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DisplayMate: Apple Watch has ‘excellent’ display, but Ion-X glass bests sapphire in light tests

Screen technology analysis firm DisplayMate, best known for comparing the display performance of phones, tablets, and laptops, today published an extensive report on the screen inside the 42mm Apple Watch. Describing the screen as “excellent,” DisplayMate’s Dr. Raymond Soneira also explained the relative benefits of the Ion-X glass found in the $349+ Apple Watch Sport versus the Sapphire Crystal used in the higher end Apple Watch and Apple Watch Edition models, notably praising the lower end model’s glass as superior across a number of tested categories.

“Apple has done a great job with the OLED display on the Apple Watch,” Soneira says, noting that it’s Apple’s first OLED screen. “It provides very nice, pleasing and accurate colors and picture quality,” including excellent calibration and rescaling of test images, which the company deemed “a very good side-by-side match to the iPhone 6.”

Although Apple hasn’t said much about the Apple Watch screens beyond describing them as Retina caliber, DisplayMate estimates the PPI of the 42mm screen to be between 322 and 326, either identical or nearly identical to the iPhone 6’s screen, with full 24-bit color. However, Soneira notes that “Blue is by far the least power efficient primary drive color” in OLED screens, “so it is desirable to reduce the Blue drive levels whenever possible,” including choosing a less blue white point to conserve display power.

The company noted two key issues with the Watch. First, to reduce power consumption, the screen is turned off in what Soneira describes as a “very annoying” way, while brightness has been reduced in a manner that impacts contrast and color gamut in stronger ambient light. Second, the sapphire crystal used on “premium” Apple Watches almost doubles the ambient light they reflect, creating brighter screen and mirror reflections, color shifting, and reduced contrast, all of which are better with the Apple Watch Sport’s Ion-X glass.

Soneira proposes that upcoming, “specially treated Enhanced Sapphire” will be able to deliver “both high scratch resistance and low Reflectance.” DisplayMate’s full report can be found here.

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Comments

  1. bennynihon - 9 years ago

    one thing that’s worth pointing out is the use of the dark UI on the Apple Watch. While it reduces power consumption it is far harder to read outdoors (a black background makes the glass screen behave like a mirror, while a white background doesn’t suffer from this problem). That’s actually one of the reasons I’ve always preferred an iPhone over and Android phone, as Android tends to use a lot of white text on black backgrounds.

    With that said, I’m not overly concerned and have one pre-ordered anyways

    • duepeak07 - 9 years ago

      That’s a fair point, although I haven’t noticed this to be an issue when outdoors in full sun. I have the sport model and it reads just fine. I think the small screen prevents you from really seeing much of anything in the reflection, you only see portions of objects in the reflection making it easier to just ignore.

    • rnc - 9 years ago

      (a black background makes the glass screen behave like a mirror, while a white background doesn’t suffer from this problem)

      A white background with black letters makes the letters invisible.

    • rogifan - 9 years ago

      If a white background is better how come I have a terrible time using my iPad in the sun? I can’t read a damn thing.

      • bennynihon - 9 years ago

        Better than a black background with white text. Good luck seeing anything but your own face in the sun in that case. Didn’t say it’d be very readable, but better.

      • With OLED each pixel is lighted individually. That is why using a black background cuts power consumption on OLED. Less energy is needed as less pixels are lighted. Meanwhile your ipad has a white back light that is on all the time even under the black pixels. Rather than using that backlight they could light each pixel more on OLED with the same power consumption making it better under the sun.

    • mbalensiefer - 9 years ago

      A dark background produces more MORE power consumption than white. The backlight is always “on” whenever the screen is on–no matter what. The black on top of the backlight is the LCDs being twisted to full “on” position.

      • that’s not true for 2 reasons. 1) it’s not true for any LED display. LED is backlight, and entire back of the image is lit in the same way. Then LCD element is used to obstruct or allow amount of light of required colour. Doesn’t matter if pixel is white or black – it’s using the same amount of energy. With OLED displays in apple watch the pixels themselves lit up. So black pixels use no power (they don’t lit up). While for example white one uses all 3 sub-pixels (Red, Green and Blue). In theory while OLED display is more efficient when there’s a lot of dark component, it’s around 3x more power hungry display white than regular LED panel (because for 1 white pixels it needs to lit up 3 separate ones.

      • mbalensiefer - 9 years ago

        You are correct regarding AMOLEDs:
        http://www.greenbot.com/article/2834583/how-much-power-does-a-black-interface-really-save-on-amoled-displays.html

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOLED#Comparison_to_other_technologies
        one…l OLED display consumed .3 W while showing a black background, but more than .7 W showing a white background (edited)

        For LCDs, though, black-switched crystals use more power than white ones–though the amount is negligible, because in relation to the power needed to run the backlight, we are in the thousandths of percentages.

  2. Toro Volt (@torovolt) - 9 years ago

    Excellent Fascinating report Jeremy. Thanks for posting it.

  3. jeff rybak - 9 years ago

    Interesting to claim the Ion- X bested the sapphire when only one device was tested…

    “We didn’t test the Apple Watch Sport with Ion-X glass”

  4. li4host - 9 years ago

    Thanks for a nice review. Waiting for the ‘Week’ review to decide whether to order or not.
    As well as I have a question: have you tried the watches to work as a smart alarm to wake you in the morning? I know that they are supposed to be charging during night, but in case if I charge them before going to bed.
    Thanks!

    • Lewis Smith - 9 years ago

      I have one of the watches now, there’s no built in functionality for using it as a smart alarm, and at least for now it’s not an option for 3rd party apps as they don’t have access to the sensors.

  5. varera (@real_varera) - 9 years ago

    the report is not publicly available :-/