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.
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Cow86 - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
I really wonder if there isn't anything wrong with your Oneplus 2 Brandon, I've just been going over some reviews from other sites, and they all seem to be very happy with the phone, both on the performance side and the screen. That being said, most don't look at the screen as detailed as you guys do, but they all call it pleasant, vibrant, if a little blue, and things like that, and the general performance with browsing etc never really seems to be an issue. At the same time, their battery life is pretty poor. It seems to indicate that in most other cases the A57 cores are getting used where with your phone they aren't...That all being said, not a phone for me either way, but I figured I'd just point to the discrepancy.
Brandon Chester - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
I actually think the display discrepancy is actually a good example of how sites that do those very superficial evaluations tend to be wrong about most aspects of a device. A good example is how some reviews parrot the PR line that S808 is perfectly fine despite us having published data showing that it is not. Another example is the mind boggling complaints of the Nexus 5X display being dull or washed out, when it's actually incredibly accurate and covers its target gamut.Ryan Smith - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
And part of the issue is that the human visual system is absolutely terrible about accuracy.For as well as we can see, we are easily tricked by bright colors. Most people will find a bright, oversaturated display to be better. Which if that's what they like, that's fine. But it's not desirable as a stock setting on a phone since it causes shared media to be displayed inaccurately.
Cow86 - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
All fair points, and I do agree I wouldn't trust most other sites to be more than subjective comparisons, but at the same time I do wonder how they can say the performance is smooth when your phone clearly was not (which by the way was the main point I was trying to make, I should've put that first and not the screen issue :P). Then again, 'smooth' is subjective as well. My Moto G 2013 is considered smooth by me most of the time...*shrug*grayson_carr - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
I dunno. I have owned a lot of phones this year as an Android developer and tech enthusiast and I did feel that the OnePlus 2 underperformed compared to other phones with the Snapdragon 810 and even 808.K_Space - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
I couldn't agree more. I had an OPO which I bought quite late in 2015 by which time most custom ROMs matured a fair bit. I ended up getting a quick invite for the OPT having attended their launch event almost by chance. The OPO made its way to a family member but I had a chance to play with both for quite a while. Not only do I find the SoC a lot less responsive but the OS is SERIOUSLY lacking in terms of features. Having never used Oxygen 1.0 and moving straight to an 'unofficial' Temasek ROM from CM 11.0 the OP2 truly feels like regression. To add insult to injury, as far as I know OPO still hasn't received Oxygen 2.2 (setteling for that trend that plague other manufacturers of no support for older phones). OPO was a great phone which seriously disrupted the market and forced the hands of other companies to raise their game in the bangs for bucks category. OPT was merely hoping to float on the hype of its predessecor. I'll be waiting for the more mature custom ROMs to land and hopefully that will bring some shine into the phone.zeeBomb - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
Wow... This review surprised me. Dropped outta nowhere, but I find this device disappointing compared to it's predecessor.zodiacfml - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
Ouch.bruh123 - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
im not saying that the phone isn't cool im just saying the price is tooooo mucheddieobscurant - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
Will you review the oneplus X ?