The 9.7" iPad Pro Review
by Brandon Chester on June 1, 2016 9:00 AM ESTDisplay Uniformity
With Apple billing the 9.7" iPad Pro as a professional device with individually calibrated displays, I felt it was relevant to bring our uniformity test over to mobile. While we usually just measure errors at the center of a display, there are also errors across the panel itself due to inconsistencies in the panel and the backlighting array. This means that a display can be accurate at the center, but the edges can have significant luminance dropoff or gain that makes the display unsuitable for any sort of image work due to the fact that there are visible color differences across the display itself. For this test we use an array of 25 points on the display and measure the accuracy of colors in the GretagMacbeth ColorChecker test, as well as the uniformity of the white and black levels at each spot.
While I don't have any other mobile devices for reference, if I were evaluating the 9.7" iPad Pro as a professional monitor I would say that the white uniformity is decent, but not amazing in any regard. The central area of the display is fairly uniform, but there's noticeable dropoff on the left, right, and bottom edges. This is something I see on a number of phones and tablets, and maintaining uniformity probably hasn't been a concern for vendors until this point, but I'm hoping that a larger focus on it will make companies put more focus on it as a selling point for professional devices.
Black uniformity on the 9.7" iPad Pro isn't great. If you divide the display along its diagonal from the top right to bottom left corners you see that the in general the bottom section has higher black levels, while the top has lower black levels. In general, the black level isn't as dark at the edges as it is in the center. Black levels and contrast are the areas where Apple's LCDs really can't compete with Samsung's AMOLEDs, and with the 9.7" iPad Pro falling pretty far behind its bigger brother with black levels Apple should put more focus on at least keeping their blacks consistent across the display.
While the black uniformity isn't great on the 9.7" iPad Pro, and the white uniformity is just okay, the uniformity for colors is outstanding. There are a few hot spots on the edges, but in general the error relative to the center is well under two, and often near or even below one. I'm surprised that Apple has such uniform color rendition, as an uneven luminance level will usually throw off colors much more severely. Whatever the case may be, you can at least depend on even color rendering across the 9.7" iPad Pro's display.
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The Garden Variety - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
For the love of god: Stop it. Stop putting spaces between the end of your sentence or clause and your punctuation. I realize the French in particular insist on doing this because, well, they're French, but that doesn't change the fact that for written English it is completely and entirely wrong. If you want to be taken seriously, be serious. Write like you care, not like a third grader. English not your first language? Fair enough, but then consider this your first step toward being taken more seriously in your communication.Brandon Chester - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
The question mark with spaces on both sides reminds me of the conditional operator in C :)kurahk7 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Keep in mind that each of these publications only have a sample size of one, and that there are variances between the same products. Because of that, Displaymate might have received an iPad with a slightly worse calibration/panel than Anandtech and vice versa for the Surface.BadSimian - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Displaymate on the iPad Pro's screen - "It is by far the best performing mobile LCD display that we have ever tested, and it breaks many display performance records." http://www.displaymate.com/iPad_Pro9_ShootOut_1.ht...Deelron - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
"Since departure of Anand, Apple product reviews look like PR marketing speech, although the tests and content itself of the review do not match the speech"Amusing since so many reviews by Anand on Apple products had the exact same refrain in the comments.
Wolfpup - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Huh? Apple's CPUs have been years ahead of the ARM stuff available for Android for...years. Swift was a nice A9+ just like Krait, but since the year after (2012) their CPUs have just been massively far ahead...and yet I STILL hear comments like this that seem completely unaware of that.zepi - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Amoled doesn't mean infinite contrast in practice, only in pitch black test environment. In real life blackest signal is (reflectance) x (ambient light), not zero. Due to this, in high ambient light new iPad has better blacks than any amoled display on the market.And actually, if we go to signal processing maths and measurements, we could start drawing comparisons from them. No one in their right mind would try to argue that 16-bit CD quality audio has infinite dynamic range, even though it is very easy to sample total silence in form of zero signal value to a musical track.
Also music volume is not considered to be infinite, but the value is compared to arbitrarily defined human hearing threshold and converted to logarithmic decibels with 0 meaning non-zero value at the lowest level human ear can measure.
One pretty reasonable comparison point for amoled contrast might be using the quantization error at lower end of the brightness. Ie: something along the lines of set brightness of display to max, display uniform pictures of gray at RGB(1,1,1), measure this brightness in lumens, divide by two (this is quantization error for lowest measurable signal) and then use this as a divisor for the highest recorded value for RGB(255,255,255). Depending on gamma, dividing by two gives wrong results, but for linear display this would be ok.
Infinitely linear displays are available ACME shop just next to frictionless bearings and other such very handy things...
UtilityMax - Monday, June 6, 2016 - link
I suspect iPad Pro is compared with the flagship android smartphones because Android tablet hardware sucks. Just have a look at the Galaxy Tab S2 or the Pixel C.tecsi - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Any chance of including iPad Air benchmark numbers as many of we iPad Air owners want to understand the performance gains we can expect.I assumed I could just look at your iPad Air 2/iPad Air reviews to get those numbers there, but apparently your benchmarks are different as the iPad Air 2 Kraken 1.1 numbers were different in the two reviews.
Please let us know if you can do this.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Unfortunately we do not have the original Air, so we are unable to generate any new numbers for it.