Display Shoot-Out: iPad 2 vs. Kindle Fire vs. Nook Tablet

Dr. Raymond M. Soneira, President of DisplayMate Technologies, has taken an in depth look at the displays for the iPad 2, the Kindle Fire, and the Nook Tablet.

DisplayMate compared the tablets using comprehensive lab measurements and extensive side-by-side visual comparisons using test photos, test images and test patterns. The Comparison Table partially seen below shows their finding in the following categories: Screen Reflections, Brightness and Contrast, Colors and Intensities, Viewing Angles, Display Backlight Power Consumption, and Running Time on Battery.

iPad 2:
The iPad 2 display has a pixel density of 132 ppi and was found to be fairly well calibrated, delivering bright images with excellent contrast, reasonably accurate colors and good viewing angle performance. It did have a reduced Color Gamut which is listed as a major shortcoming but it improved color saturation by steepening its intensity scale.


Kindle Fire:
The Kindle Fire was found to have a fairly good display but with two major flaws, one of which is fixable with software. DisplayMate found that despite an "anti-reflective treatment" the Kindle Fire had the highest reflectance levels they'd ever measured – 70% higher than the iPad 2, and double the Nook Tablet. The major, although software fixable, issue with the Kindle Fire is the Gallery. DisplayMate found that the grayscale is way off causing detail to be lost in bright photographs and it provides only 16-bit color (65,000 colors).

Nook Tablet:
The Nook Tablet has the lowest reflectance of any tablet DisplayMate has ever tested – the iPad 2 has 28 percent higher reflectance and the Kindle Fire has more than double that of the Nook Tablet. Its factory display calibration is very good with gray-scale better than most HDTVs but its White Point at 6,016K is slightly more yellowish than the standard 6,500K. The Nook was found to deliver very smooth and accurate 24-bit color in its Gallery.

Conclusion:
There is no absolute winner for this Display Shoot-Out because all 3 Tablets were both winners and losers in some categories, which is interesting in and of itself. In most categories the 3 displays were reasonably close in their lab test performance, which again is interesting, but perhaps not that surprising since they are all IPS LCDs. But the Nook Tablet was the leader in more categories – both in the lab tests and the viewing tests – so it is the declared winner in overall display performance and picture quality, at least for this round…

Hit the link below for a much more detailed analysis.


Read More [via 9to5Mac]