OnePlus is known for speed, but the OnePlus 9 Pro’s new screen aims to be known for how much it slows down.
OnePlus and DisplayMate Labs gave us an exclusive peek at some of the specs for the new OnePlus 9 Pro’s display, which OnePlus says brings power consumption way down by dynamically changing frame rates, while retaining top-of-the-line brightness and color accuracy.
The OnePlus 9 Pro is one of two phones we expect OnePlus to launch in the US on March 23. (The company may be launching a third phone, but we don’t think it will be for the US.) Those phones will be the Pro and a lower-cost OnePlus 9; while the details OnePlus gave us were exclusively for the Pro, we’re sure many of these elements carry through to the 9.
“The 9 Pro has a very impressive, excellent, top-tier, world-class smartphone display with close to textbook-perfect calibration accuracy and performance, that is visually indistinguishable from perfect,” DisplayMate Labs head Ray Soneira says in a report shared exclusively with us.
OnePlus calls its new form of OLED display “Fluid Display 2.0.” It’s a combination of a Samsung OLED panel, plus a bunch of exclusive OnePlus software optimizations and tunings.
The OnePlus 9 Pro’s base display is a curved 6.7-inch, 3,216-by-1,440 panel at 526 ppi, Soneira tells us. Slashleaks shows a 2,400-by-1,080, 402ppi, 6.55-inch 120Hz screen on the OnePlus 9.
Brighter and Brighter
Soneira and his firm have been working with us for about 20 years testing monitors, TVs, and mobile displays. He’s seen the entire history of mobile phone screens. In recent years, he’s focused only on testing the absolute best of the best, the grade-A mobile screens. We worked with him to take a look at the OnePlus 8 Pro’s screen.
The OnePlus 9 Pro makes a key shift to be more visible in sunlight, Soneira’s tests show. The phone’s auto brightness settings hide a special high brightness mode that kicks in when there’s a lot of ambient light. That max brightness, with a picture covering 50% of the screen, has been pumped up from 1,009 nits on the OnePlus 8 Pro to 1043 on the OnePlus 9 Pro, falling behind only the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra (1,240 nits) in his study. (Soneira didn’t test the Galaxy S21 series.)
The OnePlus 9 Pro can pump even more light into individual pixels when the screen is mostly dark. At a 1% average picture level (just a few pixels lit up), it can get those pixels to 1,655 nits as compared to 1,609 on the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra.
Average manual max brightness in the OnePlus 9 Pro’s “natural” screen mode is almost exactly the same as on the OnePlus 8 Pro. Average manual max brightness in the “vivid” screen mode is slightly behind the 8 Pro, but ahead of the OnePlus 8T and the OnePlus 8.
Absolute color accuracy is “visually indistinguishable from perfect,” Soneira says. White point color shift at a 30-degree angle is similar to the OnePlus 8 Pro, and in a group of phones that are visually indistinguishable, Soneira says. It’s quite a bit better than the Galaxy S20 or iPhone 12 Max. Screen reflectance also stays similar to other current flagships at 4.4% he says. (To make it any better, you’d need to add anti-reflection coatings, and they’re too scratchable, he says.)
The 9 Pro also pumps up the maximum color gamut in its “vivid” display mode from 126% of sRGB on the 8 Pro to 139% on the 9 Pro. That helps maintain color saturation in outdoor lighting, and slightly beats out the 135% gamut on the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra; the iPhone 12 Pro Max goes to 143%.
Other features include a blue-light-reduction mode, HDR10+ with a wide color gamut, and the ability to work with polarized sunglasses in both vertical and horizontal orientations, Soneira’s report says.
“The 2021 flagship OnePlus 9 Pro provides improved display performance over the 2020 flagship OnePlus 8 Pro,” Soneira says. “OnePlus recognizes the important of display excellence and has made a major commitment to improving smartphone display performance.”
The Magic of LTPO
The latest improvement in OLED display materials, LTPO (low-temperature polycrystalline oxide) combines the previous low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) transistors with Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide (IGZO) transistors to reduce power leakage and give screen makers much more dynamic control over refresh rates.
LTPO looks like the latest trend in OLED screens. It first appeared on Apple Watches in 2019, but then stepped up to phones with the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra and the Samsung Galaxy S21. It’s widely assumed to be appearing on at least some of Apple’s iPhones later this year.
Different companies have different names and different twists on various sub-generations of LTPO; Samsung calls the version in the Note 20 Ultra “HOP” (hybrid oxide and polycrystalline.) PhoneArena estimates that as a base, the switch to LTPO drops power usage by 20%.
But OnePlus says it can do a lot better than that, thanks to LTPO’s dynamic refresh rate powers. While previous-gen LTPS displays stepped from 120Hz down to 60Hz, LTPO lets OnePlus step refresh rates way down to save power, something that leads to the next feature here.
Faster and Slower
The OnePlus 8 Pro brought 120Hz, 1440p displays to the US. Now the OnePlus 9 Pro brings…a 1Hz display.
This is not ridiculous. It’s power optimization. The slower the refresh rate, the less power the display consumes. The Samsung Galaxy S21’s LTPO display goes from 120Hz to 10Hz depending on what you’re looking at.
OnePlus asks the daring question: why do you need any Hz at all? When you’re scrolling, the screen moves at 120Hz. Stop, let it sit, and it drops to 1Hz. Watch a video at 30fps, and it runs at 30Hz. This all operates in service of battery life. Annoyingly for us, it’s also not going to show up on our battery tests, which use 30fps content, but that’s our problem.
OnePlus says the extremely adaptive refresh rate, which it calls “Smart 120Hz” cuts overall display power consumption by 50%. That’ll be big for battery life, and it’ll let you spend more of your power on gaming, which gets us to the next feature.
A Touchy Subject
Laggy touch responses are a well-known problem on Android phones as compared to iPhones. The core of the problem is that while iOS treats touch inputs with priority over other processes, Android puts your touch input into the mix of background processes, which sometimes creates delays. The way hardware makers get around this is by pumping up the display sampling rate, pushing touch events at the processor more often.
The Galaxy S20 series has a 240Hz touch sampling rate; we assume the same about the S21, although Samsung hasn’t said. The Asus ROG Phone 5 goes to 300Hz. The Xiaomi Mi 11 claims 480Hz, but it isn’t available in the US.
The OnePlus 9 Pro will have a 360Hz touch sampling rate, the fastest available on any US phone. App makers need to work hand-in-hand with OnePlus to make this happen—the company says it will only be available on “a handful of games,” with the names to be announced at launch. But it’s also working with more app makers to broaden the compatibility.
We’ll find out more about the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro at 10 a.m. ET on March 23. Watch at oneplus.com/launch.
