While the Samsung Galaxy S3 is an intelligent phone, it is also pretty dim, at least when it comes to the display reports PCMag.
Samsung Galaxy S3 display found to be dim in test
The Samsung Galaxy S3 has a 1280 x 720 AMOLED PenTile display which is higher in resolution than its predecessors, but dimmer. The cause of this seems to be power management which tries to get as much battery life as possible from the 4.8 inch display, which meant that Samsung had to lower the brightness of the handset.
The figures for power consumption lead to this finding. The display power has been cut from 2.1 watts to 1.3 watts which means that the maximum brightness is dropped from 289 candelas per square meter to 224. This lower power means that battery life on the S3 with the larger screen is good having been increased from 4.4 hours on the S2 to 5.6 on the S3.
However in terms of viewability in bright light it remains decent and this is thanks to the non-reflective screen of the S3. This factor could be one of the main reasons why Apple has always kept a smaller screen on their iPhones. The iPhone 4 has around 7.8 hours of running and the screen has a brightness of 541 candelas per square meter with the brightness of the S3 being only half of that.
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