 cd/m2.) Other areas of the iPhone’s improved image quality over the Nexus One’s OLED were in color accuracy, apparently due to the use of dynamic color and contrast control in the Nexus One. Finally, the LCD scored better in high ambient light contrast (47:1 for iPhone versus 15:1 for the Nexus One.)

Not surprisingly, the Nexus One OLED did pick up points in black level brightness, where "blacks were absolute black" according to Soneira, measured at 0.0035 cd/m2, versus the iPhone’s "dark grey" measuring 3.1 cd/m2 in black state. Low ambient light contrast ratio was 65K:1 compared to the relatively low 138:1 measured contrast ratio for the iPhone 3Gs.

But there is much more going on here than just measured specs. As Soneira points out, the Nexus One OLED display "…looks like a prototype…loaded with lots of rough edges, hasty unfinished beta display drivers, …poorly implemented image processing, poor system integration together with sub-standard factory display calibration."

Soneira concludes, "It really looks and behaves like a prototype for a very nice future display, not a finished production display for a world class mobile device that Google markets it to be. It will be interesting to see the degree to which existing units will be corrected and improved with software updates."

What we think really happened here is that the pressures of time to market may have caught up with the display engineering team over at Nexus One-with an eye toward rushing to launch, putting the fix/bug list off until version 2.0. Still, some of these comments are pretty hard to reconcile, even though matching this newly minted smart phone against the iPhone manufacturing juggernaut seems a bit unfair. But life is that way, and if you want to compete with Apple, you can’t go half way. Ultimately, we think this team will get it right as we look forward to the next display shoot-out installment. - Steve Sechrist

Ed. Note: Look for an expanded version of this story complete with the full details on test procedures and results in the March Issue of Mobile Display Report