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Samsung Galaxy S9 unseats iPhone X as the best smartphone display, says DisplayMate
August 19, 2025
TheGalaxy S9 and S9 Plusare barely a week old, but the plaudits are already coming in thick and fast. Now,DisplayMatehas chimed in on the praise by proclaiming that the Galaxy S9’s display is worthy of its “highest ever A+” grade.
TheDisplayMateteam even go as far as calling the device’s AMOLED panel the “most innovative and high performance smartphone display” it has ever tested, out-matching thereigningiPhone Xon multiple fronts and becoming the only display to receive an “All Green” rating in all categories.
While the Galaxy S9’s 5.8-inch display shares many similarities with the Galaxy S8’s hardware,DisplayMate’s Dr. Raymond M. Soneira found that Samsung Display has managed to tweak its winning formula enough to provide a significant boost in picture quality and color accuracy.
As well as a color accuracy rating of “visually indistinguishable from perfect” across DCI-P3, RGB, and sRGB gamut standards,DisplayMatealso highlighted the phone’s high brightness mode that is capable of hitting 1130 nits – 20 percent more than the Galaxy S8, but lower than theNote 8’s maximum output.
In addition, the Galaxy S9 recorded the lowest ever screen reflectance score of just 4.4 percent (compared to the iPhone X’s 4.5 percent) and the smallest color shift of any OLED display, with a negligible white shift of just 1.1 JNCD at 30 degrees.
Samsung’s improved accessibility modes for visually impaired users, support for HDR Premium, and the display’s overall power efficiency (which matched that of the Galaxy S8 and Note 8) also drew praise from the team.
You can read the full reporthere. We’ll be conducting our own analysis of the Galaxy S9’s display in an in-depth review at a later date, but for now, be sure to check out our first impressions of Samsung’s new flagship(s)here.
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