DisplayMate: iPhone 12 Pro Max has the best smartphone display despite having a 60Hz refresh rate

DisplayMate has published its review of the iPhone 12 Pro Max‘s display after running Apple’s largest smartphone through its detailed testing process. This year’s top-of-the-line iPhone has garnered DisplayMate’s highest performance grade A+ rating and earned its “Best Smartphone Display Award”.

In case you haven’t heard, the iPhone 12 Pro Max is the largest iPhone ever with a 6.7″ Super Retina XDR display that features a 2778 x 1284 pixel resolution. Apart from that, it has a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio with a peak brightness of 800 nits. When viewing HDR content, the brightness is raised up to 1,200 nits.

DisplayMate said the iPhone 12 Pro Max has gone beyond last year’s iPhone 11 Pro in terms of achievements, as it has matched or set 11 smartphone display performance records. For context, the iPhone 11 Pro matched or set 9 display performance records last year. Looking even further back, the iPhone XS Max in 2018 did the same for 8 records.

These are the smartphone display records that DisplayMate said the iPhone 12 Pro Max set or matched:

· Highest   Absolute Color Accuracy

· Highest   Image Contrast Accuracy and Intensity Scale Accuracy  

· Smallest  Shift in Color Accuracy and Intensity Scale with the Image Content APL 

· Smallest  Shift in Image Contrast and Intensity Scale with the Image Content APL 

· Smallest  Change in Peak Luminance with the Image Content Average Picture Level APL 

· Highest   Full Screen Brightness for OLED Smartphones 

· Highest   Full Screen Contrast Rating in Ambient Light 

· Highest   Contrast Ratio 

· Lowest    Screen Reflectance 

· Smallest  Brightness Variation with Viewing Angle 

· Highest   Visible Screen Resolution 

One of the interesting points DisplayMate brought up during its test was the fact that the iPhone 12 line up only features 60Hz displays instead of an upgraded 120Hz one like on the iPad Pro. They concluded that 60Hz displays are fine for most applications.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max display has the standard 60 Hz Refresh Rate, rather than the higher 90 Hz and 120 Hz Refresh Rates now being introduced. With the very fast Response Time of the OLED display, and the very fast CPU and GPU processors on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, the lower 60 Hz Refresh Rate should be fine for most applications.

Another point worth highlighting was how DisplayMate found that iPhone 12 Max Pro’s display’s colour accuracy is “very likely considerably better than any mobile display, monitor, TV or UHD TV that you have.” They also found that the phone’s Super Dim Setting and Dark Mode helped reduce eye strain when viewing it in dark situations.

If you are interested in finding out more about the methodology DisplayMate used to test the new iPhone’s display, you can check out the full report here.

[SOURCE]

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