The OnePlus 2 Review
by Brandon Chester on December 14, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- OnePlus
- OnePlus 2
Display
At this point, it's hard to excuse shipping a smartphone without a great display. Not just great in terms of resolution, contrast, and brightness, but also great in terms of color accuracy. We've seen even inexpensive smartphones like the Moto G and the Lumia 640 achieve levels of color accuracy that weren't achieved even by many flagship smartphones only a few years ago. As for OnePlus, the OnePlus One was notable for bringing a very accurate and high resolution display to a low price point, and at the time it was one of the best displays you could get on a smartphone. With that being achieved by their very first smartphone, OnePlus has some big shoes to fill with its follow up.
To analyze the quality of a smartphone's display we run it through our custom display workflow which measures accuracy relative to the sRGB color space. Measurements are performed with an i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of contrast measurements which are done with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and organized using SpectraCal's CalMAN 5 software.
Out of the box, things look promising for the OnePlus 2. The display can get quite bright, and despite that it can also get quite dark, which leads to it achieving the best contrast ratio on record for an LCD device.
Unfortunately, there's not much good news beyond high brightness and deep blacks. Greyscale accuracy on the OnePlus 2 is extremely poor. Right out of the gate, there's a large imbalance between the red and blue components that make up the shades of grey, and that gap grows increasingly large as you move toward white. The gamma is also quite a disaster, with a high degree of irregularity. Honestly I don't really know what to say, as this result is quite shocking when one looks back at how accurate the OnePlus One was. The OnePlus 2 is simply too blue, and even without the blue shift the highly irregular gamma will cause issues with both greyscale and color mixture rendition.
Moving on to the saturation sweep test, the OnePlus 2 again performs poorly. Every primary and secondary color with the exception of blue has a high degree of error, particularly red, magenta, and cyan. While in this test the phone narrowly avoids being the worst result on the chart, it's not very far off, and can hardly be called accurate. There's clear saturation compression occurring, with OnePlus managing to be accurate for more of the 100% saturation values, but being undersaturated for most values below that.
With poor greyscale accuracy, irregular gamma, and inaccurate rendition of primary and secondary colors, there's no hope for accurate color mixtures on the OnePlus 2's display. There's really not much more to be said. We're not talking about the kind of inaccuracy that you'd get from an oversaturated panel, but instead just general inaccuracy where no color is quite how it should be. It seems like OnePlus just focused on making sure the panel matched the sRGB gamut and put no effort into any further calibration.
The display quality of the OnePlus 2 is not impressive at all. For a $400 phone this is simply unacceptable, and it's such an enormous regression from the OnePlus One. What's even more problematic is how OnePlus keeps tweaking the display settings with their updates, and you never know whether it's going to change for the better or for the worse. I've seen the gamma curve change significantly, but the overall accuracy didn't improve for the better because some aspects improved and others got worse. In any case, I don't know what happened when OnePlus was deciding upon the display attributes they would be targeting, but as far as being accurate to the Rec. 709 standard goes the OnePlus 2 is actually one of the worst devices on record, and I'm at a loss as to how to explain why they allowed it to fall so far behind the original.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
132 Comments
View All Comments
Huan - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
Brandon Chester & Ryan Smith, great review as always. Seeing this terrible web browsing java script performance with A57 not activing at all. I am wondering is this review done on the latest OnePlus Two firmware?I currently have OnePlus Two, Galaxy S6 Edge and iPhone 6s Plus, the OnePlus Two is slower then iPhone 6s Plus on web browsing. But it has similar web browsing experience as Galaxy S6 Edge using Chrome.
I am full time engineer, and a part time wedding photographer, I always take picture in RAW and adjust white balance in Lightroom for post processing. When I compared the white point of iPhone 6s Plus ~7000K, to my OnePlus Two, it did look slightly colder, maybe ~7300K but not 8297K. I do noticed OnePlus have sourced panel from different OEMs, maybe I am just lucky and gotten a "more calibrate" display unit in the lottery.
Never the less, OnePlus using a tag line of "2016 Flagship Killer", the least they can do is to ensure consistent calibration on the display and actually build a good kernel that optimize battery life & thermals while taking advantage of SOC's full performance.
Brandon Chester - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
It is indeed done with the latest firmware. As I mentioned, I also wiped the device to confirm that there wasn't anything weird going on. As an additional confirmation I actually wiped it again around thirty minutes ago, and re-ran the tests. Nothing has improved, and Kraken is actually much worse at 30,000ms because it takes 20,000ms to complete Astar.OnePlus has behavior to automatically detect when Chrome is open and shut off the entire A57 cluster. Even if you use CPUBurn to put extremely heavy loads that activate the A57s they will still shut off the moment you open Chrome. I posted a video of this on Twitter a little while ago to demonstrate it, and you can find it below.
https://twitter.com/nexusCFX/status/67654327791559...
Huan - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
Brandon, thanks for the reply, I just run Kraken on the OnePlus Two with the latest firmware the best I can do is ~16,000 ms.This is such an unprofessional implementation of the kernel, the easy way out, rather then spending time optimizing performance, battery life and thermals.
grayson_carr - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
The Exynos in the S6 is notoriously poorly optimized for Chrome and has very poor performance in Chrome. The web benchmarks you see on Anandtech for the S6 are using the Samsung browser, which is much better optimized for Exynos. So the OnePlus 2 performing similar to the S6 in Chrome is not a good thing since Qualcomm chips are typically well optimized in Chrome and should perform much better than the Exynos there.zeeBomb - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
I think I read some where you can download chromium that is well optimized for new Qualcomm devices. For Samsung, maybe a binary lib can help but ima agree with you and recommended stock.Lavkesh - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
What kind of a company parrots "flagship killer" all the time knowing how shitty their product is? Such a huge disappointment.danielfranklin - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
A Chinese company...fguerro - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
I have a One Plus 2 and out of the box noticed it was slower than expected. However, I installed a custom kernel and set the cpu governor to performance and turned on the A57 from two cores to four and wow, made a big difference in benchmarks and everyday use.3DMark is 1229
Basemark OS II 2.0 Overall is 1927
PCMark Work Performance Overall is 5196
Geekbench 3 Single-Core Score is 1265
Geekbench 3 Multi-Core Score is 5037
AnTuTu v5.7 is 67467
Quadrant Standard is 39128
zeeBomb - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
Damnnn. What custom kernel + ROM are you using? Those are some insane gains.fguerro - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
I'm using stock Oxygen OS 2.1.2 and the custom kernel is Boeffla