Samsung Galaxy S 5 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Joshua Ho on April 8, 2014 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Mobile
- Galaxy S 5
Display
As the smartphone market continues to mature, the distinguishing between smartphones becomes harder and harder as OEMs continue to converge in platform and in most other aspects. This is most evident when looking at the progression from the Galaxy S2 generation to today. Back then, the Galaxy S2 was notable because of its Exynos 4210 SoC, which was far ahead of Qualcomm’s dual core Scorpion solutions at the time, which meant non-Samsung OEMs had notably worse CPU and GPU performance. The same was also true for the original Galaxy S with its Hummingbird SoC. Today, just about every OEM ships the same SoC. The difference between 8974AB and 8974AC is effectively only an eight percent CPU bump for the AC variant.
One of the key differentiators now in the market is display. The Galaxy S 5 features a 5.1-inch 1080p Full HD Super AMOLED display, equipped with the usual set of software defined color profiles. The GS5 gets a new adaptive profile that automatically adjusts the tint of the display according to the color of the ambient light. It's a neat effect, however Samsung's Cinema mode still ends up being the most accurate.
As always, we measure color accuracy using Spectracal’s CalMAN 5 software and a custom workflow for smartphones and tablets.
The results show that the Galaxy S5 has a display that is dramatically improved from the Galaxy S4. However, the Galaxy S line doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so it’s important to also look at how it compares against the best LCDs in other phones. In this department, things aren’t quite as perfect. To start, the color gamut control is still rather poor even on Cinema mode, as effectively all of the secondary colors miss the sRGB targets for saturation sweep. Yellow, cyan secondaries and green primaries are also notably out of the sRGB gamut triangle. While recent headlines have raved about the Galaxy S5’s record-setting color accuracy, I don’t see this at all in the results. Still, against the competition in the Android space, Samsung has improved a tremendous amount while other OEMs seem to be stagnating or even regressing in color accuracy. The only Android OEM that actually beats Samsung in the color accuracy department is now Google, which is strange because they contract out their hardware to other Android OEMs.
Looking at the saturation sweep, it’s evident that Samsung is now about equivalent to LG in color accuracy for their displays. HTC is barely ahead, with such a small difference that it’s not worth counting. Only Google and Apple have a noticeable lead in this department, a huge improvement from 2013 when Samsung trailed far behind most other competitors in this test.
In the Gretag Macbeth Colorchecker, Samsung continues to hold its position, beating all but Google and Apple. HTC is noticeably behind in this department compared to Samsung, as the One (M8) is horrific in this department compared to even the original HTC One.
In the contrast department, Samsung continues to dominate, with effectively infinite contrast. Based upon some quick viewing of the display in the darkest room I have in the house, I don’t see any obvious DC bias issues. Unfortunately, I still see some ghosting on the display at low brightness which manifests as a purple trail when scrolling. This seems to be unchanged from the Galaxy S4. The minimum white brightness is around 1.8 nits, which is great for reading at night, as many LCD-screened phones such as the LG G Pro 2 have a minimum white brightness of around 7-12 nits.
Samsung has also made great gains in the maximum brightness department, which is especially pleasing because for the longest time, AMOLED was noticeably less bright which made it incredibly difficult to read webpages and similar content outdoors. I’m happy to say that this is no longer the case, as the Galaxy S5 now has a display that realistically reaches around 440 nits outdoors with a pure white image, although this requires auto-brightness to be on and will vary with the screen mode. The maximum that is accessible without this daytime boost mode is somewhere around 350 nits.
The problem is the way Samsung has achieved this, something that is shown in the grayscale tests. While Samsung has done a great job in clamping down the white point to around 6504k, grayscale is so noticeably green that not only does CalMAN show this in the measurements, but also casual observation. I can literally see that the grayscale image is not gray, but an off-green. I’m not quite sure how this happened, but I suspect that this was done in an effort to increase peak brightness as even in the bluest display mode, green is still closely tracking with blue.
Overall, I’m quite pleased with the display. The AMOLED display in the Galaxy S5 is finally equivalent to LCD displays in color accuracy and peak luminance, areas that LCD used to be the best in. Throw in the incredible contrast that AMOLED has always had and the ability to toggle between wide color gamut and accurate color, and I would say that AMOLED is finally equal, if not slightly better than LCD. With a few more iterations, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to write that AMOLED is clearly superior to LCD. Of course, there are some issues such as a noticeable green tint to the display in grayscale and Samsung still needs to improve their clamping of gamut to sRGB for Cinema/Movie mode, but none of these issues seriously detract from the viewing experience.
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nerd1 - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
Samsung still makes the most well-around and practical phone out there. It's funny so many people are crazing the metal stuff that bends and scratches without case.synaesthetic - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
I used to love Samsung phones, but not so much anymore. If I'm going to spend 600 bucks on a phone, can we please stop making it feel like a toy? I'm not saying anything about using metal; Nokia's Lumia devices are made of polycarbonate but they feel rock-solid and excellently constructed.AMOLED? Meh. IPS is where it's at. AMOLED's oversaturated to the point of cartoonishness. With AMOLED, in six months of decently heavy use, tons of the blue subpixels burn out and the display gets weird unless you're very, very careful to make sure that all your subpixels wear evenly. White webpages drain the crap out of battery. I had a Galaxy Nexus for eighteen months (the one with the RGBG pentile matrix that's supposed to reduce the effects of subpixel burn out) and within half that time I had blue stripes where the status bar and nav bar were whenever I put it in landscape mode. IPS doesn't have this issue; my Nexus 4's screen looks exactly the way it did when it was new, eight months later.
The only new device I really care much about right now is the Xperia Z2. Sony phones have been awesome for a while now except for Sony's insistence on using crap screens, but the Z2's display is amazing. Not oversaturated, looks natural and fantastic, has great viewing angles... not to mention an sdcard slot and a gigantic battery.
Samsung doesn't sell a ton of phones because they're the best device, just like Apple doesn't. They both sell a ton of phones because they both spend a ridiculous amount of money on marketing.
ashleynelson548 - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
My review is simple. Get in line and get this phone: http://amzn.to/1ksys3o - Got a chance to test it and this is one awesome phone. Finally Samsung got something right with the S5. I've had HTC & Samsung phones prior to the Galaxy series came out. And nothing has come close to this phone. Great resolution, great camera, love it still has a sd slot to expand your storage capacity along with the high gb internal memory. Lots of ways to tweak to your liking.SymphonyX7 - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
Anyone know how Anandtech measure the phone's power consumption? Do they just hook up a voltmeter between the battery terminals, get the voltage readout and compute from that?nerd1 - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
I think they used in-line powermeter.Stiv21 - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
This fake , here's flagshiphttp://pdadb.net/index.php?m=specs&id=6040&...
RonaldNCoady - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
People who are been obsessed with stock experience pushed to their phones the minute Google announces a new update buy a Nexus phone. Everyone else buys the phone they feel best suits them. Most people teds to buy Galaxy S phones, simply because they are the best, and one of the very few with an OLED display. http://evo9.it/qr.net/aacrodex - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
I really didn't get the capture latency part. Unlike iphone, android phones support continuous drive, so if you want to capture multiple photos, just don't release your finger.abufrejoval - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
I am (actually more than a little) disappointed that Samsung is trying to do the right thing on one hand with the introduction of Knox for securely running enterprise applications on these devices, yet on the other hand not taking suffient care to really enable them to be what they are:Very small and portable yet incredibly powerful workstations, quite capable of replacing entry level PCs by just sticking them into (better placing them on a wireless) docking station, which has a set of full sized screens, keyboard and mouse connected to them so you can run either light office applications right off the phone or use Citrix (or any other terminal server protocol) for some heavier stuff, which still requires a beefy VDI to run.
To call them "phones" today is like calling a PC a "word processor": Sure that's how they started, but that's not what the have become.
I bought the Note 3 (like its predecessor, a Note 1) as a very personal workstation, also bought the docking station, which gave me HDMI video and audio out as well as 3 USB (2.0) ports, but I was extremely disappointed to find that the "handheld workstation" wouldn't properly initialize the Asix USB Ethernet adapter, which *every* Android I've ever tried works with out of the box.
And the monitor was little better: Even though the phone's screen is actually turned off with KitKat and orientation properly switches to landscape mode, all UI elements look groteskly swollen because they were sized to fit a 1080p resolution on a ~6" screen, but not the 32" LED TV I use on my desktop. Needless to say that word processing is no fun when letters are taller than your thumb.
Clearly the only use case Samsung seems to support via the HDMI port is watching movies: Something I don't need a workstation for.
After no essential Knox features or applications were forthcoming I went ahead and rooted my Note 3, essentially killing any chance of ever using Knox on that device now. With two "netcfg eth0 dhcp" commands in sequence I can now properly bring up Ethernet and thus connect to the securized office LAN and run Citrix, but with the built-in and fixed DPI settings all other desktop use is still painful to look at.
There are of course solutions to that problem: Any Parandroid ROM and derivative has wonderful multi-DPI support built in, but unfortunately since the MHL adapter in the Samsung devices doesn't have an open source driver, you immediately loose the HDMI connect, once you put one of these multi-DPI capable Androids on the workstation: Catch-22!
The only one who can fix this is Samsung and it doesn't look like they are using this opportunity to make their devices more appealing for enterprise use.
I have quite a number of Android devices and having a different flavour on each one of them would make them pretty unusable. So I put Omnirom on all my Galaxys (except the Note 3), my Nexus 4, 7, 10, Oppo Find 5, Asus TF101, Notion Ink Adam and even switched the return and menu keys around on all the Nexus devices to put them back where "God" (Samsung) intended them to be on my first Galaxy S, with home in the center.
And since the original launchers were always far too limited and boring I've been running SPB 3D shell on all of these devices for years, which gives me both speed and a nice look as well as a level of consistency across phone, portrait and landscape tablet sized Androids, not possible otherwise.
Custom Androids give me choice, configurability and privacy: Let the hardware vendors concentrate on creating the best workstation they can make and leave the OS alone!
I bought a post-PC darn it, like in "personal" not a blackmail subscription!
tomgadd - Sunday, April 13, 2014 - link
Why are the tester do not test audio quality??The background is, that people between 15-30 years do consume 90% of music on their smartphone. So it would be a smart move to give the audio quality a higher priority in the test.
Finally the S5 has in my view the best audio quality available on a smartphone these days.
A really smart move from samsung....that was formerly one of the key the departements of apple....Sadly the competitors needed a few years to understand the importance...