Numbers can only tell you so much. Based on reader feedback, we've toyed with the idea of introducing color accuracy tests using our spectrophotometer. It's not easy to derive meaning from those results though, since they're expressed in a distance metric for color space called Delta E. Instead, we chose to set up in a pitch-black room and capture images that reflect LCD performance.
But first, a couple of caveats. A camera is able immortalize the difference between two displays. If you were to rank hardware based on its color gamut performance, you'd see cameras, wide-gamut monitors, high-quality printer, and then mainstream monitors and printers, in that order. So, depending on the device you're looking at Tom's Hardware on, you may not see the differences in what we're about to present. If you're using a decent screen, though, you should get an image representative of what we're trying to show.
Further, these pictures haven't been optimized in any way. We're simply publishing them after converting RAW files to PNG, which means all six comparisons are made under the same conditions.
We aren't labeling these pictures so that you evaluate them without the previous page's results in mind. Which tablet looks the best to you? Scroll to the bottom of the page if you want to know which is which.
At least to our eyes, the difference between these two is painfully obvious. The third-gen iPad is on the bottom, and its colors are both richer and more vivid. Google's Nexus 10, up top, doesn't look bad by any stretch, but a side-by-side comparison against a higher-quality screen makes the shortcomings we quantified on the previous page pretty easy to see.




Values higher than that will result in the image having a blue bias. Values lower than that will result is the image appearing reddish. Of course, this also depends on the ambient light, which will influence how the image is perceived. But 6.5k Kelvin was supposedly chosen to match natural daylight.
Just sayin'...
Link is http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/605-toms-hardware-editors.html
A T604 can be configured up to what - 8 cores? The Nexus 10 has ONE and it performs just under a PVR 543MP4
The CPU is absolutely monstrous, as is RAM Bandwidth, resolution etc..
I often think to myself - Why aren't other manufacturers sticking specs like these into their own systems? Stick a T604MP4 in there and you've got performance numbers (mind you, numbers likely not real-world) close to 2.5x that of the fastest iPad in every single way (except battery.. Lol).
As for CPU, Stick a 1.7GHz S4 Pro in there with 2GB of RAM and combine it with the same screen.
The company that does that has my next purchase guaranteed.
Values higher than that will result in the image having a blue bias. Values lower than that will result is the image appearing reddish. Of course, this also depends on the ambient light, which will influence how the image is perceived. But 6.5k Kelvin was supposedly chosen to match natural daylight.
Just sayin'...
Link is http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/605-toms-hardware-editors.html
They also used images that are so vivid and almost artificial that it's sometimes hard to tell which display is reproducing the images more faithfully.
i disagree completely.
If they want to learn how to write better video reviews, Tom's could do worse than to check out David Katzmaier's reviews, on CNet.
You're nowhere close to alone on this.
That being said, I do see what both sides are talking about. The yellows are clearly better on the iPad, but it does appear to have some over-saturation (btw over-saturation means the colors bleed into each other, not that they are brighter or more vivid than natural) that you can see in a couple of flower photos. My question would be though - is what I'm seeing color bleed or a poorly set contrast/brightness, or related to the cameras?
The pictures of the barn look better on the iPad to me. The pictures of the adjacent butterfly look better on the iPad in detail and color. The Nexus - well, I don't know what those butterflies look like in real life, but the yellow flowers are atrociously colored. They are practically orange. Same with the yellow flowers on down the page, though they are the worst in the butterfly picture.
Blues seem to be the other way around in some of these pictures, but not in terms of color, in terms of detail. I'm thinking the blues may actually be over-saturated in the true sense of the word, but I have to wonder about the other contributions to the picture unrelated to screen quality - were they adjusted right? What about the camera? What about the reproduction process that puts them in the article?
Is my screen going to see these images differently than someone else's?
I don't think we as readers can really tell what's going on here. I will say one thing, yellow color on screens is one of my "pet peeves" so I know which screen I like better, and that's the iPad. I'm sick of orang-ish yellows, I tell you! Sick of them!
Decent battery life, powerful processor, $100 cheaper than an iPad, great display (colour difference between this and the iPad would be unnoticeable in most cases unless they were be readily compared next to each other). Are you guys at Tom's all just Apple fanboys or something?
if anything, the bleeding and saturation (i hate to call that "rich and vivid") of the colors and lost details in that last picture of the ipad screen is rather harsh
They also used images that are so vivid and almost artificial that it's sometimes hard to tell which display is reproducing the images more faithfully.
We actually did disable autofocus and awb, all this was noted in our ipad mini review. All pictures were taken at a fixed f/stop and iso setting at the same distance. Second, you can't really calibrate tablet screens. This means we are testing out of box gamut performance.
As for not being able to see the difference, Cambridge Color has some great information on color chemistry if you're not too familar.
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/color-space-conversion.htm
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/soft-proofing.htm
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/sRGB-AdobeRGB1998.htm
A camera's spectral response, (we're talking point-and-shoot, slrs, dslrs circa 2007) and later all have a gamut response larger than that of monitors, even high performance gamut monitors. On the low end of the hierarchy, printers have a smaller gamut response.
This means the inablity to see a difference is tied directly to the monitor you own. If you own a TN-based display, you're very likely going to see less of a difference in these pictures than someone rocking a wide-gamut IPS. That's simply the way the tech is. That's why professional photographs are so picky about the monitors they use. The compression of the picture's gamut clips out highlights, midtones, and shadows on a lower-end LCD.
The difference is definitely there. Your ability to see them is going to be dictated by your hardware.
Just sayin'...
Link is http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/605-toms-hardware-editors.html
I'm camera shy and wasn't featured in that article. Second, those that owned an Apple product generally were my overseas colleagues and news team. Nothing wrong with that, just say'in.
Finally, I don't know why there's this perception that we're being harsh on Google. To the contrary, we gave the Nexus 7 an Editor's Choice award. It was the first time we that award to a tablet - ANY tablet. We've seen tons of tablets, but that was the first one that really impressed us.
Simply put, the Nexus 10" is not the 10" equivalent to the Nexus 7. The latter was simply amazing. It was powerful. It was light. It had a beautiful display. Better yet it was cheap. In the past, anything at the $200 price point had some sort of shortcoming. Not so with the Nexus 7. That's what made it a game changer. Considering that the Nexus 7 came out first, we expected the larger 10" brother to deliver similar performance, right? I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation. I'm not sayin that it's a terrible tablet, but it's clearly not as "game changing" "wow that's awesome" as the Nexus 7 was.
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
Tom's Hardware
Values higher than that will result in the image having a blue bias. Values lower than that will result is the image appearing reddish. Of course, this also depends on the ambient light, which will influence how the image is perceived. But 6.5k Kelvin was supposedly chosen to match natural daylight.
This was a typo that occurred during the transition to our new charting system.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ativ-smart-pc-500t-windows-8-atom,3360-10.html
We have to sort the values simply for ease of reading. When we created the new chart format, the legend was incorrectly labeled. Fix'ed.
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
Tom's Hardware
Bigger!
Slimmer!
Better!
What I would like to see is the pictures that were displayed on the tablets also in the article so you can see the picture on your own screen for comparison purposes. Because simply comparing the two doesn't say much – what we should be looking for is how it compares to the real thing, not how they compare to each other. How they compare to each other is irrelevant. What is actually wanted is how the comparison to the real compares with each other.