Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S7 Edge was one of the most anticipated Android smartphones of the year and when the South Korean maker unveiled the device, one of the aspects that got everybody’s attention the most was the gorgeous and bright Super AMOLED screen with curved edges on both sides and a stunning resolution of 1440 x 2560 pixels or Quad HD (QHD). Samsung is known for putting really good display panels on their phones and with the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge it couldn’t be different. On paper, the 5.5-inch screen has great specs, especially with a pixel density of around 534 pixels per inch (ppi), but what about a more technical analysis to see how well the display performs on a deep test inside its roots? SamMobile, which specializes in Samsung products, have just released their analysis of the Galaxy S7 Edge display and here are the most important aspects of their test.
The first thing to notice is how bright the screen is. You can adjust the brightness manually and by doing so you will get a maximum brightness of 306 nits (measuring unit). Things get really interesting in automatic mode as the screen can reach a maximum brightness of 714.56 nits, meaning you will probably be able to read the display even with intense sunlight. So you can have a parameter for comparison, the Galaxy S6 has a maximum brightness of 563 nits while the Galaxy Note 5 has 470 and the Nexus 6P goes down to a maximum of 356 – and all these devices use Samsung’s Super AMOLED display technology. This is the maximum brightness possible in intense lighting conditions and using it all the time would surely drain the battery and damage a user’s eye. So, in regular lighting conditions, the average brightness is around 500 nits, which is still a lot.
Regarding colors, Samsung phones have an Adaptive Display mode that, as the name suggests, automatically adapts a variety of aspects such as color saturation and contrast so the screen can look better in different situations. The tests revealed that every color missed its target point on the sRGB color space, making it oversaturated, which is something common with AMOLED displays. Additionally, on lighter colors, there’s a blueish tint that tries to make the white look “more white”, and as a result, you end up getting something slightly blue. On the other hand, thanks to how AMOLED technology works, blacks are really black, since the individual pixels are actually turned off. Turning off the Adaptive Display mode and activating the Basic mode makes things get better with the colors.
As previously mentioned, these are very technical aspects that usually cannot be detected by the naked eye. Nevertheless, no phone is perfect and the Galaxy S7 Edge has a lot to offer thanks to its cutting edge performance provided by octa-core Exynos 8890 or Snapdragon 820 processors, 4 GB of RAM and plenty of interesting features such was water resistance, external storage support, quick charge and wireless charging technologies, and so on.