Report: Samsung Galaxy Note 9 Screen Is ‘Visually Indistinguishable from Perfect’

In what has become something of a yearly tradition, consulting firm DisplayMate has crowned the new Galaxy Note as the king of display quality. According to the report, the Galaxy Note 9 has record high color accuracy. Displaymate goes so far as to call it “visually indistinguishable from perfect.” That’s just the start — the Note 9 OLED panel is apparently the best at everything.

Samsung has been the leading maker of OLED displays for years, which it markets at Super AMOLED. In the early days, there were obvious issues with OLED technology including blown-out colors, low brightness, and uneven panel quality. The tables turned a few years ago, and now OLED is better than IPS LCD at just about everything. Samsung is still the leading OLED manufacturer for mobile, and its screens are the best. That’s why DisplayMate makes this same basic announcement every year — actually twice yearly if you count the Galaxy S release.

The Note 9’s 6.4-inch OLED screen has the best color calibration of any display on the market. The Note 9 actually has several display modes, each tied to a specific color gamut. For example, the Basic mode is sRGB, and the AMOLED Photo mode is Adobe RGB. DisplayMate measured the color accuracy using the Just Noticeable Color Difference (JNCD) system. Anything under an error rate of “3” is visually indistinguishable from perfect in most situation. When two colors are touching, a rating of “1” or less is necessary to ensure perfection. The Note 9 scored a JNCD of 0.5, so it’s effectively perfect.

The display brightness has also improved this year. Phones with poor brightness might still look alright inside, but you can’t read them outdoors. The Note 9 improves on the Note 8’s brightness by 26 percent with a maximum output of 825 nits. That’s one of the brightest panels on any phone. LG can hit 1,000 nits on the G7’s LCD, but it lacks in most other areas compared with the Note 9’s OLED.

DisplayMate also cites a number of other record-setting stats for the Note 9 display including the lowest reflectance (4.4 percent), the highest contrast in ambient light (239), and smallest color variation at off-angles (27 percent at 30 degrees).

Displaymate is focused on the quantifiable aspects of display technology. So, maybe these numbers don’t mean a lot to smartphone buyers. Any way you slice it, this is a killer mobile display. People will notice that even if they don’t know what a color gamut is.