- Oct 4, 2012
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It’s a diamond but Apple’s doing a lot of stuff no other vendor has done with OLED before. Waiting to hit it with my loupe. https://t.co/TUESjuMFAA
— Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) September 17, 2017
Rene suggests there's more Apple has done here, but on further digging it sounds like he's backing off of any major OLED customizations and more talking about their general good calibration
Samsung OLED is Samsung OLED But there’s tons Apple can do, and did do, to make the X display.
— Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) September 23, 2017
Presented as it is for whatever it's worth. As a reminder, a diamond matrix pentile screen means that of the iPhone X's 450PPI, the red and blue colour channels actually have 2/3rds of that, ending up at resolving power closer to the base 8, rather than 400PPI Plus. The green channel, where people can see more detail with our eyeballs, does have the advertised resolution. Pentile also has nonlinear arrangement problems.
Since the diamond matrix is beyond question, I think we'll see that the Plus, not the X, is still the sharpest iPhone screen around, though there's obvious OLED benefits to contrast ratio.
Personally I'm on an iPhone 7 and I can easily see that things aren't perfectly sharp in any fine text or icon with a curve, even every homescreen icon, so 2 out of 3 channels having the resolving power of the 6-8 rather than the Pluses is a bit of a letdown. So in end sharpness, it'll be a bit above the base iPhone, but closer to that and still below the Plus which is noticeably better than the base.
So why wasn't anyone complaining with the Note 8? Well, that has a 520ppi screen, that still lands it above the regular iPhone on its worst colour channels, while being well above on its best. So Pentile isn't inherantly bad, but pentile plus 450ppi is looking suspect so far.
Of course, when it launches, 99% of people will think it looks great. 99% of people don't seem to notice the jaggies on the base iPhone either. That's fine. Just putting this here for those who care.
— Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) September 17, 2017
Rene suggests there's more Apple has done here, but on further digging it sounds like he's backing off of any major OLED customizations and more talking about their general good calibration
Samsung OLED is Samsung OLED But there’s tons Apple can do, and did do, to make the X display.
— Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) September 23, 2017
Presented as it is for whatever it's worth. As a reminder, a diamond matrix pentile screen means that of the iPhone X's 450PPI, the red and blue colour channels actually have 2/3rds of that, ending up at resolving power closer to the base 8, rather than 400PPI Plus. The green channel, where people can see more detail with our eyeballs, does have the advertised resolution. Pentile also has nonlinear arrangement problems.
Since the diamond matrix is beyond question, I think we'll see that the Plus, not the X, is still the sharpest iPhone screen around, though there's obvious OLED benefits to contrast ratio.
Personally I'm on an iPhone 7 and I can easily see that things aren't perfectly sharp in any fine text or icon with a curve, even every homescreen icon, so 2 out of 3 channels having the resolving power of the 6-8 rather than the Pluses is a bit of a letdown. So in end sharpness, it'll be a bit above the base iPhone, but closer to that and still below the Plus which is noticeably better than the base.
So why wasn't anyone complaining with the Note 8? Well, that has a 520ppi screen, that still lands it above the regular iPhone on its worst colour channels, while being well above on its best. So Pentile isn't inherantly bad, but pentile plus 450ppi is looking suspect so far.
Of course, when it launches, 99% of people will think it looks great. 99% of people don't seem to notice the jaggies on the base iPhone either. That's fine. Just putting this here for those who care.

