Mar 03, 2016 07:24 PM
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The Galaxy Note 3 is a slightly large-screened Android phone equipped with a Wacom digitiser stylus. The bigger brother to the Galaxy S5 it’s also arguably a lot more interesting, although at £600 SIM-free the additional benefits come at a price. There are quite a few aspects of the phone we're not totally enamoured with, particulry regarding some of Samsung's design decisions, but this is a great phone for gadget lovers and geeks alike
Like Galaxy S4, the Galaxy Note 3 uses a PenTile ‘diamond’ display, where the sub-pixels are arranged into a diamond shape. In a lower-resolution screen, using a PenTile display would result in fuzzy text, but here the 396ppi pixel density is high enough to make it a non-issue. This is a super-sharp screen despite being oversized.
And as comes with any good OLED-type screen, contrast and black levels are excellent in the Galaxy Note 3. Colours are a little more problematic. Fresh out of the box, they are a little hot, but Samsung gives you some control over the character of the display.
In the Settings menu you can pick between Dynamic, Standard, Professional Photo and Movie screen modes. Dynamic is as ugly as a TV in a Curry’s high street store(i.e. oversaturated), but the Photo and Movie modes get pretty close to giving an impression of accuracy.
As we saw with the Galaxy S4, top brightness is excellent for an AMOLED panel, although whites aren’t quite as searing as you’d see on a top-end IPS screen. This is a great display.
The most interesting part of the Galaxy Note 3’s screen, though, is the digitiser layer. You can’t see, it, but it’s what lets the S Pen stylus work. Wacom makes the digitiser in the Note 3 – it’s the company behind the ‘industry standard’ Intuos graphics tablets, used by professionals across the world. We’ll get onto what it’s capable of later.
