Apple’s new iPhone 16 ranks behind three Samsung phones and two Google phones when it comes to its display credentials, according to new testing by DxOMark.
The company, which evaluates consumer and professional products, tested the iPhone across four criteria – Readability, Colour, Video and Touch – to measure its overall display performance.
In the Premium phone category, the iPhone 16 ranked sixth, with a score of 142 points.
This put it behind the Google Pixel 9 (156 points), Samsung Galaxy S24 (Exynos) (154), Google Pixel 8 (153), Samsung Galaxy S23 (149) and the Samsung Galaxy S24 FE (145 points).
The iPhone 16’s 142 points was matched by the Xiaomi 14T and, perhaps a touch worryingly – it only ranked slightly above the iPhone 15 (140) and iPhone 14 (138), which held spots eight and nine, respectively.
“The Apple iPhone 16 put in a solid display performance as the base model of the 16-series, providing very good brightness in nearly all tested conditions for a generally satisfying readability experience,” the report said.
“However, if the screen’s automatic brightness is adapted to a middle-of-the-night smartphone check, it was too low when our eyes were not perfectly adapted to the dark room conditions, making the display hard to read. A manual adjustment of the brightness might be necessary in such cases.”
The display’s colours were described as “accurate and pleasant, although a slight orange cast affected the rendering when viewing photos and HDR10 videos with True Tone activated”.
Watching videos indoors was “satisfying in terms of brightness, which was suited for HDR10 content indoors”, but under low light conditions, “SDR content suffered from a low contrast and brightness while HDR content provided a satisfying experience. Thus, the user experience is clouded by a brightness mismatch between SDR and HDR, creating brightness ‘jumps’ as you switch from an SDR content to an HDR one”.
It said the management of the screen’s frame drops and motion blur was “very good”.
Touch reactions on the iPhone 16 were fast and accurate, however the review stated that corners of the device were “sometimes difficult to interact with, and the device had many unintended touches when held in landscape mode”.
It also said when holding the phone with one hand and touching the Camera Control button, the touchscreen “occasionally became unresponsive”.
“Even though some comparable devices in this category have increased their screen refresh rates, the iPhone 16’s refresh rate remains at 60 Hz, which could affect some of the display’s smoothness.”
