LCD Performance: The Subjective Analysis
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.