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iPhone 15 Pro Max Screen uniformity and cast
- Thread starter iamdman
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True Tone seems way to aggressive on the iPhone 15 Pro for me. One second my screen is blue and the next it’s yellow. The iPhone 12 mini I had always felt like it matched my surroundings
I am upto my sixth and seventh 15 PM units. A G9P3403 and a G9N3406.
Under daytime conditions I find the G9P screen to be ever so slightly better panel with more pleasing white and uniformity, but the G9N is very close (tends to be more green shifted). However at night (with TT on, NS at ~75%, brightness ~5%) that's when everything changes, both irritate me in different ways.
For the G9P when reading black text on white background the top half of the screen has a red-ish tint, with the bottom having a greener tint, which is very annoying. Under the same condition the G9N is uniform but generally has an even redder tint across the whole display, but my perception of contrast is that it is slightly worse, and slightly harder to read than the G9P - but that only becomes evident when holding them side by side. If I put a grey test background however, the G9P appears more uniform than the G9N unit. The G9N has a lot of red tinting blotched around the bottom of the screen and doesn't present the uniformity that i experience when in normal use. With a white test background, they both appear similar under these night conditions.
Generally (during day and night conditions), true tone seems to be more aggressive on the G9N going both ways, sometimes making the screen too warm, and sometimes too cool. While i think that this is more an ambient light sensor issue, it is definitely having a real world impact /significantly influencing my perception of which panel is better or worse.
To me, based on my testing, the display serial no. (G9P vs G9N) is not proving to be an indicator of better or worse quality. Perhaps it is an indicator of different measured characteristics per the manufacturers testing regime. Also, there seems to be significant variance in perceived performance of the panel depending on environmental lighting conditions, NS, TT, brightness, and what content is being displayed on the panel at the time, but to me the night viewing conditions for the majority of the time on panels seem both noticeably below the standard I expect for such a premium product.
I haven't decided which one I should keep, but either way there are compromises.
I mainly noticed all of this, because my 12 PM is very uniform (green shifted) far more than any of the 15 PM units i have been through, which is disappointing.
@sdante based on your read of what these numbers mean, I take it that both panels were manufactured in 2023 week 40?
Under daytime conditions I find the G9P screen to be ever so slightly better panel with more pleasing white and uniformity, but the G9N is very close (tends to be more green shifted). However at night (with TT on, NS at ~75%, brightness ~5%) that's when everything changes, both irritate me in different ways.
For the G9P when reading black text on white background the top half of the screen has a red-ish tint, with the bottom having a greener tint, which is very annoying. Under the same condition the G9N is uniform but generally has an even redder tint across the whole display, but my perception of contrast is that it is slightly worse, and slightly harder to read than the G9P - but that only becomes evident when holding them side by side. If I put a grey test background however, the G9P appears more uniform than the G9N unit. The G9N has a lot of red tinting blotched around the bottom of the screen and doesn't present the uniformity that i experience when in normal use. With a white test background, they both appear similar under these night conditions.
Generally (during day and night conditions), true tone seems to be more aggressive on the G9N going both ways, sometimes making the screen too warm, and sometimes too cool. While i think that this is more an ambient light sensor issue, it is definitely having a real world impact /significantly influencing my perception of which panel is better or worse.
To me, based on my testing, the display serial no. (G9P vs G9N) is not proving to be an indicator of better or worse quality. Perhaps it is an indicator of different measured characteristics per the manufacturers testing regime. Also, there seems to be significant variance in perceived performance of the panel depending on environmental lighting conditions, NS, TT, brightness, and what content is being displayed on the panel at the time, but to me the night viewing conditions for the majority of the time on panels seem both noticeably below the standard I expect for such a premium product.
I haven't decided which one I should keep, but either way there are compromises.
I mainly noticed all of this, because my 12 PM is very uniform (green shifted) far more than any of the 15 PM units i have been through, which is disappointing.
@sdante based on your read of what these numbers mean, I take it that both panels were manufactured in 2023 week 40?
Holy smokes, 6-7 units? Has Apple said anything when you returned them? Your issues with the current two you have would also drive me nuts. The process is exhausting I’m sure. If it was me and I had to keep one of yours, I suppose I’d keep the G9N because issues only arise on dark gray sample backgrounds. Aggressive tint when using TT or night shift can be toned down but poor uniformity can never be fixed.
Sounds very similar I went through trying to choose between 15 PM with either G9P or G9N. What I regret is that I did not use each one for full day or two in normal use. Not sure I made a wise choice choosing one with G9P.
I also had 12 Pro with good screen that was maybe a bit toward green but uniform. So my 15 PM is much worse.
Yes.
I find these green shifted panels to be better generally - the red/pink hue panels don’t match the overall vibrancy and “lushness” of the green shifted ones (if that’s what we’re calling them). I also find the pink hue panels don’t get as bright?
Whatever process is used to make these oleds must be equivalent to spray some substrate and pray bc it’s wild to me that such a mature process delivers such varied outputs.
Whatever process is used to make these oleds must be equivalent to spray some substrate and pray bc it’s wild to me that such a mature process delivers such varied outputs.
I am leaning towards this also, however it is odd to me that the G9P under the dark grey test background is quite uniform and the G9N is not, vs. the real world use case of black text on white background. I will try toning down night shift to see if that helps with the G9N red tint at night. At the moment they are both set to the same level for the purposes of comparison.
Is there anything that can be done to tweak true tone?
Re returns, a couple had manufacturing defects (scratches on titanium frame) out of the box. All units were kept painstakingly pristine, and were within return window. I do not find it useful to have a discussion with the store staff about any issues, unless outside the return window. They usually don't acknowledge there is an issue, and it becomes a pointless exercise / waste of time trying to have a somewhat technical discussion with a sales rep.
I have switched to my G9N unit, and am going to use for a day or two and see how it goes, before making final decision. Tbh, and as per my previous post, I feel there are compromises either way, and maybe flipping a coin might be the only way to make a decision.
Seems like we came from the same reference point. I do feel the 15 PM is worse for uniformity, but is quite a bit better for colour accuracy. Of course, my 12 PM panel has likely degraded significantly, so can't properly compare today.
Yeah I tend to lean to the green shifted panels. I would normally agree re the pink/red hue panels, but these units seem to get as bright as each other, although some previous units were less bright. I tend to agree generally re vibrancy also, but again this time around they are very close.
Re the process I guess it is a combination of limitations of OLED technology, and what Apple are willing to accept vs. discard re proximity to edge of the batch production sheets. Nonetheless, it is disappointing that one way or the other, Apple have not found a solution after 7x generations of iPhone models.
I felt the same. I compared our 15 PM's for a good while and each day I thought I found the one I prefer until I tested more. I ended up with G9P because it looked like it has less reddish tint in NS mode in lighter background, like when simply browsing apple.com front page with images on different light level gray background. In that test G9N had much more pink on the upper half of the screen and some on the left side all the way down, where G9P had some pink tint on the upper part around DI mostly on the right side of DI and some on the whole right side. Overall it looked like G9P was better but I had and I still have second thoughts since G9N is supposed to the better one. I guess both my panels are not cut even near from the middle part of the big OLED glass.
Again, I feel the same. I'm sure my 12 Pro (BTW mine was 6.1") must have worn down some during almost 3 years of use but I never noticed in use any change and uniformity was always very nice on that. Also with 12 Pro I had 6 G9P in a row and none of them were acceptable to me, they all had varying half screen pink and blue tint and similar issues when viewing straight angle and the first G9N I got my hand on was nearly perfect. Slightly towards green but uniform.
I feel 15 PM is not even close to that. It surely has warmer and maybe more lively colors but uniformity is just terrible. I have even checked shop demo units when ever I see one and many of them are like mine, just terrible even in bright shop lightning. But I saw also one perfect one there too (G9N) and I noticed that so far only one demo model 15 PM had G9P screen.
For me our both 15 PM looked about as bright and I even used some app in my 12 Pro that measure screen brightness and color temp comparing the screens and difference was almost nothing. Both screens had almost the same color temp even they looked somewhat different and G9P was very slightly brighter in measurement but visually the same.
Both very rather cool bluish without TT and NS. Also both seemed to have TT acting totally different. Like both used under the same 2700K ceiling lamp, one went cool and the other warm and again using them in natural daylight the other went warm and the other cool. That's why in my comparison I often used setting TT off but NS at 100% in both, so TT was not messing the results especially when I wanted to compare uniformity.
I don't think this is about finding any other solution than request binned panels with perfect uniformity but that would cost and I'm not sure there is enough production capacity to make so much panels to meet the demand and what to do with the rest of the panels. Probably 99.9% of buyers do not even care about the uniformity. Also there is not the same kind of competition as there is with android phones between different brands.
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HI! What kind of scratches did you get when you first opened the box?
They were straight hairline scratches, as if something had scored the titanium frame. One unit had this at the top, and the other at the bottom.
I don’t believe there’s anything that can be done to tweak TT, I have left that off ever since it became an option on IPhones. It works so much better on iPads.
I also don’t believe G9N or G9P makes any difference whatsoever. The only thing that matters is where the screen is cut from the main sheet. Apple’s tolerance is very high due to the volume of phones they need to produce. Phones at launch would be delayed far worse than they already are if Apple was to reject these screens. This just seems logical to me, I have no proof either way.
I remember exchanging a few of those MBP as well due to yellow screens and Samsung vs LG haha.
Our other 15 PM also has minor hairline scratch around volume buttons, but I did not bother exchanging it since it is always possible another has similar and/or some other problems. Also I went exhausting process of changing multiple 12 Pros back in the day and I never want to experience that stress again, it took months and was nerve wrecking. I've done some exchanges with other my gear too before including Apple products and it has been disaster almost always.
I just few months ago bought ThinkPad (I have MBP 14" too but I use Windows for certain tasks) and I ended up going through few of them until found one that has the least issues (it was 6th unit).
I envy people who don't stress over displays but actually just watch the content on the screen. I tend to watch the display instead of content. I've noticed most people actually concentrate on the content, like when I show my stuff like a new TV to someone and play movie content to demo it, they actually watch the content not the panel itself...
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Sure it makes difference where the screen in cut from the big glass but there might be something else too. Some company is telling on their web site about this, check Google using search Rewa tech G9P. Not sure what to think about that...?
I hope so and I don't know what is their proof. But from what I understood that is a large company repairing these things and that was in their industry insider section.
mine also has a small imperfection on the titanium! I didn't change it for fear of receiving something worse! what do you think?
I remember seeing that when we were experiencing the same issues with the 13 Pro. I've have had many terrible G9N screens and G9P screens. I had a perfect G9Q screen once. My current G9P is perfect.
If someone comes and provides data on hundreds or thousands of samples of each panel type, then we're talking. Until then I don't believe anything I read about panel types and it is all just filed under the category of "trust me bro".
Can't wait until OLED dies...I refuse to even buy an OLED TV and haven't yet. My Nintendo Switch OLED suffers from smearing at lower brightness, the older LCD version was perfect. Same thing on PS Vita OLED, had dark blotches. The LCD revision while being slammed as inferior, was perfect.
Yeah, you might be right. I just myself had a long exchange roulette going on with my previous 12 Pro and I had 6 units with G9P and all had uniformity issues but the first G9N I got my hand on was very nice and I was happy with it. Now with 15 PM we got 2 identical ones with both different screen G9P and G9N and yeah, neither has very good uniformity just different and I can't really make up my mind which one is less bad. I chose G9P even I knew these stories about claimed difference. It was a hard decision to make since this one with G9P also has weaker battery but based on test patterns and long tests I ended up with this. I regret not testing each one for a full day or two in normal everyday use as I still wonder if that other one is actually better in normal use (other family member has that phone now. It was a deal already between us that I get to choose the better screen since this other person don't stress over screens like I do). It is just so hard to test them using it normally with your Apple ID if you need to swap between the phones.