The OnePlus 2 Review
by Brandon Chester on December 14, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- OnePlus
- OnePlus 2
Display
At this point, it's hard to excuse shipping a smartphone without a great display. Not just great in terms of resolution, contrast, and brightness, but also great in terms of color accuracy. We've seen even inexpensive smartphones like the Moto G and the Lumia 640 achieve levels of color accuracy that weren't achieved even by many flagship smartphones only a few years ago. As for OnePlus, the OnePlus One was notable for bringing a very accurate and high resolution display to a low price point, and at the time it was one of the best displays you could get on a smartphone. With that being achieved by their very first smartphone, OnePlus has some big shoes to fill with its follow up.
To analyze the quality of a smartphone's display we run it through our custom display workflow which measures accuracy relative to the sRGB color space. Measurements are performed with an i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of contrast measurements which are done with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and organized using SpectraCal's CalMAN 5 software.
Out of the box, things look promising for the OnePlus 2. The display can get quite bright, and despite that it can also get quite dark, which leads to it achieving the best contrast ratio on record for an LCD device.
Unfortunately, there's not much good news beyond high brightness and deep blacks. Greyscale accuracy on the OnePlus 2 is extremely poor. Right out of the gate, there's a large imbalance between the red and blue components that make up the shades of grey, and that gap grows increasingly large as you move toward white. The gamma is also quite a disaster, with a high degree of irregularity. Honestly I don't really know what to say, as this result is quite shocking when one looks back at how accurate the OnePlus One was. The OnePlus 2 is simply too blue, and even without the blue shift the highly irregular gamma will cause issues with both greyscale and color mixture rendition.
Moving on to the saturation sweep test, the OnePlus 2 again performs poorly. Every primary and secondary color with the exception of blue has a high degree of error, particularly red, magenta, and cyan. While in this test the phone narrowly avoids being the worst result on the chart, it's not very far off, and can hardly be called accurate. There's clear saturation compression occurring, with OnePlus managing to be accurate for more of the 100% saturation values, but being undersaturated for most values below that.
With poor greyscale accuracy, irregular gamma, and inaccurate rendition of primary and secondary colors, there's no hope for accurate color mixtures on the OnePlus 2's display. There's really not much more to be said. We're not talking about the kind of inaccuracy that you'd get from an oversaturated panel, but instead just general inaccuracy where no color is quite how it should be. It seems like OnePlus just focused on making sure the panel matched the sRGB gamut and put no effort into any further calibration.
The display quality of the OnePlus 2 is not impressive at all. For a $400 phone this is simply unacceptable, and it's such an enormous regression from the OnePlus One. What's even more problematic is how OnePlus keeps tweaking the display settings with their updates, and you never know whether it's going to change for the better or for the worse. I've seen the gamma curve change significantly, but the overall accuracy didn't improve for the better because some aspects improved and others got worse. In any case, I don't know what happened when OnePlus was deciding upon the display attributes they would be targeting, but as far as being accurate to the Rec. 709 standard goes the OnePlus 2 is actually one of the worst devices on record, and I'm at a loss as to how to explain why they allowed it to fall so far behind the original.
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lucam - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
Hahaha...lol!!!cuex - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
Is it possible for you to give review using a custom kernel that allow the usage of A57 Cores in normal usage? Would like to know whether it's really the "hesistant of using A57 Cores" is the cause of slow-down...danielfranklin - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
Yes you can, i have and its very fast.In fact ive calibrated my display as well and im quite impressed with it now, the high contrast really comes alive.
Unfortunately with further hacking OnePlus havent properly released their source code and Devs are leaving it in droves.
Im quite happy with it (got it on special) but i cant help but think they have alienated the power users with the lack of code and alienated the normal users with the CPU performance and lack of calibration on the screen.
Personally i think they have kind of lost the plot.
adityarjun - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
Umm, sorry to hijack this thread but I am in the market for a 5inch-ish android phone. My requirements are a good battery and camera and a decent enough display and lag free UI interaction. I don't game. My current phone is Moto G 2014. I am looking at the 5x, OnePlus X and Moto X 2014. I favor the last. Is it still a good buy?mcbhagav - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
IMO, if you are dead set on 5" screen. You should get Nexus 5X ( i suggest 32 GB) out of above 3 contenders. Why not one Plus X? HW, SW, Radio are slower than 5X. Why not Moto X-14? smells already end of life.grayson_carr - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
Wow, I was kind of shocked by the display analysis. I actually owned a OnePlus 2 for a short time way back in August and thought the display looked quite accurate. Granted, I was just using my eyes to compare it to my wife's iPhone 6 and my MacBook Pro and not a measurement tool, but it certainly seemed more accurate than the Nexus 6 and LG G4 which I also had at the time. But maybe I was just looking for oversaturation inaccuracies and not general innacuracies. Also, their website has this quote: "We focused on producing professional grade, true-to-life colors, avoiding over-saturation." (https://oneplus.net/2/technology) But Brandon also mentions that they keep changing the calibration profile with updates, so maybe the calibration has actually gotten worse since I owned it haha. I remember that happening with my OnePlus One... with one of the updates to that phone the color temperature went from like 6300K to 8000K.Bottom line, these little issues are why I ended up selling both my OnePlus One and OnePlus 2 after a very short time. I am a phone nerd and love to try different phones, but I think I'm done giving OnePlus chances to impress me only to be disappointed with the software and abundant other minor annoying issues that add up. I'm not sure how it is now, but when I owned the OnePlus 2 back in August the software was super buggy.
I currently own a Nexus 5X and I would highly recommend it over the OnePlus 2. Don't let the theoretically better specs of the OnePlus 2 fool you. I am having a vastly better end user experience with the 5X even though it doesn't match up spec wise.
zeeBomb - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
Oh definitely. Very cautious move you have done there Grayson. To me, Oneplus has been slipping in terms of...what's the word...I guess presentation for what they have to offer.zeeBomb - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
Take the One Plus X, another device that they had made this year. On paper the specs seem really good for the price you are getting it for... Then you realise it uses a modified 801AA chip plagued with bugs and sluggish graphical performance. I hope in the future Oneplus can fix these things so the user experience isn't such a hassle. At least the updates are quick enough.Another thing that seems to not be mentioned is the USB C cables. They were so cheap to buy, but little that we knew until the faithful Benson Leung came along is the resistor type was way incorrect, which makes charging the device pretty dangerous!
Granted to sum up Oneplus this year: You win some, you lose some.
sandy105 - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
Where did you read about the 801AA and its graphics performance issues ? . I have the OPO and the 801 does well on most games , but i saw a oneplus X review where game performance was sun optimal and it got me thinking why did it happen.zeeBomb - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
Oneplus forums say it all.