Sony will supposedly reveal an Xperia X Premium with the world’s first HDR display on a phone
HDR is all the rage in TV land these days. It’s a display capable of displaying a much wider range of colors than older technology: think 16.8 million colors compared to over 1 billion. You can read more about the budding technology right here. Surely nothing like that could ever come to a phone, right?
That’s what they said about 4K before the Xperia Z Premium, and now Sony is about to introduce another crazy smartphone display innovation. PhoneRadar is reporting that Sony will introduce a Premium variant in the new Xperia X line.
The device’s big claim to fame will be an HDR display, which would be the first time we’ve ever seen it on a mobile device. The display will supposedly sport up to 1000 nits of brightness, making it the brightest smartphone display on the market. For comparison’s sake, the Galaxy S7 boasts 855 nits. The display will also have 1,024 shades of color in the RGB spectrum as opposed to the standard count of 256.
Technical marvel aside, we’re going to take a step back and keep from getting too excited about this. An HDR display sounds awesome, but will there be a catch? There was with the Xperia X Premium — 4K mode could only be activated while doing certain things, such as watching video.
It made sense because the benefit of 4K for typical smartphone usage (more clarity and immersion for VR and gaming) didn’t outweigh the negatives (hits on performance and battery). The achievement was still great, but ultimately anticlimactic. That’s something we hope not to experience with the introduction of an HDR display should this rumor pan out.