Today we will be kicking off a new category on SamMobile: Screen Measurements. This will allow you, our readers, to get a detailed overview of what Samsung's smartphone displays are capable of. We all know that Samsung's AMOLED displays are among the best (or the best, depending on who you ask) screens in the industry. With our screen measurements, we will find out how good they are actually are.
Before we start, you can check out what all the measurement graphs mean by taking a look here. SamMobile uses the Calman 5 Ultimate and a i1Display Pro colorimeter, while the brightness is measured with Supercurio's Spectra Study.
We started by measuring the screens in Adaptive and Basic screen modes. Adaptive is what the phone comes with out of the box, and the Basic screen mode is the one that usually presents the most accurate colors. The Galaxy A8 uses a 5.7-inch Full HD display, with a pixel density of around 389 ppi. The screen uses a PenTile diamond pixel layout, which you can see in the picture below.
First of all, the screen has a maximum brightness of around 380 cd/m2 (nits) in manual brightness setting, and 590 cd/m2 in auto brightness. At the most dim setting, the screen can go as low as 19 cd/m2 in auto brightness mode, and as low as 2 cd/m2 in manual brightness.
What this means is that this is an excellent screen for this type of phone, and you can read the display easily in bright sunlight and not strain your eyes in dark conditions. The Note 5 and Galaxy S6 family provide more clarity, but the Galaxy A8 will satisfy most users. Now, on to the graphs.
Adaptive Display
If we take a look at the screen in its default mode, we see that the primary and secondary colors miss their target in the sRGB colorspace, meaning all colors are oversaturated. It's Samsung way of making the screen look better because of the popping and vibrant colors, but the colors aren't displayed correctly according to these measurements. The margin of the displayed primary and secondary colors isn't that good, with a Delta E error of 6.254 being too high and the margin of error of the Grayscale color error not being too great either at 4.4.
With 6509 being the sweet spot, the screen's color temperature of 7293 is too high which means it's too cold. RGB balance isn't that great either; as you can see in the charts above, it boosts blue a bit too much over other colors. This happens most in the lighter color range, something that is done to make the whites appear closer to actual white. What does look good is the screen's contrast ratio, which we can conclude that it is unmeasurable.
Basic mode
We aren’t a fan of the Adaptive mode, but luckily we have the option to change it. In Basic mode, the screen is way better calibrated, though the display could look a bit dull when you set it to Basic mode for the first time. In the sRGB color space it scores great as it hits most of the targets; it’s a similar story in grayscale, although it boosts red a little too much (the screen could look a tad yellowish compared to Adaptive or other screen modes.) The margin of color error in Grayscale of 1.5 Delta E is just excellent and the display of primary and secondary colors is fine, with an average deviation of Delta E of 1.4.
AMOLED Photo
Like we said before, the colors of the basic screen mode could look a little dull, so we suggest you use the AMOLED Photo mode instead, which has almost the same accuracy as the Basic mode but boosts saturation just a bit to make things look more vibrant.
Conclusion
The Galaxy A8 is rocking one fine piece of screen technology. It can get very dim and very bright, and in basic mode the colors are almost perfect. In adaptive mode the screen is way oversaturated to make colors pop, something we are used to from Samsung devices. AMOLED Photo is the sweet spot if you want vibrant colors and accurate ones at the same time, hitting the sweet spot between the two.
(A thank you to Ray for our custom made workflow and SuperCurio for his use of SpectraStudy.)
