Galaxy Tab LCD beats iPad 2 in viewing comparisons (spoiler: just barely)

By Jason D. O'Grady | July 26, 2011, 8:00am PDT

Summary

DisplayMate performed in-depth lab and viewing tests of the iPad 2, Motorola Xoom, Asus Transformer, Acer Iconia, and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 — and the results may surprise you.

Blogger Info

Jason D. O'Grady

David Morgenstern

The LCD display panel in a tablet computer is the single most expensive and important hardware component because it determines the quality of the visual experience for every application it runs. DisplayMate Technologies Corporation’s Ray Soneira performed in-depth lab and viewing test comparisons of the iPad 2, Motorola Xoom, Asus Transformer, Acer Iconia, and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 — and the results may surprise you.

And the winner is…

While the iPad 2 display easily outperformed all of the previous Android Tablets, with the new Galaxy Tab 10.1, Samsung has delivered the first Android Tablet with an impressive, potentially outstanding display, but then ruined it by turning up the color level to obnoxious levels – apparently in an effort to overcompensate and blatantly standout from the other mobile LCD displays that have subdued color. But in the case of color, too little is a lot better than too much…

As a result the iPad 2 still delivers the best color picture quality and accuracy of all of the Tablets, even though its colors are somewhat subdued. As things stand, based on all of the display tests, the iPad 2 and Galaxy Tab 10.1 are reasonably close in performance in most categories, so it’s almost a tie, but the Galaxy Tab is ahead more often than the iPad 2, so the Galaxy Tab is the Winner, by a nose…

Although the results skew ever so slightly toward the Galaxy Tab, it’s unlikely that any of the current crop of tablets would be able to beat an iPad 3 packing a Retina Display (as has been rumored) but we’ll have to reserve judgement until the new iPad ships — possible as soon as this Fall.

Read the rest of the tablet LCD shootout for the full results and conclusions.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/galaxy-tab-lcd-beats-ipad-2-in-viewing-comparisons-spoiler-just-barely/10696?alertspromo=&tag=nl.rSINGLE