Display Performance
A mobile device’s display serves as its primary interface—the front is basically all screen—and, over the course of a day, we can spend many hours staring at it in lighting conditions varying from a pitch-black room to bright sunlight outdoors. Because display quality so profoundly impacts our mobile experience, we thoroughly scrutinize its performance.
For display measurements, we use a SpectraCal C6 colorimeter, which measures color and luminance accurately and works equally well with LCD or OLED screens. The C6 is calibrated by SpectraCal with a Konica Minolta CS-2000 and comes with a NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) certificate of accuracy. Even though sealed designs like the C6 are more stable than designs whose color filters are exposed to air, the accuracy of all colorimeters can drift over time. Therefore, our C6 hardware gets calibrated as required.
In conjunction with the C6 colorimeter, we use SpectraCal's CalMAN Ultimate for Business v5 software, which allows us to create custom workflows and provides us with a wealth of measurement options. The CalMAN software also makes the nice looking graphs you see in our reviews.
The C6 is placed at the center of a thoroughly cleaned screen during testing. The display testing patterns are controlled manually or by the CalMAN software working together with SpectraCal’s MobileForge app.