iPhone 6 Plus awarded 'best LCD display ever' but still loses out to Galaxy Note 4

Note 4
We have a winner

There's no denying that the iPhone 6 Plus has a great display, but just how good? Well apparently it's the best LCD display to ever grace a smartphone.

That's the conclusion DisplayMate came to after extensive testing, giving it 'very good' to 'excellent' ratings for everything from resolution and sharpness to contrast and colour accuracy and a whole lot more besides. The only area where it didn't fare quite so well was its brightness variation at different viewing angles, but that's the case for all LCDs.

Yet despite those remarkable results it still came out second overall to its main rival, the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, which according to DisplayMate has the best smartphone screen on the market, thanks to its QHD resolution, high levels of colour accuracy, high peak brightness levels and more.

iPhone 6 minus

The standard iPhone 6 meanwhile received high marks too, matching the performance of the iPhone 6 Plus in many ways, but the lower number of pixels was found to cause rescaled images to look worse than on the iPhone 6 Plus and even at native resolution fine text and graphics didn't look as good.

If you've just bought a shiny new iPhone 6 though don't worry, because it's still supposedly one of the best LCD displays around. But the iPhone 6 Plus and the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 are the ones to beat.

Don't know your QVGA from your Retina display? Check out our display tech guide.

James Rogerson

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.