Conclusions: Two Very Impressive Tablet Displays and One Disappointment…
These Mini Tablets include some of the most impressive and innovative displays and display technologies, which is perhaps not that surprising given how popular and competitive this mobile category has become.
First, they all have high resolution displays, with more pixels than your 50 inch HDTV, but on a 7-8 inch screen, which is certainly impressive. With about 325 Pixels Per Inch, at normal viewing distances a person with 20/20 Vision can’t resolve the individual pixels, so the displays all appear to be perfectly sharp.
Even more impressive is that the Kindle Fire HDX 7 and new Google Nexus 7 displays also deliver a full 100 percent Color Gamut, with color accuracy and picture quality that is probably better than most HDTVs, laptops, and monitors. They accomplish this in two very different ways…
The new Google Nexus 7 has a very impressive display that uses the highest performance LCDs with Low Temperature Poly Silicon LTPS. The very high efficiency LTPS technology allows the new Nexus 7 display to provide a full 100 percent Color Gamut and at the same time produce the brightest Tablet display that we have measured so far in this Shoot-Out series.
Most impressive of all is the Kindle fire HDX 7 – the first Tablet display to use super high technology Quantum Dots, which produce highly saturated primary colors that are similar to those produced by OLED displays. They not only significantly increase the Color Gamut to 100 percent but also improve the power efficiency at the same time. Instead of using White LEDs (which have yellow phosphors) that produce a broad light spectrum that makes it hard to efficiently produce saturated colors, Quantum Dots directly convert the light from Blue LEDs into highly saturated primary colors for LCDs. You can see the remarkable difference in their light spectra in Figure 4. Quantum Dots are going to revolutionize LCDs for the next 5+ years. To learn more about Quantum Dots read this from Nanosys. Congratulations to Amazon for leading the way and being the first to incorporate this revolutionary display technology in Tablets! It will be interesting to see how rapidly other manufacturers adopt Quantum Dots. This level of display competition and excellence is great to see! Consumers will come to appreciate and then demand this new high level of display performance excellence, which will hopefully spur other manufacturers into improving their display performance in order to remain competitive.
And finally… the iPad mini with Retina Display unfortunately comes in with a distant 3rd place finish behind the innovative displays on the Kindle Fire HDX 7 and new Nexus 7 because it still has the same small 63 percent Color Gamut as the original iPad mini and even older iPad 2. That is inexcusable for a current generation premium Tablet. The big differences in Color Gamut between the Kindle Fire HDX 7 and Nexus 7 and the much smaller 63 percent Gamut in the iPad mini Retina Display were quite obvious and easy to see in the side-by-side Viewing Tests. See Figure 1 to compare the widely disparate Color Gamuts and Figure 2 to see the very large Color Errors that result. This all appears to be due to incredibly poor planning. Instead of moving up to the higher performance (and cost) Low Temperature Poly Silicon LCDs, Apple chose to continue gambling on IGZO, which has resulted in both production shortages and inferior products.
Two innovative Tablet manufacturers, Amazon and Google, have significantly leapfrogged Apple by introducing Tablet displays using LTPS (in the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 and the new Nexus 7), and they are significantly outperforming the IGZO and a-Si displays in the current iPads. Apple was once the leader in mobile displays, unfortunately it has fallen way behind in both Tablets and Smartphones. This should be a wakeup call…