“If you’ve read a number of reviews about Apple’s iPhone X, at some point you may have discovered that the new OLED display Apple utilizes is made by Samsung,” Mark Reschke writes for T-GAAP. “What you may also have been led to believe is the display for iPhone X is no different than any other OLED display, and certainly nothing different than any other display Samsung manufactures. Sadly, that’s not even close to accurate.”
“It is true that Samsung manufactures Apple’s iPhone X OLED display,” Reschke writes. “That point alone brings with it a lot of assumptions, or misguided information, and it should really stop. It’s sloppy journalism to say the least.”
“Apple spends billions on display RnD and its related partnerships, pushing the technology forward. Samsung acts as a contract manufacturer which can stamp out Apple’s design specification en mass,” Reschke writes. “Apple further snuffs out OLED issues with its own individual sub-pixel level display calibration and manufactures its own display driver. Of course Apple went even further, adding in HDR and a TrueTone technology, keeping the display looking near color temperature perfect to your eye, no matter what lighting conditions you are in. Apple delivers all this additional technology, and it goes beyond just a stamped display. The entire screen, from its nit (brightness) characteristics, size, viewing angles, to how it is driven with software, is all due to Apple.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s a capacity and yield quality issue. It’s also why it took for long for Apple to move to OLED – nobody outsells iPhone, so there was previously no way to get enough quality OLED displays amassed to meet Apple’s demand.
When you see outlets stating the iPhone X’s display is the “same” as those found on Samsung phones, you can attribute it to mistaken assumptions if you like, but the information is readily available, so the outlets’ intent must also be questioned.
Apple individually calibrates every single iPhone X unit before it leaves the factory. And Apple’s OLED iPhone X’s feature TrueTone. Those are two big reasons, among others, why Apple’s iPhone X displays are particularly special vs. other Samsung-made OLED screens. — MacDailyNews, November 13, 2017
“Apple’s version of an OLED screen is manufactured by Samsung, but is not an off-the-shelf Samsung part. It’s a custom-built, diamond-pattern OLED array that was built to Apple specifications and driven by an Apple display driver. This screen is not comparable to screens found in Samsung devices on a variety of levels.” – TechCrunch, October 31, 2017
SEE ALSO:
DisplayMate: Apple’s iPhone X has the most color accurate display we’ve ever measured; it is visually indistinguishable from perfect – November 8, 2017