The Google Nexus 9 Review
by Joshua Ho & Ryan Smith on February 4, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- HTC
- Project Denver
- Android
- Mobile
- NVIDIA
- Nexus 9
- Lollipop
- Android 5.0
Display
For those that are uninitiated to the world of displays, a display seems relatively simple. After all, it just needs to have high resolution, pretty colors, high brightness, and high contrast. However, there’s a great deal of complexity to this issue. Even excluding the actual structure of a display, the characteristics of a display can strongly affect perception. Poor display calibration, low brightness, high reflectance, and low contrast can all affect the experience. In addition, something as simple as subpixel arrangement and the thin-film transistor design can have significant impacts on viewing angles and battery life.
In order to test these things, we use SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 Ultimate and X-Rite’s i1pro2 spectrophotometer to ensure accuracy in our testing, in conjunction with subjective testing to get a good idea of overall display performance. As always, we target sRGB gamut and 2.2 gamma as these are the industry standard. While there are many arguments for larger gamuts and different gamma curves, the goal of our display calibration testing is to make sure that a display will be reasonably accurate in its reproduction of content as an artist intended. Without this calibration, videos, photos, and other content can appear "off".
While we still don’t have an accurate reflectance test, I spent a great deal of time wondering why the display on the Nexus 9 seemed to have more distracting glare than most. This was strange to me as the display was obviously laminated with no perceivable viewing angle degradation that comes with non-laminated displays. It seems that whatever material HTC has used to laminate the display isn’t quite ideal in this case, as at some point in the display stack there’s an obvious secondary reflection. This is an issue relating to a lower index of refraction, so it’s likely that some other characteristic was valued over reflectance.
Other than this, the only other immediately noticeable flaw is the display’s backlight bleed. To me, it’s quite obvious that the display gets lighter at the edges much like what I’ve seen on the Nexus 5. It seems that this is related to the backlight configuration, although given the high brightness of the panel I'm not sure that this can be avoided.
Before we get into the objective testing, I also wanted to mention that this display has “dual-domain pixels” similar to the iPad Air 2 and iPhone 6. The level of angling seems to be much more significant though, which seems to make the purple blacks much more obvious, but outside of this shift in black point it’s almost impossible to see shifts in color with changes in viewing angle. The microscope photo combined with some casual examination under sunlight suggests that the digitizer has been integrated into the display for improved clarity. The resolution is also quite high for a tablet, and while I can obviously pick out aliasing when closely examining the display, at a normal viewing distance I don’t really see any of these problems.
The brightness of the Nexus 9's display ends up higher than what we see with the iPad Air 2. Contrast is approximately equal to what we see in the iPad Air 2, which is good but definitely not the perfect inky blacks that one might be used to from AMOLED.
The next aspect of our display test suite is the grayscale test, which looks at the color balance and brightness of various shades of grayscale from black to white. Here, the Nexus 9 really does a great job across the board. If I were to nitpick, there is a bit of extra blue in the display but it’s really nothing worth talking about. Google does seem to consistently favor a lower contrast look when the gamma curve is dead on the mark, but on average it’s close enough to a power 2.2 curve that it doesn’t make a difference when viewing the display.
While grayscale is important, colors are really the hardest part to get right in a display. Here, the Nexus 9 does an amazing job in our saturation test. I really don’t have anything else to say here as pretty much everything is on the mark. At this point, it’s pretty clear that most Nexus devices have a strong focus on display quality, and the Nexus 9 is no exception.
Finally, the Gretag MacBeth test shows that the Nexus 9 is quite accurate with color even outside of the basic primary and secondary colors. There shouldn’t be any issues with viewing content that has high requirements for color accuracy. Overall, the Nexus 9 display is great with only two real issues of note, namely the reflectance issue and the backlight bleed. While neither are deal-breakers, fixing these issues would make this display fall under a short list of the best mobile displays I’ve seen all year. For now, it sits just shy of that list. I definitely have to applaud Google in this case as they haven’t fallen into the trap of wider gamuts, bluer white points, dynamic contrast, and other “features” for the sake of showroom appeal.
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seanleeforever - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
2nd that.I am not here to read about how fast the tablet is or how nice it looks. i am here for in depth content about the chip. would it be nice that this content was available since the release of the product? absolutely, but given the resource it would either be a brief review that is going to be the same as review you can find from hundred of other websites, or late but in depth.
honestly i think anand should be targeting at more tech oriented contents that's few but in depth, and leave the quick/dirty review for other websites.
superb job.
WaitingForNehalem - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Yeah but who cares about tablets??!! I don't come to Anandtech to read about budget tablets, or SFF PCs, or more smartphones. The Denver coverage was not even that in depth TBH, just commentary on the NVidia slides. I have a EE degree and some of the previous write ups were so in depth they could be class material. This one isn't which is fine but I don't think it excuses how late it came out. The enthusiast market is growing and you should be targeting that demographic as you previously have, not catering to the mainstream like hundreds of sites already do.retrospooty - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
The enthusiast market is growing ? What with CPU's not really getting, or needing to be any faster for several years now, and a standard mid range quad core i5 (non-overclocked) being WAY more than powerful enough to run 99.9% of anything out there, how is the enthusiast market is growing? Most enthusiasts I know don't even bother any more... There just isnt a need. Any basic PC is great these days.WaitingForNehalem - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I totally agree with you. That doesn't change the fact that the market is growing as more users are adopting gaming PCs. Enthusiasts now actually command a sizable portion of desktops sold. Intel's Devil's Canyon was in response to that.retrospooty - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
OK, I get what you mean.I guess I am still in a mind set where a PC "enthusiast" is your overclocker, tweaker, buying the latest and fastest of everything to eek out that extra few frames per second.
Today, a mid range quad core i5 from 3 years ago and a decent mid-high range card runs any game quite nicely.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
There was a time, readers may be too young to have been there, when there was a Wintel monopoly: M$ needed faster chips to run ever more bloated Windoze and Intel needed a cycle-sink to soak up the increase in cycles that evolving chips provided. Now, we're near (or at?) the limits of single-threaded performance, and still haven't found a way to use multi-processor/core chips in individual applications. There just aren't a) many embarrassingly parallel problems and b) algorithms to turn single-threaded problems into parallel code. I mean, the big deal these days is 4K displays? It looks prettier, to some eyes, but doesn't change the functionality of an application (medical and such excepted, possibly).Does anyone really need an i7 to surf the innterTubes for neater porn?
nico_mach - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
I think the chip coverage was superb, I don't have an EE degree and I'm pretty sure that's what the website is steered towards. And I still think I got it.It's fascinating the number of layers involved in this Android tablet, and speaks to why Apple can optimize so much better. There's the chip->NVIDIA chip optimizer->executable code->Dalvik compiler/runtime->dalvik code. I mean, when the lags are encountered, that's twice as many suspects to investigate.
I still think that the review is a little harsh on Denver. It's hitting the right performance envelope at the right price. While it's an mildly inefficient design, clearly NVIDIA is pricing it accordingly, and that might be a function of moving some of the optimization work to software. And that's work that Apple and MS do all the time - Apple much more successfully, obviously. There's a real gap in knowledge of how efficient Apple's chips are vs how optimized the software/hardware pairing is.
dakishimesan - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I have no interest in tablets, but the deep dive on Denver was a fascinating read, and still completely relevant even if the product is a few months old. Thanks for the great review.Sindarin - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
...can I offer you a cup of hot chicken soup laddy? .....maybe some vicks vapor rub? lol! c'mon dude! we're all sick(vaca) in December!hahmed330 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Hi, outstanding article with incredible attention to detail... Do you think its possible to run Dynamic Code Optimizer on per say 2 or maybe even 4 small cpu cores dedicated to doing all the software OoOE functions instead of using time slicing? (A53s or just some XYZ narrow cores for a potential 2+2 or 4+4 or maybe even 8+8)Also whats the die size of a denver core in comparison to a enhanced cyclone core?? That is where a lot of gains are possible potentially 30%-50%..