Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/10445/revisiting-the-oneplus-3



Last week I published my review of the OnePlus 3. I reviewed the OnePlus 2 for AnandTech, and given that the OnePlus 2 had many problems it seemed appropriate that I should examine the improvements that OnePlus made with their latest smartphone. As I used the phone, I was glad to see that OnePlus had clearly taken feedback from the reviews of the OnePlus 2 to heart and spent the year since then working on creating a truly great phone. From the chassis, to the camera, to the SoC, the OnePlus 3 really delivered a level of quality comparable to phones that cost significantly more.

There was one exception to this trend, which was the OnePlus 3's display. The OnePlus One shipped with a 5.5" 1080p IPS display, and it clearly aimed to accurately render content targeting the sRGB color space, which applies to essentially all content that you'll see on a smartphone. With the OnePlus 2 things weren't so great. OnePlus still used a 5.5" 1080p IPS display, but there was essentially no effort put into calibrating the display. As for the OnePlus 3, it marked a shift from IPS LCD displays to AMOLED displays in OnePlus's flagship smartphones, and this was to be expected based on the launch of the OnePlus X which sports a 5" 1080p AMOLED display.

The move to AMOLED doesn't come with any inherent issues, but there are things that a manufacturer needs to keep in mind. Without any sort of brightness boost mode the display can be more difficult to use outdoors than competing LCDs, due to AMOLED displays typically capping at 300-400 nits when setting brightness manually. Sharpness is also another factor to consider. The use of the PenTile subpixel arrangement reduces effective resolution, especially when rendering areas of solid color. It also has a negative impact on the rendition of text and other glyphs, as you're not dealing with subpixels aligned in a perfect grid of vertical and horizontal lines. This is why I've advocated for remaining at 1080p when using standard RGB displays but moving to 1440p for PenTile displays. In fact, the red/blue resolution on a 1440p PenTile display is still slightly lower than that of a 1080p RGB display, but that's another topic.

The last thing vendors need to keep in mind about AMOLED displays is that, while they can offer a much greater color gamut than your typical WLED-backlit LCD, without color management this will cause distortions in all content you view on the display. For this reason it's important to offer an sRGB color mode which constrains the display so that it matches the color standard used by essentially all content. Unfortunately, the OnePlus 3 omitted such a feature, which is why it ended up performing so poorly in my display testing.

The display section of my review spawned a great deal of debate, and I'll get into that more on the next page. To sum things up, OnePlus was quickly able to ship a preliminary update to review units which added an sRGB mode in the phone's developer settings. Right now this setting resets upon a reboot, but OnePlus says that it will keep its state between reboots when the stable firmware goes out to all devices. With OnePlus making an effort to correct what I felt was the biggest issue with the OnePlus 3, I thought it only made sense to revisit the display and run it through the tests again to see just what sort of changes have been made, and whether they improve the OnePlus 3's standing among smartphones.

A quick word on memory management:

Before discussing the changes that OnePlus has made to the display, I did want to comment on one of the other controversial aspects about the OnePlus 3. I only mentioned this once in my review, but the OnePlus 3's memory management on its original firmware is quite aggressive about evicting apps from memory, which led many people to wonder why OnePlus had included 6GB of RAM if you couldn't use it. With the beta update that they've sent to review units one of the patch notes states that this behavior has been tweaked somewhat. While I'm not able to do any in-depth comparisons due to the fact that I'm now stuck on this firmware, I did want to mention that app eviction seems to be less aggressive. In my admittedly not very scientific testing I was able to have Chrome with three tabs loaded, Twitter, Hangouts, Dropbox, Google Drive, Gmail, Skype, the Files app, and Google Photos all resident in memory at the same time, and none had to recreate their activities upon me returning to them. Pushing any further would honestly be going far outside the set of apps that I use on a daily basis and can keep track of in my mind, and so at least in my view I don't think app eviction is something to worry about on the OnePlus 3 as of this new firmware.

With that out of the way, lets take a look at the new sRGB mode that has been added to the OnePlus 3.



Display Accuracy

As I mentioned in my initial review, the OnePlus 3 targets the NTSC color gamut. I really feel the need to reiterate that this choice of gamut target makes absolutely no sense. The actual NTSC gamut was never really relevant, even back in the 1950s when it was created. This is because the phosphors used in CRT displays of the time simply could not produce such saturated colors with an adequate brightness level. In fact, most modern displays still cannot realize the original NTSC gamut. Because of this, it was assumed that content was created and should be displayed using the gamut defined by the SMPTE C specification, which is actually smaller than the sRGB gamut. SMPTE C also used CIE Illuminant D65 for the white point instead of CIE Standard Illuminant C which has a CCT of 6774K, making it more blue than the white point used in more modern color standards.

If the NTSC gamut is not a sensible target, a good question is what gamut would be? This gets back into the discussion of color management, which is something I've discussed in the past several times and don't want to tread over again in this article. In theory, it would make most sense for OnePlus to target the DCI-P3 gamut, because right now UltraHD Bluray content uses that color gamut in a Rec. 2020 container for future compatibility as displays actually move to Rec. 2020. That is why Apple is targeting the DCI-P3 gamut on their newest devices, and it's why all the high end UltraHD TVs launching this year use it as well.

Unfortunately, Android poses a problem here. Android has no color management at the system level, and so if you ship a wide gamut display you get oversaturation when viewing anything designed for sRGB, which for most people will include every single piece of content on their phone. Because of this, the only two reasonable options are to just constrain your Android smartphone to sRGB completely, or to include separate color modes that allow switching between sRGB and the wider gamut. This isn't the fault of the Android device makers, and it's clear that the inclusion of wider gamut displays is done with good intentions, but for now we have to wait on Google to bring color management to Android.

One thing I didn't do in my review was test the OnePlus 3 against the NTSC standard. Again, I feel this is mostly pointless because you will not be able to find any content anywhere that targets that gamut, but examining how well the display conforms to OnePlus's target gamut would have been an interesting exercise nonetheless. Unfortunately, OnePlus seems to have changed the white point in the normal display mode significantly with this update, which means any results I report won't be representative of how the phone was on its original firmware, or how it may be in the future. We ran into this same issue with the OnePlus One, where later updates completely changed the calibration and made it much less accurate. OnePlus has a bit of a track record of changing key device behavior after release, with another example being the browser detection on the OnePlus 2 which shut off the A57 cluster. I'm not a fan of publishing results that are subject to change with any update, and I'm not going to play the game of testing a phone again after every single update to see if things have changed, especially when changes are made but not documented at all in the update notes.

Display - Grayscale Accuracy


SpectraCal CalMAN

Greyscale accuracy with the sRGB mode enabled is a huge improvement over the standard display mode. The CCT average is slightly below target, but only by a tiny amount. My only complaint is that the RGB balance with the whitest shades is shifted too far toward red, and it would be good to tweak this a tiny bit to make sure 100% white is properly balanced so that the display doesn't have any sort of warm cast on webpages and in Material Design applications. Even with that, the error levels for each individual shade of grey are all at or below three, which is what we're targeting. With these changes the OnePlus 3 goes from being one of the worst displays on record to one of the best, and that's a great thing to see.

Display - Saturation Accuracy


SpectraCal CalMAN

I was originally concerned that it might be too late to properly fix the OnePlus 3's display once phones had shipped, as there's a degree of variance from display to display. However, it appears that the displays, while inaccurate, were defined well enough that OnePlus knew what to tweak to constrain them to sRGB. In the saturation sweep test you can see that only two error values go slightly above three, with the rest being comfortably below.

Display - GMB Accuracy


SpectraCal CalMAN

With great greyscale and saturation rendering you're usually set for accurate color mixture rendering. With its sRGB mode enabled the OnePlus 3 does a great job of rendering the colors that are part of the GretagMacbeth ColorChecker test. The error value is below our target value of three, and pushing accuracy much further doesn't bring many benefits as at this point you already can't discern the difference between the colors and their actual reference colors unless you have them sitting still beside one another.

To say that OnePlus's new sRGB mode provides a substantial improvement in display accuracy would be an understatement. The display has gone from being the most inaccurate display that I've seen in years, to being among the most accurate displays that we have on record. Gone is the ghastly blue shift, and even in the standard display mode OnePlus has toned that down significantly. The gamut matches sRGB very well, and both greyscale and color reproduction is right on target.



Final Words

As far as accuracy relative to the sRGB standard goes, the OnePlus 3 is now in a great position. The last questions that need to be answered are what the relevance of this is, and how it changes my opinion about the phone. I'll start with the question of relevance, as it has generated some interesting discussions in the time since I published my original review.

In my view, having your phone target the color space used for content on the web is an important feature. Clearly not everyone shares this view, and we're all welcome to have differing opinions on this topic. However, from an objective perspective there is no question that targeting an irrelevant color gamut which causes severe distortions to content is not a good thing. When looking at things from a more subjective point of view, the situation becomes much less clear. Many people enjoy the oversaturated colors that wide gamut displays provide when software isn't color managed. I have no issue with that, but users who want an accurate display should have the option to enable an sRGB color mode, and that was the issue with the OnePlus 3 when it launched.

What I do have to disagree with is the idea that sRGB accuracy is a niche feature. Many readers and other commentators have made that assertion since I posted my review, and OnePlus maintains that stance as well. I think people value display accuracy more than some may think, and it isn't spoken of much purely because if your display is accurate then there's no discussion to be had about it; it simply looks as it should. While this is by no means a definitive piece of evidence, it is worth noting that Apple, the company bringing in most of the profits in the smartphone market, values color accuracy quite highly across all their devices. When moving to a wider gamut they put a great deal of effort into updating their operating system to enable the use of a wider color space for designing applications and artwork, while maintaining accuracy and compatibility with older devices, and they are really the only vendor that has properly executed the transition to wide color.

Targeting a common color standard has benefits beyond simply being "accurate" relative to some arbitrary gamut. It means that what you see on one device will look the same on another device, and this means that you can rest assured that the people you share content with will see the same colors that you did. In the world of creative arts you have people who spend hours editing photos and videos, drawing artwork, and designing websites and apps. In all of these situations, someone spent a great deal of time choosing exactly the right colors to bring their content to you. I think they would all disagree with the idea that being able to view their creations as they intended is just some niche feature that isn't worth the effort. sRGB is certainly not the widest gamut, and things are finally moving away from it, but that transition needs to be handled properly. The important thing is not that everything targets sRGB, but that everything targets whatever color standard has been chosen to be used across all platforms, and for the time being that standard is sRGB whether we like it or not.

While not everyone feels that offering an sRGB mode matters, and seemingly not everyone at OnePlus feels that it matters, it is apparent that there are engineers there who do. After my review was posted they were exceptionally quick to publish an update for review units that included an sRGB mode, and as you've seen, they did an excellent job of bringing the display in line with the sRGB standard considering that there must be some degree of variance from unit to unit that prevents precise tuning. Creating, validating, and publishing updates takes considerable engineering effort, so it looks like sRGB calibration is not too niche to be worth it after all. I haven't gotten a firm answer on when this update will rolling out to every OnePlus 3, but I've heard that it should be happening quite soon.

Now for the second question: how does this change my view of the phone? I mentioned this on Twitter the other day, but with this update the OnePlus 3 has become my daily Android device, as I had originally hoped it would before the display accuracy disappointed me. OnePlus has addressed the only issue about the phone that I felt truly hampered my enjoyment of it. My original recommendation was conditional in that you needed to not really care about display accuracy for the phone to be worth buying. It's unfortunate that OnePlus can't fix the relatively low brightness or address the low effective resolution that a 5.5" 1080p PenTile display provides, but every phone has issues and these are ones that I can live with. My only other complaint about the phone now is that the video recording isn't great, but it's still functional and not a deal-breaker at all unless you record a ton of video. After this update I can safely say that if OnePlus leaves these settings as they are then the OnePlus 3 should be seriously considered by all smartphone buyers, and it's a phone that I would personally recommend based both on its technical merit and how I simply enjoy using it on a daily basis.

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