Perfect colour is ... on my phone.

[Garbz]

So I got bored the other day and threw my mobile phone under a calibrator. My phone has a 4" Super-AMOLED screen which stands for "the future" (ok not really it's active matrix organic light emitting diodes).

For those of you who haven't heard of this, OLEDs differ from LCDs in that each individual pixel is a lightsource. An LCD is a backlight followed by an active shutter working on polarisation principles, followed by a filter that makes it appear red, green and blue. This comes with many disadvantages such as the inability to display black, and sub perfect colour performance due to filtering of a backlight which has an average spectrum.

OLEDs on the other hand are just like regular LEDs except that they can be manufactured small, thin, and flexible. Like LEDs they also produce a spectrum of a single tight peak. This is pure colour.

Anyway to my mobile phone:

I set it to black and white to take a contrast measurement which resulted in 192.8cd/m^2 white, with a white balance of 8500K, and 0.1cd/m^2 black giving a resulting contrast ratio of 1928:1. That is already about 3 times better than my current screen, but ... Holdup it's supposed to display black, so doing the test again with the room light on produced a measurement error on the black and 192.7cd/m^2 on the white. There's our infinitely high contrast ratio

Anyway contrast ratio is nice but in reality photography relies on low contrast ratios when printing so it's kinda moot, what about spectrum:

The light blue triangle is the sRGB spectrum, the yellow triangle is the AdobeRGB spectrum, and the red is the phone.

Wow!

So now all we need is for the technology to mature, become available in 26" models, incorporate a 12bit LUT, and I'm sold