Pixel 2 XL screen quality
Just thought I'd make this thread as I'm planning on buying the Pixel 2 XL, however knowing that it has the LG V30 OLED screen, I've become concerned after reading about the LG V30 screen quality from reviews like these:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/16/16457544/lg-v30-review-design
"You may be wondering why I have left discussion of the LG V30’s display for last. Well, that’s because I wanted you to understand the essential strengths and weaknesses of this phone before I told you the ultimate deal-breaker for me. The OLED screen of the V30 is just bad. There’s no dodging this issue, and there’s no making excuses for it. This isn’t a good display, and if your phone doesn’t have a good display it might as well be a Nokia 5110.
Areas of the same color on the V30 appear blotchy: when I open up a Google Keep note, I don’t get a flat white canvas as I should, but instead I see streaks of gray, looking as if there’s an inconsistent backlight. This being an OLED display, there’s no backlight to speak of, so it’s just poor brightness uniformity across those light-emitting diodes. The same unhappy effect is even more pronounced with darker grays and colors like navy blue, and it’s amplified by the V30’s apparent inability to render color gradations smoothly. Gradients appear grainy and I see unpleasant color banding, exactly the same issues that Ars Technica encountered with a preproduction V30 device last month.
Every time I switched between the V30 and HTC’s U11 in my testing, the U11’s screen felt like a luxurious escape. It’s painfully apparent that LG’s so-called plastic OLED screens are multiple generations behind Samsung’s alternative — which graces the Galaxy S8, Galaxy Note 8, and the upcoming iPhone X — as well as significantly behind the best LCDs, as exhibited by the U11. If you’d asked me, before getting ahold of the V30, what most excited me about this phone, the bezel-deprived OLED screen would have been one of my top two or three features. I really do think LG nailed the dimensions of this phone, and I’m confident the screen technology contributes to the V30’s thinness (as well as making it compatible with Google’s budding Daydream VR ecosystem). But the V30’s desaturated, lifeless screen, addled with all of the foregoing issues, makes this a phone I find impossible to love, or even get along with on a daily basis."
And this:
https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/09/lg-v30-hands-on-display-quality/
"The front is dominated by all-new LG-made 6-inch 2880×1440 P-OLED display with an extra-tall 18:9 aspect ratio. LG has been producing OLED TVs for some time, but the company's OLED display production has kept away from smartphones after the awful LG G Flex and G Flex 2 displays in the 2013-2015 era. These were physically curved smartphones (they were banana shaped for some reason) and LG's flexible OLED technology was so early that the display couldn't display a smooth, consistent color.
Two years later and things don't seem to be any better. The OLED panel on my pre-production unit still has the same issues as the LG G Flex. In low brightness in a dark room, the screen is grainy and has "dirty" looking horizontal banding all over it. The light level is also woefully uneven, with hotspots blazing out of the left and right corners."
Now this does sound very concerning to me. The Pixel 2 XL is not a cheap device, and reading these reviews, it sounds like the screen is not good at all. Not average, not decent, but sounds actually quite poor.
Granted this may be a bad batch, might be defects, might be a number of things, or it could be that the display simply is not good and noticeably worse than modern LCD and AMOLED displays.
I had thought that the Pixel 2 XL pretty much ticked a whole lot of boxes for me, but if the screen is that poor, I really don't know if I could spend the money on a phone with a sub-par screen.
Android Central's review is nicer on the screen:
https://www.androidcentral.com/lg-v30-review
"I'm happy to report that the company has made a huge amount of progress over the past two years, to the point where V30's screen is almost as good as Samsung's SuperAMOLED. That sounds like faint praise, but I'm actually more than satisfied with what LG has brought to the table here. It's not Galaxy S8 good, but it's surprisingly close, and that's an achievement in itself.
Samsung is still the king of smartphone displays, there's no doubt about that. But LG's latest screen, at Quad HD+ resolution, looks fantastic and punchy, and unlike some of those older P-OLED panels, is clear enough to use outdoors in bright daylight."
I don't get how we can have such a large disparities of opinions on the screen? One reviewer pretty much calling it terrible and another saying it's great and almost as good as the best screens on the market.
I guess we have to wait for the reviews for the Pixel 2 XL to come out, and I'll have to see the screen myself to decide, but these comments on the LG V30 screen do concern me.
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