It shouldn’t come as any surprise when someone says that this year’s display, or phone, or what have you, is the best ever. After all, improving the category is what companies strive to do, right? So Apple’s claim (on Samsung’s behalf, really) that the new iPad’s display is the “best display ever on a mobile device” isn’t hyperbolic, just confident. DisplayMate’s battery of image quality tests, fortunately, agree with that assessment.
The new display is sharper than any screen its size and has better color representation than most home displays and HDTVs. It’s not perfect, of course, and the iPad is more than just a display (one has to take into account many things when reviewing or purchasing one), but it’s nice to know that the claims of superiority are, in this part of the iPad at least, justified.
Those interested in the details of the report should just go ahead and read it; the take-away is that everything is way better, the color is great, the sharpness is unaccompanied by any problems or effects, and generally things are as good or better than everything else out there. The one big fail seems to be in battery life: at full brightness, the new iPad died almost an hour and a half before the iPad 2. But at medium brightness they were back on par with one another.
As for what’s powering the display: it may not be quite the knockout Apple suggested. A few synthetic benchmarks have suggested that the A5X does indeed excel in graphics performance, but the CPU itself is behind the latest Tegras. It’s difficult to extrapolate from synthetic benchmarks into real-world performance, though, so for now no one should be making a lot of noise about who’s got the fastest gun in the west.
I wrote about the potential benefits of screens of this quality pervading the world of publishing and design. Hopefully the other display makers will catch up with Samsung and offer their high-res displays to the likes of Asus, Motorola, and the rest, and we can stop talking about resolution and color representation and resume talking about content and usability.