1440p smartphone displays have now matured to the point where they’re bright enough for regular use, and the increased sharpness and clarity makes viewing text a pleasure. The higher resolution also has advantages in virtual reality applications, which is quickly becoming a great use case for high-end devices like the HTC 10. HTC’s Super LCD technology has typically been one of the better LCDs on the market, and this is no exception with the HTC 10. Top end brightness isn’t as good as the LG G5 provides with its display, but we’re still getting fantastic viewing angles and reasonably deep blacks for an LCD, leading to a great contrast ratio that helps colors ‘pop’.
Color performance in the default ‘vivid’ display mode is poor as you might expect. Colors are oversaturated to deliver a more vibrant image, which does make things look great in some situations, but you lose that realistic look you’d get from a color correct display. In this mode, the display also has a very cold color temperature, which gives whites and greys in particular a blue tint. Luckily, for those craving an accurate display for color critical work, HTC has included an sRGB display profile that significantly improves the performance of this display. Switching to this mode doesn’t make the display completely accurate - the color temperature is still too cold - but this can be corrected by entering the temperature slider and adjusting it three notches to the warm (left) side.
When the display is corrected in this fashion, the display is very accurate, coming in just above 2.0 dE2000 in our accuracy tests. Personally I’d still leave it on the vivid mode (and there’s a temperature slider in this mode too if you’d prefer a warmer display) but I appreciate how HTC has included a color accurate mode. It’s also worth mentioning that because HTC has used physical rather than on-screen navigation buttons, the screen real estate available is larger than some other smartphones like the LG G5. The 5.2-inch display is pretty comfortable to use in general, and the slim bezels to either side assist with usability.
