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The Galaxy Note 9’s display is better than any other smartphone – even the iPhone X

Published Aug 14th, 2018 3:59PM EDT
Galaxy Note 9 Display Review
Image: Jacob Siegal/BGR

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The Galaxy Note 9 may look a lot like last year’s Note, but it’s a lot better in every way. It’s got the high-end specs you expect from an Android flagship smartphone this year, as well as a few extra perks on top, like a smarter S Pen stylus, bigger battery and lots and lots of storage.

The new Note also has a feature no other smartphone can match, a screen that delivers an even better performance than this year’s Galaxy S9 series.

Samsung’s OLED screens have been praised for a few years now, setting new performance standards with each new Galaxy S and Note model Samsung introduced. It’s no wonder that Apple went with Samsung Display when it made the first-ever iPhone with an OLED screen, and the iPhone X briefly held the title of best smartphone display in the world. Then the S9 came along.

It’s the same experts from DisplayMate that put the Note 9’s 6.3-inch OLED screen through the usual screen tests, concluding the phone has features that are even better than Samsung’s previous screens:

The Galaxy Note9 is the most innovative, and high-performance smartphone display that we have ever lab tested, breaking and establishing many new display performance records that are listed above.

The phone sets various records like the “very high absolute color accuracy,” that is “visually indistinguishable from perfect, and almost certainly considerably better than your existing smartphone, UHD TV, tablet, laptop, and computer monitor.”

Other records include record peak luminance that is independent of the on-screen image content (Average Picture Level) APL, record color accuracy and intensity scales that are independent of the image content APL, and record high brightness mode (710 nits or 27% higher than the Note 8).

In other words, if screen quality is all that matters to you, then the Note 9 should be on your short list — you can read the full review at this link for more technical details about the Note 9’s screen performance.

On the other hand, better things are en route, including the 2018 iPhone X and the Galaxy S10. It’s very likely they’ll outperform the Note 9 when it comes to display quality. We’ve seen it all happen before.

Chris Smith Senior Writer

Chris Smith has been covering consumer electronics ever since the iPhone revolutionized the industry in 2008. When he’s not writing about the most recent tech news for BGR, he brings his entertainment expertise to Marvel’s Cinematic Universe and other blockbuster franchises.

Outside of work, you’ll catch him streaming almost every new movie and TV show release as soon as it's available.