If you want a smartphone with the very best screen on the market, turn to Apple's iPhone XS Max.
DisplayMate Technologies, a company that evaluates screen quality, recently took the iPhone XS Max for a spin. And after evaluating its color accuracy, brightness, and other key measures, it determined that Apple's giant, 6.5-inch handset offers the best screen of any smartphone ever released.
In its testing, DisplayMate found that the iPhone XS Max's screen had "top tier display performance" and achieved "very good to excellent ratings" in all but two of the company's measurement categories. DisplayMate found that the screen's color accuracy is 0.8 JNCD (Just Noticeable Color Difference), which suggests that the differences are nearly impossible to see with a human eye and therefore perfect.
DisplayMate went on to say that its screen brightness was excellent, its black color performance "outstanding" and readability in high ambient light, like direct sunlight, an "A+." The screen similarly scored extremely high marks for its contrast performance, and its overall picture quality was outstanding. DisplayMate noted that the screen's full-HD+ resolution of 2688 x 1242 also helped it score high marks.
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In our own iPhone XS Max review, we praised the display for its brightness (over 600 nits) and color accuracy. In side-by-side comparisons with the Galaxy Note 9, some preferred the more realistic hues offered by the iPhone XS Max's panel, but others preferred the more saturated colors of the Note 9, and you can engage different screen modes. However, the iPhone XS Max has a slight edge to our eyes because you can easily get a brighter picture indoors.
"The display has Diamond Sub-Pixels and Sub-Pixel Rendering with 458 pixels per inch, providing significantly higher image sharpness than can be resolved with normal 20/20 Vision at the typical viewing distances of 12 inches or more for Smartphones, so the display appears perfectly sharp," DisplayMate said. "As a result, for Smartphones it is absolutely pointless to further increase the display resolution and pixels per inch up to 4K (3940x2160 pixels) for a silly marketing wild goose chase into the stratosphere, with no visual benefit for humans!"
Ultimately, DisplayMate awarded the iPhone XS Max's screen a score of A+ and said that it's the best smartphone display on the market. Better yet for Apple, its display performed "considerably better" than any other competing device, including Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 and last year's iPhone X.
