As
we reported here, a
number of posters on MacRumors are claiming that their new iPhone 2.0 screens are looking rather yellow compared to their old iPhone. So, we decided to investigate on our review units to see if any of them had this problem. We found that some of the iPhone 3G screens do have a yellowish cast, but the effect is pretty minor. None of our review units had the sort of extreme problem that some posters are reporting; you only notice the difference in color if you hold the two iPhones side by side. In this photo, you can see a first generation iPhone on the left and one of our review models on the right; the screen on the original iPhone is distinctly bluer.
We tested the screens using a
CS-200 chroma meter and Erica Sadun's
Light application. The CS-200 is a professional chroma meter that can analyze the brightness and color of a screen, and the Light application turns the screen brightness to full and shows a pure white screen that turns your iPhone into a flashlight. We measured both the screen brightness and the color temperature.
|
Brightness
(Cd/m2)
|
Color temperature (k)
|
| Iphone (1st Gen) |
393
|
8294
|
| iPhone 3G 1 |
526
|
7054
|
iPhone 3G 2
|
486
|
7272
|
iPhone 3G 3
|
463
|
6858
|
As you can see from these results, the new iPhone 3G screens are significantly brighter than the original iPhone. But the brightness varies from unit to unit, presumably because the backlights in the screen differ. If you are curious what these backlights look like, the iFixIt teardown has photos of the iPhone screen
here. And the screens on the new iPhone have a somewhat different color; the color temperature of around 6800 to 7054k means that colors on these screens will be shifted towards the warmer, more orange end of the scale. But, if our review units are anything to go by, this should not prove to be an issue for most users; the color difference is there, but is not likely to be a problem.
