Dubai: Apple’s iPhone 5 may draw the frenzied crowds and overnight campers, but it’s Samsung’s Galaxy S III that has the better display, according to an industry expert.
“The Galaxy S III’s screen is thinner and features a better colour gamut than its main rival,” said Vinita Jakhanwal, director for small and medium displays, IHS iSuppli.
Despite the iPhone 5 featuring a four-inch display — a clear improvement over the smaller iPhone 4S screen — the Samsung Galaxy S III boasts better overall specs for its screen.
“Such improvements on the iPhone 5 are consistent with Apple’s philosophy of selecting features designed to yield profitable products that deliver a superior customer experience, rather than of providing technology for technology’s sake,” said Jakhanwal.
She said the differences in the two displays are fairly subtle and might not matter to users. He said Apple chose features in the overall iPhone 5, as it has with other products, that are designed to yield profits and “deliver a superior customer experience, rather than of providing technology for technology’s sake.”
She revealed that the iPhone 5’s display is 1.5 mm thick (1/16th of an inch), while the Galaxy S III is 1.1 mm (3/64 of an inch). Also, the iPhone 5 displays 72 per cent of the colours in the NTSC (National Television System Committee) standard, while the Galaxy S III reaches 100 per cent of those colours.
Overall, the iPhone 5 is actually thinner by 1 millimetre than the Galaxy S III, which IHS said was most likely due to a fatter Galaxy S III battery.
Apple used in-cell technology in its LCD display in the iPhone 5, which eliminates the standalone touch panel layers used in the iPhone 4S and makes the iPhone 5 18 per cent thinner.
The in-cell technology eliminates the separate touch overlay layer, which allows more light to be emitted from the display without added refraction and glare, IHS said. As a result, the iPhone 5’s display provides a “more vibrant and crisper image with improved colour saturation than the iPhone 4S.”
The Galaxy S III uses an active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) display, in contrast to the low temperature polysilicon (LTPS) liquid crystal display of the iPhone 5. AMOLEDs don’t use a backlight and potentially have better power efficiency than LCDs, IHS said.
“Some user reviews indicate that colours presented on the Galaxy S III actually can look oversaturated and unrealistic,” Jakhanwal said. “While it may be interesting to compare the display specifications for the two phones, the actual front-of-screen viewing experience could diverge for different users.”
