In recent years, the progress of domestic OLED panels is obvious to all, and some flagship panels can have the display quality of international first-line panels on terminal products; but in the public perception, Samsung has always been synonymous with good screens and the benchmark of OLED panels.
Samsung's OLED panel is known for its high brightness, color accuracy and vividness, low blue light, low energy consumption and other advantages, and Samsung every new generation of substrates (luminescent materials), the relevant parameter performance will be improved, and now the E series substrates used in olED panels sold by Samsung have come to E5.
▲ The iQOO 8 Pro, the first E5 substrate OLED
The first Samsung E5 substrate OLED panel was the vivo iQOO 8 Pro released in August last year - in history, every time Samsung updated the E series substrate, its OLED panel will become the representative of the flagship OLED panel at that time, while the previous generation of E series substrates relegated to the second level and is regarded as the "sub-flagship OLED panel".
This year's situation seems to be a little special, the flagship models with Samsung OLED panels are not all inclined to use the E5, but some still use the E4 substrate panel, such as the recent OPPO Find X5 Pro, OnePlus 10 Pro, Redmi K50 Pro, etc. - in addition to the well-known cost problems, why don't these models use the new E5, but continue to use the E4 substrate OLED panel?
▲ The OnePlus 10 Pro, which still uses the E4 substrate OLED
In order to let everyone have a more intuitive comparison of the display quality of E5 and E4 substrate panels, here we have selected several representative models and taken their screen performance for comparative explanation.
On the E5 side, the iQOO 8 Pro, vivo X70 Pro+, Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro, and iQOO 9 Pro were selected, while the E4 side chose the realme GT 2 Pro, one plus 10 Pro, Find X5 Pro, and most recently the Redmi K50 Pro.
The first is the brightness, from the data comparison of 8 models can obviously perceive the (global) excitation brightness of the E5 substrate is significantly higher than that of the E4 substrate - the former E5 substrate can easily reach 900+nits, and some can even exceed 1000nits; and the excitation brightness of the E4 substrate is 700+nits, some excellent E4 panels can actually reach the level of 800nits, but compared with the E5 substrate is still inferior.
(Source: Xiaomi Mi 12 released a warm-up poster)
E5 can have higher brightness in fact, there is a reason, the most important thing is that E5 substrate introduces a "micro prism" structure, so that the optical path of pixels is more concentrated, directly improving the brightness of the vertical direction - the technical principle is similar to the prism spotlight of the car headlights, which can reduce light loss, achieve higher light output efficiency, and the power consumption can be lower under the same brightness.
▲ vivo X70 Pro+ (E5 substrate)
However, the "microprism" structure also has a certain cost, because its brightness in the vertical direction is enhanced by the light path that was originally in other directions, so the brightness of the entire panel will be discounted at other angles, and the actual viewing angle is worse than that of the panel of E4 substrate - which is also the largest slot point of the E5 panel.
Another big improvement in the E5 panel is the performance of color, but if we compare the color accuracy data of these E5 and E4 phones together, it does not seem to explain the advantages of the E5 material.
First of all, let's explain, we generally use the value of "ΔE2000" to measure the color accuracy of a screen, it is actually a direct reflection of the degree of color offset, this value represents the gap between it and the standard color, we take 124 colors to measure, and finally get "124 color average ΔE2000", to fully measure the color accuracy of this screen - you just need to know that the lower the value (the smaller the gap), the more accurate the color accuracy.
▲ OPPO Find X5 Pro (E4 substrate)
We can see that the color accuracy performance of these 8 machines is very good first, but from the data point of view, whether it is P3 or sRGB color standards, the gap between the 4 machines of E5 and the 4 machines of E4 is not large, and it can even be said that the model of E4 substrate is slightly better than that of E5, and among the eight machines, the best models of color accuracy are born in E4 substrate - yes, referring to OPPO's Find X5 Pro, and the Default Display Redmi K50 Pro.
Of course, in addition to the advantages of the hardware itself, the actual performance of a screen is also affected by the adjustment of the manufacturer - not that the quality of the E5 substrate panel is not as good as the E4, but to say that the advantages of the E5 substrate this year do not seem to be as strong as in previous years, and the manufacturers of the E4 substrate panel can even obtain the performance of the E5 substrate panel that is not inferior to the E5 substrate panel through their own optimization and adjustment - perhaps this is also the reason why many flagship models continue to choose Samsung E4 substrate OLED panels.