The iPhone 11 Pro Max has a better display than the Note 10 Plus, in fact it has the
best smartphone display ever, but before you downvote and leave a nasty comment let me
explain exactly how and why.
Yesterday we put out our detailed comparison of the iPhone 11 Pro Max to the Note 10, my
two favorite phones which both have their strengths and I tried my best to be unbiased,
but it still got a ton of hate.
So many people thought that I was rigging the test to favor the iphone, and I absolutely
wasn’t, and I have proof.
Overall I actually think the Note 10 is the better value and brings some amazing specs
to the table, and if I wasn’t tied in Apple ecosystem with my Apple watch and Mac Thats
the phone I would be using.
The biggest issue people had was the brightness comparison, where I manually set the brightnesses
to the max and the iPhone was so much brighter.
Now I knew that Apple really stepped up their display game but I thought they just reached
the level of the amazing oled display in the Note 10, so I was shocked to see how much
brighter it was. I literally spent about 5 min going through every setting to make sure
there isn’t any power mode or any other software limiting the brightness and there
wasn’t, it was set to +10% brightness in the settings but we were still seeing a huge
difference.
After seeing all the comments we decided to investigate further and see what was causing
this, was it bad settings, the battery being too low, or something else, and we did find
our answer.
Before we started retesting I did some searching online and multiple publications stating that
the iPhone looked brigher than the Note. Next, we redid our testing and made sure the note
was charged and once again power settings were set to full performance.
I turned off auto-brightness and set both to the Max, and there right away I saw the
same exact results. Now I have to mention that cameras are more sensitive to light differences,
but in person, there was definitely a big noticeable difference.
Then I turned off the screen and turned it back on, and my eyes caught something. The
Note 10 started off brighter and then dimmed its display even though it was manually set
to Max where the iPhone stayed consistent. This had me thinking, what if the Note 10
can’t run anywhere near full brightness if there is a lot of bright content.
For example, Many lower end TV’s can do HDR but only if you don’t have a lot of
bright areas at the same time, and even Apples $6000 XDR display can only achieve its crazy
1600 nits if its not displaying that on the full screen, which if it is it goes down to
1000 nits sustained.
To test this I found a wallpaper designed for Oled display thats mostly black but a
white center. As you can see the iPhone is still brighter but the results are much much
closer than before. Next, I opened Youtubes settings in dark mode
and now they even closer. To test this further I decided to playback a Netflix HDR video
and interestingly when the video is paused the white controls are actually slighlty brighter
on the Note 10, but during playback when we have much more bright areas the iPhone take
a sizable lead.
I’ve previously heard that its best to keep your phone in auto-brightness, as many can
get brighter that way in direct sunlight, so we headed outside and I opened the verge
which has a dark design and scrolled to fill most of the display black. With auto-brightness
on and this method the Note 10 was very slightly brighter than the iPhone.
So we had our answer, The Note 10 Plus does have a display capable of the same 1200 Nits
as the iPhone, but the times that it can actually get that high is really rare.
We have hardware and/or software limitations that don’t allow it to reach the same sustained
levels as the iPhone.
Now some of you will say how could this be if Samsung makes these displays for Apple?
Well, Samsung just makes the panels themselves, not the display controller, calibration, software
and other things that set it apart.
If you just look at the spec sheet they seem similar, but in the real world there are clear
differences one being screen flickering. As you can see the Samsung has banding from the
display flickering being more noticeable, and this is most likely because Apple uses
a higher quality brightness controller.
Now brightness isn’t the only thing that matters, we also have things like color accuracy,
reflections, contrast, etc, and this is where Displaymate’s crazy detailed testscome in.
They rated the iPhone 11 Pro’s display as The highest absolute collor accuracy, smallest
shift in color, highest full-screen brightness for Oled phones and HDR peak brightness, lowest
screen reflections, and smallest brightness shift.
Taking a deep dive into their results I once again found validation for our comparisons
drastic difference in brightness, where they say that the note 10 produces 410 nits when
maxing out the brightness in Manual on a white screen compared to the iPhones 770 nits, and
for a more normal screen of 50% its 465 compared to 821. There's the huge difference we saw
in our tests.
So there we have it, proof that the iPhone 11 Pro does infact have the better display,
that it gets noticeably brighter with average use and that our original comparison wasn’t
biased or set up in any way. We were just as shocked as you were, and now we know why.
I also want to add in that the Note 10 plus still has a display that is gorgeous with
super thin bezels, without a notch, and brightness and colors that are better than almost every
other phone out there and you won’t be disappointed by it.