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iPad 2 and iPhone 4 display Gamut


Jeff Mottle
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As many in our field use their iPhones and iPads for presentations I was curious to know what kind of gamut these devices had and how they stacked up to a standard LCD display. I was not expecting much and did find they were pretty limited, but I thought some of you would be interested to see the Chromaticity diagrams I created today for them.

 

As you can see below, the gamut of both are nearly identical and the are both noteably smaller than sRGB. As long as you don't plan on showing anything with really saturated, which is pretty tough to avoid with architectural rendering (greens, blues), then it's ok, but still pretty small. Hopefully future generations of their displays will be better as their laptop display improved some over the years.

 

I was however surprised to see how closely they fell to D65 (6500K) which is where you want the display to be in a calibrated environment. Not perfect, but close.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]44363[/ATTACH]

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Interesting. I've uploaded some of my images to my iphone4 and my comments would be that the contrast is quite harsh. A lot of the detail in the shadows gets crushed and the images are generally a tad dark - but that might be an autobrightness feature that can be overridden. Do you get any brightness/image control on the ipad? I think my printed portfolio does my images a bit more justice but the option to zoom and insert movies and just turning up with an ipad is very appealing for a slick client presentation. Although glare might be a bit annoying off the grass screen - something you dont get on a nice matt print.

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The harsh contrast would be a result of the luminance which you can see in the bottom left of the graphs which I maxed out for the measurement. They are around 400-500cd/m2, which is very bright. On a calibrated display you'd want to see it around 100 cd/m2. You can adjust the brightness, but it's just a slider and there is no measurement or scale.

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Cheers Jeff. I had a go at boosting the screen brigtness manually on my iphone4 and it actually made quite a bit of difference and brought more light into the shadows hence reducing the harsh contrast. I guess the auto setting it probably there to keep a strong contrast whatever the lighting as a strong contrast is good for keeping black text black on a white page. I My images look OK to be honest after this tweak so might actually be worth a punt when I have some spare cash. I might have finally found the excuse I needed to get an ipad! Although I really really hate how petty apple are about flash support, its playground stuff! Also adding attachments in emails, printing, no native USB etc - basic lack of analysing how we use things - not what the adverts would have us believe!

 

I wonder how android is coming along, last time I checked it had a few tablet issues itself.

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That being said Im hopefully recieving my new laptop next week with a 95% NTSC Gamma matte screen. That might be sweet enough for presentations. But doesn't have the pass it around tactile hold it in your hands feel, which is a bonus for the ipad.

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