The ASUS ZenFone 2 Preview
by Brandon Chester on May 18, 2015 2:00 PM ESTDisplay
I thought it would be important to give potential buyers some idea of how good the display is on the ZenFone 2. On paper it looks very good, as it's a 5.5" 1920x1080 IPS display. The pixel density isn't as high as the latest generation of 2560x1440 panels, but I find that with an RGB stripe panel the difference between 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 is minimal even at 5.5".
The ZenFone 2 appears to be off to a good start. Black levels are very low among our LCDs, and the max brightness is somewhat low but not terrible by any means. I never had any issues when using the ZenFone 2 outside, although it was definitely not as comfortable as the Galaxy S6.
The slightly low max brightness and above average black level results put the ZenFone 2 right in the middle of our LCD devices when it comes to contrast ratio.
Unfortunately, these numbers are somewhat misleading. This is because the ZenFone 2 makes extremely heavy use of dynamic contrast and contect adaptive backlighting. I have never used another device with such dramatic shifts in backlight power. The best example I've found is when switching from an all black to all white screen at max brightness. While this is obviously an extreme case, it illustrates the behavior that is occuring very well. At the moment you switch to white, the brightness of the display is around 170 nits. Over the next few seconds, that brightness rapidly increases to the 390 nits you see in the results above. This is an enormous jump in brightness, and it's very easy to see with your own eyes.
One last thing I'd like to note about the brightness is that the 100% setting on the built in brightness slider is not actually the max brightness that the display is capable of. The max you can achieve using the slider in the Settings app is 319 nits, which is around 82% of the 390 nit result you can get using applications like Brightness Adjuster from Google Play.
The gamut results are unfortunately not as good as what we've seen from the latest generation of smartphones. The DeltaE for red, blue, and magenta are all just over three, while the remaining three colors are around five. The high error in white also contributes to the higher than optimal overall error.
The complete review of the ZenFone 2 should be posted in the near future, and it will include the remainder of our display workflow. The heavy use of CABC and dynamic contrast has a large impact on the display's performance in some of our tests, and so I'll also be elaborating on where and why that occurs, and what it means for the user. For anyone who really wants to order the ZenFone 2 now, I'll conclude by saying that it's definitely not perfect, but it's still a good display. I think it's by far the nicest one you'll find on a phone that starts at $199 purely because of its resolution.
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rosege - Tuesday, May 19, 2015 - link
I've got this phone - the 4GB 2.3Ghz model and the battery drains pretty quick. Apparently the 2GB/1.8Ghz model is much better - battery isnt the biggest issue for me so I decided to go with the extra power.If I could have got the 4GB/1.8 I would have but the LTE bands that it supports weren't optimal for my region.
Still hoping Asus will do something to improve the battery life a bit in a future update though
Michael Bay - Tuesday, May 19, 2015 - link
I had an ASUS-some navigator firm WinMo smartphone for a time.It was INCREDIBLY horrible.
CalaverasGrande - Tuesday, May 19, 2015 - link
ffs another computing product with 'zen' in the name.I wonder if you go to Japan, do they have 'catholic' computing products?
Instead of ZenDesk do they use 'Confessional'?
Labeling like this isn't just cultural plundering. It also belies an unimaginative marketing dept.
Roaringriku786 - Tuesday, May 19, 2015 - link
Which would be a better buy One Plus One 64GB or Asus Zenfone 2 64GB? I am planning to make the switch from an Iphone 4s to one of these phones.speconomist - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
I am actually pondering the purchase of these sames phones (but the 16 GB versions). Let's wait a few days for the review.From what I have read battery life is ok (important for me), and the camera is a disaster (it's a phone, so I'm willing to compromise).
zaza - Tuesday, May 19, 2015 - link
Great Preview. I saw a post from an intel engineer once saying that their should be no problem with app compatibilty since android 5.0 , since ART compile any java apps to work in native code, and native apps that uses the NDK are translated to the desired architecture with minimal overhead (x86, arm, MIPS ...). So in theory their should be no app compatibilty problem. can you confirm this in your review?Hrel - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
I was so happy to see this in my inbox. FINALLY a phone with no compromises that has a 1080p screen!!!!!!Also, can we praise Asus here for actually increasing included storage for the first time in FAR too long? You guys have talked about it here on Anandtech, NAND manufacturers expected NAND to sell more as smartphone capacities increased. Because, ya know, that's what computer hardware has done since it's conception, gotten better for less money. Frankly at this point the fact that any phone is being sold with less than 32GB of internal storage is ridiculous. We should be seeing flagships with 256GB+ by now. I'm glad Asus is at least increasing the standard to 64GB at $300!!!
F2.0 camera on the front and back! Includes SD slot! $300!!!! In terms of bang/buck this phone blows everything else on the market away, they're not even close. I look forward to picking this up next year, or the next iteration assuming it doesn't get ruined like the LG G series got destroyed.
----On screen resolution.
If phone makers wanna have resolutions over 1080p for early adopters, fine. But I am in the majority when I say I don't care about resolutions beyond 1080p. More than that I actively avoid them until the price differential reaches 10% over the cost of 1080p. The same way we achieved "good enough" performance with the Core 2 Duo CPU's 1080p is "good enough" resolution that the effect of diminishing returns for pushing beyond that makes the "upgrade" worth less and less money. 4 times the resolution? Ok, I'm willing to pay about 10% extra to get that, let me know when the prices have reached that point. That's all without even considering the performance hit you're going to take, and how much battery life will suffer from the extreme resolution. So it's not just the screen technology that needs to mature to make that viable for mainstream, but the APU and battery technology as well. To put it simply, if going beyond 1080p is going to mean less battery life by anything more than 3%, slower performance, compatibility, stability, by anything at all, then I'm not interested. More power to the early adopters, but LG and Samsung and even HTC need to provide an alternative to obscene resolutions without handicapping the other specs of the phone. 5" form factor, top of the line APU and camera, regardless of the resolution of the screen.
alin - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
It's not blowing anything out of the water... The pictures you get with those specs are unbelievable, utterly crap. You can see them on gsmarena.com.Quote:
"Image quality left us wanting. On one hand, when viewed to fit the screen, photos show pleasant colors and accurate exposure. White balance is also spot-on, and dynamic range is decent.
Zoom in to pixel level though, and things go south real quick. Images exhibit a very pronounced watercolor character, with detail smeared by broad brushstrokes. The image corners have a very pronounced softness too.
There's little detail in demanding subjects like the railing of the building across the street in the fifth sample, for example. Where other cameras resolve the separate vertical bars, the Zenfone 2 irons them out into a semi-transparent patch. Meanwhile areas of uniform color are rendered into a noisy mess."
Belive me you have to see the pictures with your own eyes. The guys were a to nice in the review regarding the quality...
johnny_boy - Wednesday, May 20, 2015 - link
I hope Intel doesn't focus on GPU performance. Right now it's easily good enough to run any games available in the Play Store at pretty high res. Aside from people that play demanding Android games, I think most users will be more concerned with CPU than GPU performance.blzd - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
Because Android needs more CPU performance? I'm pretty sure we're well ahead of any CPU requirements Android and its apps require.Actually what they need to focus on is power efficiency.
More CPU and GPU performance is the easy part. Making them use less power is the hard part.