The Samsung Galaxy S10+ Snapdragon & Exynos Review: Almost Perfect, Yet So Flawed
by Andrei Frumusanu on March 29, 2019 9:00 AM ESTDisplay Measurement
On the new Galaxy S10, the display is the centre-piece of the phone. Samsung in particular has proclaimed some big new improvements in terms of brightness and display quality, advertising the HDR10+ capabilities of the screen.
One thing that Samsung didn’t mention is that this is the first Galaxy device shipping with Android’s new colour management support out of the box. What this means is that we have support for both standard gamut as well as wide-gamut content without switching between display modes in the settings. This latter menu has been redesigned in the Galaxy S10: gone are the familiar display modes such as Cinema, AMOLED Cinema or AMOLED Photo. The new S10 instead simply ships with a mere two modes: “Natural” and “Vivid”.
The natural mode is the default that the devices comes in, and is also the accurate CMS profile of the phone. This also means that Samsung now finally ships an accurate targeting display mode out of the box, targeting both sRGB and Display P3 gamuts (I didn’t test wider gamuts!).
The Vivid mode is a super-wide gamut near the native capability of the panel, the colours here don’t adhere to any specific display standard and are just meant for punchier colours which some users enjoy.
We move on to the display calibration and fundamental display measurements of the S10 screen. As always, we thank X-Rite and SpecraCal, as our measurements are performed with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of black levels which are measured with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and examined using SpectraCal's CalMAN software.
The Galaxy S10’s brightness was something that was much touted during the launch of the phone. Here Samsung had advertised “peak brightness of up to 1200 nits”. This figure was sourced by DisplayMate’s testing, however it’s a pretty misleading number as the phone only achieves this at minimal APL, which is nearly impossible to achieve in real life usage.
In regular scenarios, the Galaxy S10’s maximum brightness is similar to that we’re used to from past Samsung phones, reaching a maximum of 310-320nits.
To achieve brightness higher than this, the phone needs to be in adaptive brightness mode and in high ambient light. Here the Galaxy S10+ reaches up to around 700nits. I’ve tested this on both my units and got matching maximum brightness figures.
SpectraCal CalMAN
Exynos Natural
Exynos Vivid
Snapdragon Natural Snapdragon Vivid
Greyscale accuracy measurements on the Galaxy S10+ ended up being quite a headache because the Exynos and Snapdragon units behaved very differently. The issue at hand wasn’t any manufacturing divergence on the part of the panel, but rather an issue of diverging software calibrations between the different models and display modes. To make things even more annoying, the Galaxy S10 is also Samsung’s first smartphone with very aggressive CABC (Content adaptive brightness control) which cannot be turned off, with brightness scaling very differently based on APL.
At 200 cd/m² on both Exynos and Snapdragon units in Natural mode we see too warm white colour balance, with especially dominating reds, resulting in colour temperatures of 6327K and 6250K for each respective unit. In Vivid mode, oddly enough the Snapdragon was warmer at 6945K while the Exynos had a more blue 7697K CCT. It’s to be noted that in Vivid mode Samsung allows users to adjust the colour temperature, whilst this isn't possible in Natural mode.
What is inherently broken on both phones in different modes are the gamma curves. On the Exynos unit the natural mode has a far too low gamma at low levels and too high on high levels. In Vivid mode this low gamma on the low-end is reversed, with some additional black clipping now due to too high gamma, with again too high gamma at the high levels.
On the Snapdragon unit, the natural mode is the only display mode out of all combinations that actually manages to have a correct gamma near 2.2, with the only issue being a slight amount of black clipping at the lower levels. This is the mode and device with the best greyscale dE2000 of 1.79 – only thwarted from getting a better score due to the overly red colour temperature.
Exynos Gamma Problem
The gamma issues on the Exynos variant in natural mode are especially apparent in the most ironic place: Samsung’s own display mode settings screen. When enabling Night Mode in OneUI and using the dark interface, the background isn’t actually black but of a very low level grey. It’s exactly at these levels where the gamma differences between the Natural and Vivid display become obviously apparent. The above GIF shows how the broken low gamma in natural mode makes the UI exceedingly brighter. On the Snapdragon unit of the Galaxy S10, and for that matter the S9 and Note9 as well, we don’t encounter this change in gamma when switching between display modes and the Night Mode UI remains of an extremely dark grey nearing true black.
We end up with four different greyscale comparison patterns:
SpectraCal CalMAN - Exynos Vivid
The Exynos in Vivid mode is too blue with too dark mid to high level tones.
SpectraCal CalMAN - Exynos Natural
The Exynos in natural mode is unperceivably red, however we can clearly see too bright tones above what they normally should be.
SpectraCal CalMAN - Snapdragon Vivid
The Snapdragon in Vivid mode is ever so slightly too blue, but the gamma is off and again too dark.
SpectraCal CalMAN - Snapdragon Natural
Finally, the Snapdragon in Natural mode is the only mode that is near perfect, with correct gamma and a hard to perceive slight shift towards red.
SpectraCal CalMAN
Exynos - Snapdragon
Continuing with saturation accuracy measurements, we see that in that in Natural mode on both phones we’re getting similar results with dE2000 deviations of 1.68 for the Exynos and 1.48 for the Snapdragon. Both phones share the same issue of having offset red mid-level saturations.
SpectraCal CalMAN
Exynos - Samsung S-Browser
Testing the Display P3 patterns in Natural mode is a bit of a headache. Samsung introduced colour management with the Galaxy S10, however there’s one gigantic caveat: The OS can’t display content of different gamuts alongside each other. For example, viewing P3 pictures in Samsung’s default S-Browser results in incorrectly clipped saturations, and in effect the browser is still limited to sRGB content.
Out of all applications I’ve tested on the Galaxy S10, Samsung’s only app that supports wide gamut content is the Gallery app, but again with a big caveat. It only switches over to wide gamut when opening up a picture, and when in thumbnail mode the content is still limited to sRGB. Apple’s iPhone Photos app doesn’t have this issue and is able to display P3 thumbnails alongside sRGB thumbnails.
SpectraCal CalMAN
Exynos - Samsung Gallery vs Chrome P3 Forced
To make matters worse, the actual rendering of P3 content though the OS is actually incorrect. Displaying P3 patterns in the Gallery app results in a dE of 3.18, which at the limit of what should be acceptable. However if we completely bypass Android’s internal CMS transform and instead of rely on an external app, we can achieve some great results. In this case we rely on Chrome and tell it to force itself to D65 P3 display mode, and through this we’re measuring the Galaxy S10’s panel with a fantastic dE2000 of 1.03, as good as Apple’s best performance in the iPhone XS.
In the end, because most users will be using P3 content through the default CMS, the Galaxy S10+ ends up with a disappointing dE of 3.18.
SpectraCal CalMAN
SpectraCal CalMAN
Exynos
SpectraCal CalMAN
SpectraCal CalMAN
Snapdragon
Finally, in the Gretag-Macbeth test of common found tones we see a case of the Exynos S10 scoring worse with a dE of 2.18 versus the Snapdragon’s figure of 1.62. In terms of hue, both display panels exhibit extremely similar characteristics in the test tones, but it’s again the flawed gamma on the Exynos unit which really offsets things and shows too bright results, compared to the Snapdragon’s near perfect gamma.
Display Conclusions
Overall, the Galaxy S10+’s display is a typical Galaxy S display. Samsung over the last 3 iterations has continued to have issues with their gamma, often times patching the most obvious issues a few months after release. While differences between the Exynos and Snapdragon calibrations have always been there, we’ve never had such a jarring issue as on the Exynos’ Natural mode. The other display modes including on the Snapdragon also continue to have black clipping at the first few greyscale levels. To be honest, this is getting a bit tiring and frankly I’m losing hope in Samsung to ever getting this right at release, it’s obvious that the quality control in their calibration department just isn’t there and after so many years of the same issues the company obviously doesn’t care to improve things.
Samsung adopting Android’s CMS in the Galaxy S10 also is of mixed feelings. Actually the S10 shipped with the traditional various mDNIe scenarios we’re used to from Samsung, but they’re just unavailable from the settings UI. Thus I think the decision to have the phone released with the CMS must have been a last minute choice. The biggest caveat here is the fact that Android cannot display different gamuts alongside each other, and fundamentally this is an issue of Android, Google and maybe even the SoC vendors. For now, Apple is 4 years ahead of everybody else and there’s yet to be an Android phone matching the iPhone’s colour management capabilities.
Having said all of the negative things, the Galaxy S10 with all its issues still probably remains among the best displays available. It’s a step down from the S9 and Note9 in terms of calibration, but all other aspects such as display sharpness, viewing angles, brightness and naturally contrast are just top-notch for the new Galaxy S10.
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xian333c - Wednesday, April 17, 2019 - link
How to buy that unicorn on table in ur shout?Brightontech - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
it is an awesome phone<a href="https://www.brightontech.net/2019/04/audiovideo-ed... Editor and Video Converter</a>
Video Editor and Video Converter
Jhereck - Tuesday, April 23, 2019 - link
Hi Andrei another question regarding the patch designed to increase PELT resonsiveness : is there any way a third party kernel can include it, therefore making s9 and s10 the devices they should be ?You know like last year when you tried to play with s9 exynos kernel in order to match snapdragon power and power efficency ?
Thanks in advance
Rixos - Thursday, May 2, 2019 - link
It's kind of sad, I was actualy looking at the s10e as a replacement device for my galaxy S7 but as I live in Europe I would be getting the Exynos variant. Worse audio quality, less processing power and worse camera results. Basically seeing this kind of ruined the purchase for me. In some sense I wish I would not have seen it, the S10e is likely still a great upgrade for my S7 but knowing that there is a better version out there just ruins it for me. I guess ignorance sometimes really is bliss.theblitz707 - Thursday, May 23, 2019 - link
I see this is in every review. I actually went to stores and used my phones ambient light sensor and an another phones flashlight to measure display brightnesses. Although slightly inaccurate lg g7 gave a 1050lux reading with boost on.(all test on apl100) Taking that as a base s9 plus did 1020 s10 plus did 1123 and p20 pro did around 900 when i shone my flashlight to each sensor. So why everyone makes it seem like they are less bright than they actually are? Does using a flashlight to trigger high brightness impossible to imagine? Let me tell you those oled screens get very bright with high ambient light like outside on a sunny day.ballsystemlord - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Spelling and grammar corrections. I did not read the whole thing, so there maybe more.Samsung new L3 cache consists of two different structures
Possesive:
Samsung's new L3 cache consists of two different structures
Similarly, the A75's should be a ton more efficient the A55 cores at the upper performance points of the A55's.
Missing "than":
Similarly, the A75's should be a ton more efficient than the A55 cores at the upper performance points of the A55's.
Arm states that the new Cortex A76 has new state-of-the-art prefetchers and looking at what the CPU is able to do one my patterns I'd very much agree with this claim.
Missing "to":
Arm states that the new Cortex A76 has new state-of-the-art prefetchers and looking at what the CPU is able to do to one my patterns I'd very much agree with this claim.
The nature of region-based prefetchers means that fundamentally any patterns which has some sort of higher-level repeatability will get caught and predicted, which unfortunately means designing a structured test other than a full random pattern is a bit complicated to achieve.
"have" not "has" and a missing y:
The nature of region-based prefetchers means that fundamentally any patterns which have some sort of higher-level repeatability will get caught and predicted, which unfortunately means designing a structured test other than a fully random pattern is a bit complicated to achieve.
Switching over from linear graphs to logarithmic graphs this makes transitions in the cache hierarchies easier to analyse.
Excess "this" and analyze is with a "z":
Switching over from linear graphs to logarithmic graphs makes transitions in the cache hierarchies easier to analyze.
Indeed one of the bigger microarchitectural changes of the core was the addition of a second data store unit.
Missing comma:
Indeed, one of the bigger microarchitectural changes of the core was the addition of a second data store unit.
...we see that in the L3 memory region store curve is actually offset by 1MB compared to the flip/load curves, which ending only after 3MB.
"ed" not "ing":
...we see that in the L3 memory region store curve is actually offset by 1MB compared to the flip/load curves, which ended only after 3MB.
"Traditionally such misses are tracked by miss status holding registers (MSHRs), however I haven't seen Arm CPUs actually use this nomenclature."
This is almost certainly a run on sentence with missing punctuation. Try:
"Traditionally, such misses are tracked by miss status holding registers (MSHRs). However, I haven't seen Arm CPUs actually use this nomenclature."
"Again to have a wider range of performance comparison across ARMv8 cores in mobile here's a grand overview of the most relevant SoCs we've tested:"
Missing comma:
"Again, to have a wider range of performance comparison across ARMv8 cores in mobile here's a grand overview of the most relevant SoCs we've tested:"
giallo - Monday, June 17, 2019 - link
how much did they pay you to write this bullshit? you must be true downstheblitz707 - Monday, August 19, 2019 - link
i discovered something about display brightness on oleds recently. I did a test with a7 with auto brightness on.Lets assume, on a slightly dark room you set your brightness to 25nits(whites), so when you go out to the sun phone boosts around 750-800 nits.
Now lets assume on a slightly dark room you set your brightness to 250 nits, now when you go out to the sun phone boosts to 900nits. (what i actually did was not go in a dark room but while i was outside i covered the sensor with my hand so it thought i was in a dim place)
I used to assume everytime you go out to sun it would get maxed but apparently it still depends on what you set your phone before.(dumb a bit if you ask me, cuz you know, its THE sun, brightest thing..) I believe this might be the reason why you didnt reach to 100APL 1200nits.
P.s. I know every brightness sensor is different but i had tested lg on full white and i had gotten 1050 lux, i also tested s10 or plus, all white and i had gotten 1120lux on white,100APL.(It was painfully hard to find the sensor to shine the flashlight, its somewhere around upper part of the phone under the display).
It would be cool if you retested the brightness in this way:
1- After you put auto brightness on, Go in a very dark room or cover the sensor, so phone put itself to a dark brightness, after that happens, set the brigthness to max while you are still in the dark room.(auto is still on).
2- Now go under sun or shine a phone flashlight to sensor and test the brightness on white APL100. That would be really nice.
theblitz707 - Monday, August 19, 2019 - link
lg is g7 on boosted, forgot to mention