There's a common saying in the tech bubble that is often met with polarizing feelings: "Apple isn't usually the first to adopt any particular type of technology, but when it does, Apple usually does it right."

Hearing this can only make my eyes roll back so far, as there are too many instances where it's far from the truth (cough Siri). But I concede that there are some cases where the adage fits like a glove, and OLED displays happen to be one of them.

The iPhone 14 Pro's OLED display is unique from others on the market right now, and we're going to break down how, on top of our usual technical assessment of its screen quality.

About this review: The product in this review has been purchased from the Apple Store. Apple had no involvement in the contents of this article.

The iPhone 14 Pro Max is Apple's biggest and best smartphone, and in typical Apple fashion, it is both a powerhouse and an endurance beast.

Specifications
  • Brand: Apple
  • SoC: A16 Bionic
  • Display: 6.7-inch OLED, 120 Hz, Dolby Vision HDR
  • RAM: 6GB
  • Storage: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB
  • Battery: 4,323mAh
  • Ports: Lightning
  • Operating System: iOS 16
  • Front camera: 12MP, TrueDepth, AF
  • Rear camera: 48MP Main, 12MP Ultra Wide, 12MP Telephoto
  • Dimensions: 160.7 x 77.6 x 7.9mm (6.33 x 3.05 x 0.31in)
  • Colors: Space Black, Silver, Gold, Deep Purple
  • Display type: Flexible OLED, PenTile Diamond
  • Weight: 240g (8.47oz)
  • Charge speed: MagSafe (15W), Qi (7.5W), up to 50% in 30 minutes (20W wired)
  • IP Rating: IP68
  • Price: $1,099
  • Micro SD card support: No
  • Stylus:
Pros
  • Best-in-class outdoor screen legibility
  • Excellent color accuracy & precision in all conditions
  • Zero black smear, even at low brightness
  • Best-in-class HDR viewing experience
  • Super-efficient variable refresh implementation
Cons
  • Shadows slightly too steep at low brightness
  • No manual white balance adjustment
  • Tested unit exhibits screen discoloration around the perimeter at minimum brightness

Navigate this article

  1. Hardware and features: Not your average OLED
  2. Brightness and power testing: More nits than you think
  3. Screen refresh testing: Adaptive smarts
  4. Color gamut and Spectra testing: Slightly more colors
  5. Contrast and tone response testing: Sunlight improvements
  6. Color accuracy and precision testing: Almost flawless calibration
  7. HDR10 reproduction testing: Apple's HDR experience is even better
  8. Final thoughts

Hardware and features: Not your average OLED

The first thing you'll likely notice on the display is the large cutout Apple has named the Dynamic Island. It really calls attention to itself; there is no subtlety nor playful effort in minimizing its presence. It was something I expected to quickly get over, as I do with all screen intrusions, but this is the first time I've felt it can truly be an eyesore.

It's a pill-shaped cutout that houses the camera and can also show off information like Apple Wallet transactions and other alerts. It does offer some quality-of-life improvements, but I haven't found the experience all too revolutionary. This might change in the future, perhaps in a year or two when more apps make use of it.

Apple iPhone 14 Pro, dynamic island
The dynamic island can occupy a considerable amount of screen estate

As expected, the iPhone 14 Pro Max uses the latest and greatest tech available from Samsung Display (and LG Display beginning in 2023). But before delving further, it's important to stress that the OLED is not a simple case of Apple just "ordering" the best components from display vendors. Some may believe that each phone with similar hardware would be super comparable, which is not the case here. Apple develops its display driver IC completely in-house, with design elements not found on other flagship phones.

The iPhone 14 Pro OLED possesses design elements not found on other flagship phones.

One such example is its pixel structure. Since the iPhone X, the company has made use of much larger blue subpixels for its OLED compared to other phones. This theoretically leads to slower panel aging by reducing the rate of decay for the blue emitter, which has the quickest lifespan. Apple's red and green subpixels are also marginally larger, filling up more of the total area of the OLED panel. Compared to the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra OLED, the relative emissive area of the iPhone 14 Pro Max is about 40% larger.

Subpixel comparison between the iPhone 14 Pro Max and the Galaxy S22 Ultra
Subpixel comparison between the iPhone 14 Pro Max and the Galaxy S22 Ultra

One of my favorite qualities of this screen is that it's the only OLED I've seen to almost completely mitigate the problem of slow response times for black-to-gray pixel transitions (also known as black smearing). On other OLEDs, this smearing of black pixels becomes a complete eye-sore when using dark-themed apps at low brightness, making interacting with UI elements feel less satisfying. Some companies address this issue by preventing the pixels from actually turning off, and leaving them the darkest gray the OLED can output. However, this reduction of contrast is super noticeable in a dark room. I'm happy to see that the iPhone 14 Pro does not appear to use this method, and it does indeed show zero pixel emission for pure black.

I don't know what sort of technique Apple uses to extinguish these artifacts, but it's nothing short of black magic, and I hope other companies follow suit. These are the only phones where I enjoy using pure black OLED app themes. Similarly, the iPhone OLEDs were the first I've seen to completely avoid the clipping of near-black colors (also known as black crush), which was another issue that plagued many older OLED phones.

Brightness and power testing: More nits than you think

Peak screen luminance vs. window size for various phones
Peak screen luminance vs. window size for various phones

As with many displays, the most eye-catching spec sheet upgrade to the iPhone 14 Pro screen is its newfound peak brightness. Apple claimed at its keynote that the iPhone 14 Pro could reach 2,000 nits when outdoors, which is currently higher than any other phone is capable of. However, like with all other OLEDs, this peak brightness depends on the number of lit pixels and their intensities. For the iPhone 14 Pro Max, its OLED can only reach the claimed 2,000 nits when the screen has 25% or fewer of its pixels lit up, or when the average luminance of the entire screen is below 500 nits.

It turns out that Apple was being modest with its 2,000-nit claim, as I've measured the display to actually be able to output 2,200 nits for a 10% window or up to 2,300 nits for a 1% window. Of course, a tiny 1% window of white isn't a realistic scenario for any type of content, which is the condition many other phone makers use to market their screen's peak brightness. I'm happy to see Apple reporting real-world metrics for its screen. Next year, we will no doubt see other companies advertise 2,300 nits peak brightness for this same generation of OLED.

The iPhone 14 Pro is able to output up to 2,300 nits — more than Apple's 2,000-nit claim.

Some people might have noticed that the iPhone 14 Pro won't always look any brighter than the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra or even last year's phone. That's because when most of the screen is white (in light-themed apps, for example) the OLED will only output about 1,050 nits, which is identical to other premium phones. In fact, if we look at the iPhone 14 Pro's peak luminance chart, the iPhone 14 Pro Max only boosts higher than 1,050 nits below a 50% window (also called average pixel level, or APL). This means the iPhone 14 Pro screen can only show content at a much higher luminance in dark mode apps or when viewing fullscreen media. Otherwise, it's a similar viewing experience to last year's phone.

Given the data, it seems likely that Apple is artificially limiting its peak brightness at higher pixel levels. If we extrapolate from our lower pixel-level peak brightness measurements, the iPhone 14 Pro OLED should be able to reach around 1,400 nits of fullscreen brightness, since OLED brightness fall-off typically follows a logarithmic curve with respect to window size.

So why the limitations? The obvious answer is battery concerns, but to what end? For those who spend much of their day outdoors, it can be annoying when the phone screen throttles down in brightness after several minutes of bright use. From my testing, it seems that the iPhone 14 Pro OLED matches the peak fullscreen brightness of the iPhone 13 Pro, but the new screen can now remain indefinitely within this brightness range. Though when outputting 2,000+ nits for a few minutes, the screen will throttle down back to 1,000 nits as expected.

Fullscreen luminance vs. display power chart for various phones
Fullscreen luminance vs. display power chart for various phones

Unfortunately, we don't have display power measurements for either the iPhone 13 Pro or the Galaxy S22 Ultra, but we do have readings from the Galaxy S22 Plus, which should have similar power measurements to the former two as they all share the same OLED material set. The biggest difference is that the S22 Plus does not contain hybrid-oxide transistors (LTPO/HOP), which may have a slight effect on luminous efficacy.

Compared to the Galaxy S22 Plus, which uses the same OLED material set as the iPhone 13 Pro, the new iPhone 14 Pro Max OLED consumes about 10% less power when below 500 nits. This is also while having a 4.6% larger screen area than the Galaxy S22 Plus. However, near peak brightness, the iPhone 14 Pro appears to actually use up slightly more power than the Galaxy S22 Plus. I believe this is due to Apple limiting the fullscreen peak brightness while simultaneously using a higher voltage state to achieve 2,000+ nit peaks.

This new OLED consumes about 10% less power compared to the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus.

When measuring the battery consumption of the new always-on display, I found the feature to use up to 350 milliwatts of display power, depending on ambient lighting. In average office lighting of about 300 lux, the feature only used about 100 milliwatts. With a nominal battery capacity of about 16,000 milliwatt-hours, this is anywhere between 0.6% to 2.2% additional battery drain per hour.

Screen refresh testing: Adaptive smarts

ProMotion is the name Apple calls its adaptive high-refresh-rate system solution, which the company first introduced with the 2017 iPad Pro. It debuted on phones last year with the iPhone 13 Pro, and it remains again this year as a Pro-only feature (hence the name, I guess). One difference is that this year's OLED now ramps down to 1 Hz, but only in the Always-On display mode. The minimum refresh rate is still 10 Hz outside this condition. Measurements I've taken for the temporal spectra of the iPhone 14 Pro OLED confirm this behavior.

There have been some complaints about why Apple did not decide to ramp the UI down to 1 Hz when idle. The reason for this is that lower refresh rates leave the pixels discharging for a longer period, and a 1 Hz mode in normal screen operations would likely appear to flicker in dark conditions. The Always-On display, for example, already exhibits flickering when viewed in low light through my peripheral vision.

Nevertheless, the power savings of idling to 1 Hz compared to 10 Hz would be negligible outside the Always-On display. For reference, the difference between driving an OLED at 10 Hz and 60 Hz is only about 50 milliwatts, or about 0.3% of the iPhone 14 Pro Max's battery per hour of difference the difference between 1 Hz and 10 Hz would be even lower.

In terms of the flicker situation, the iPhone 14 Pro uses a 480 Hz base frequency for its pulse-width modulation (PWM). Some users report discomfort due to subconsciously noticing this flicker, but the iPhone 14 Pro's flicker frequency should be fast enough for most people not to notice. However, this cadence slows down near the minimum brightness of the OLED, and the PWM controller instead works over two periods, making 240 Hz the dominant flicker frequency at low brightness. This downstep is likely to keep the average luminance of the pixels at a more predictable value since the rise and fall durations of the pixels are not instantaneous, but actually slower at low brightness.

Apple's ProMotion system is extremely robust, capable of adapting to more conditions than other phones we've tested.

There's also a curious 60 Hz signal that appears at low brightness that's accompanied by odd harmonics. This is characteristic of the square wave of a normal refresh period, but what makes it mysterious is the signal is present even when scrolling the screen past 60 Hz. At the moment, my best guess is that it helps further stabilize the screen luminance at low brightness.

Video playback frequency for the Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max at varying framerates
Video playback frequency for the iPhone 14 Pro Max at varying framerates (24fps, 25fps, 30fps)

For video playback, one niche benefit of variable refresh rates is the ability to match the screen's refresh rate to the frame rate of the content. Some people perceive judder during 24 FPS videos due to these frame rates not dividing wholly into 60 Hz, and it would be a waste of power to run the display at 120 Hz just to cleanly playback 24 FPS. In this category, Apple's ProMotion system is truly best-in-class, being able to adapt its refresh rate not only to 24 FPS video, but to 10 FPS, 15 FPS, 25 FPS, and even 30 FPS video. No other variable refresh OLED phone I've tested adapts to all these conditions, and it likely contributes to how Apple manages such outstanding battery runtime during video playback. Most other phones simply leave the display at 60 Hz when a video is playing on the screen.

Color gamut and Spectra testing: Slightly more colors

The iPhone 14 Pro has completely new OLED emitter materials from the panel suppliers. The blue emitter's dominant wavelength moved down from 460 nm to 455 nm, and the spectral bandwidth of the green emitter is slightly sharper. These changes make for about a 5% increase in the maximum size of the iPhone 14 Pro color gamut. However, these colors are not really used since Apple's color management is limited to working within DCI-P3. Instead, these emitters likely just facilitate the panel's boost in power efficiency.

Most consumer content only utilizes up to DCI-P3 color primaries, so this gamut limitation isn't a big deal. It also ensures consistent colors between P3 displays, at least until we have consumer displays that can cover a larger portion of the BT.2020 color space.

Contrast and tone response testing: Sunlight improvements

Many older OLEDs suffered from inaccurate gamma calibration due to their Auto Brightness Limiter (ABL). This effect reduces the OLED's overall brightness proportional to the screen's average pixel value, making calibration difficult. Today, most smartphones circumvent this issue by minimizing the effect of ABL, achieved by limiting the brightness of the pixels to the same luminance associated with a full screen of white, when ABL is strongest.

ip14p_trc_medium
Medium brightness
Tone response chart for the iPhone 14 Pro Max (100 nits, 33% APL)

Like most phones and computer monitors, the iPhone 14 Pro display targets the faux-standard 2.2-gamma tone response. Its tonal calibration is extremely accurate to its target, from low to high brightness. What's important to understand, though, is that a 2.2-gamma tone curve is not always the appropriate response, and the convention is only really used in medium-to-high brightness levels (100–500 nits) with low-to-medium screen glare.

The improved tone response in sunlight is a huge improvement for content legibility.

Part of what makes the iPhone 14 Pro display so much more readable in the sunlight is not just its new peak white brightness, but how it tone maps the rest of the colors. The OLED, new to this generation, will now crank up the lightness of shadows and midtones in an effort to counteract outdoor screen glare. I've complained about the lack of this behavior in all prior iPhones, and I'm happy to finally see it added as it makes a huge improvement to content legibility.

Adjusting tone lightness substantially usually leads to color hue distortion, but colors on the iPhone are just as accurate in this mode. This suggests the tuning is applied to the pixels' derived luminance signal rather than directly to the color channels, which is excellent attention to detail by Apple.

But on the darker side of things, I'm sad to see that Apple backtracked its minimum brightness calibration. Prior to the iPhone 13 series, Apple calibrated its OLEDs to have a flatter tone curve at low brightness levels. This made reading on the phone much easier on the eyes in low light, and it reduced the appearance of black clipping (or black crush) in photos and videos. Now, I find myself more often needing to increase the screen brightness to make out the shadows in the content I'm viewing. Using a 2.2-gamma power simply provides too much contrast at low brightness, and as a night owl, this is my least favorite aspect of the iPhone 14 Pro screen. On the other hand, the complete lack of black smearing on this phone more than makes up for it.

Color accuracy and precision testing: Almost flawless calibration

ip14pm_grayscale_medium
Medium brightness
Grayscale spread plot for Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max (Medium brightness, 33% APL)

Color precision on the iPhone 14 Pro is outstanding, as the color of white measures very close to D65 for all brightness levels. Better yet, darker shades of gray remain very close to the color of white, and no color tinting is visible across gray tones. The two rings in the plots above represent the threshold for a difference in color between gray measurements (solid circles); the inner circle is the absolute threshold under critical adaptation parameters for a trained viewer, and the outside circle is the soft threshold for normal conditions and normal people.

As we can see, most of my gray measurements are packed tight within the absolute threshold, with only a few really dark measurements a little further out, but still within the normal threshold. Apple has always been among the best in this calibration quality, so this is not much of a surprise.

Panel uniformity of the Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max
Panel gray uniformity of the iPhone 14 Pro Max, taken at an extremely dim 0.01 nits. Color corrected to match what my eyes see.

However, as with every OLED, panel gray uniformity varies with each unit. At minimum brightness, a slightly warm tint could be seen around the perimeter of the screen. It's not as bad as it could be, and although it's not a deal-breaker, it's a little disappointing to see this after my last two years with flagship phones, which all had pristine panels. I reckon this may have something to do with the current yields of the new OLED material set, as Samsung Display faced similar issues the last time they changed their blue emitter with the M10 material set found in the Samsung Galaxy S10 and iPhone 11 Pro. Or I could have simply just had bad luck with mine.

Metameric failure

Although the iPhone 14 Pro may measure accurately to 6500 K, the reality is that it actually appears different from the intended appearance of the D65 specification. This is something I've mentioned in my past reviews, and I will continue to do so until these companies provide solutions to this problem. Here's what I wrote in my recent Google Pixel 7 Pro display review:

The fact of the matter is that current methods of color measurement don't provide a definitive assessment for color matching. As it turns out, the difference in spectral distributions between OLEDs and LCDs creates a disagreement in the appearance of their white points. More precisely, the color of white on OLEDs will typically appear yellowish-green compared to an LCD display that measures identically. This is known as metameric failure, and it's been widely acknowledged to occur with wide-gamut displays such as OLEDs. The standard illuminants (e.g. D65) have been defined with spectral distributions that match closer to that of an LCD, which are now used as reference. For this reason, an offset towards magenta is needed for the white point of OLEDs to perceptually match the two display technologies.

For a concrete example, I color-matched my Google Pixel 7 Pro OLED to the white of my calibrated LCD monitor. The Pixel 7 Pro also has outstanding white balance calibration, measuring even more accurately than the iPhone 14 Pro Max at medium brightness and below. After matching my two displays, measuring the Pixel 7 Pro white point resulted in a ΔE color distance value of 12.2, which is significant. The distinction is also immediately noticeable when compared to past iPhones with LCDs, which appear to have accurate whites. If Apple is truly striving for consistent color reproduction for its displays, which they absolutely are, then this is a matter they need to prioritize in order for its OLEDs to be reliable professionally.

ip14pm_srgb_medium
Medium brightness
sRGB color accuracy plots for the iPhone 14 Pro Max (Medium brightness, 50% APL, 75% intensity)

As for the rest of the colors, the iPhone 14 Pro calibration is almost flawless. The one issue is that red colors near max chroma are slightly oversaturated and hue-shifted within the default sRGB color space. But in the end, this is something almost no one will actually notice unless you're looking for it; those working professionally with graphics and color should just be aware of this.

When using your phone outdoors, the colors on its screen can get washed out from reflections, impacting color accuracy. In bright conditions, the new iPhones will bump up the color saturation to compensate for this reduction of color. And as we've covered earlier, the screen will also boost its tonal lightness, which, together with its peak brightness, contributes to the most sunlight-legible phone screen yet.

HDR10 reproduction testing: Apple's HDR experience is even better

Ever since the iPhone XS, Apple has offered an impeccable HDR viewing experience, arguably better than any other phone. This is still true today, and the catalyst for this is iOS's capacity to display "brighter-than-white" highlights. When it comes down to it, this abstraction from a peak reference white is one of the essences of high dynamic range media, and Apple is one of the first companies to execute it properly. Four years later, the Google Pixel 7 Pro is the first Android phone to provide similar functionality.

A primer on HDR10

Out of the various HDR video standards, the HDR10 format is by far the most popularly used in film. Dolby Vision builds on top of this standard, and the baseline for both is what's called the ST.2084 Perceptual Quantizer tone response curve, or PQ for short. Much like gamma-2.2 for SDR content, HDR fidelity largely relies on the screen accurately reproducing this curve. But one big difference compared to gamma-2.2 is that the PQ curve is an absolute tone response, meaning that it defines pixel values to an exact screen luminance value. Gamma-2.2, on the other hand, relates pixel values to a screen luminance value that is a relative percentage of the screen's current peak luminance for white.

If we take the PQ specification at face value, then that means the exposure of HDR content following this curve does not change when adjusting the screen brightness. Obviously, in everyday use, this makes absolutely no sense because content should scale with the brightness we want it at. Most displays will calibrate to this curve for the screen's maximum backlight level and automatically switch to this brightness when HDR content plays. This is how many Android phones have operated, but this runs into the issue of rendering the rest of the OS at peak brightness.

The remedy to this is to dim everything on the screen except for HDR content, and this is what Apple (and recently Google) does. When HDR content appears, the OS will gradually ramp up the screen brightness while proportionally and simultaneously reducing the pixel values of the rest of the UI, fooling the user to believe it's only the HDR highlights getting brighter. This is how software achieves those "brighter-than-white" highlights that appear more intense than the white of the UI.

What makes the iPhone HDR viewing experience even better is how Apple scales the appearance of HDR10 video. The video brightness of the ST.2084 specification assumes the viewer is watching inside a dark room, which is not always the case; the same video brightness would look way too dark outdoors or in office lighting. So, Apple decided to set the pivot point for the ST.2084 curve around 50% system brightness. At this midpoint, the iPhone will accurately reproduce the ST.2084 curve; above or below this brightness, the system tone maps the video brightness accordingly. Many Android phones set the pivot point at 100% system brightness, meaning you would need to set the phone to its max brightness for video intended for a dark room. For this reason, HDR often appears too dark on many Android phones.

One caveat is that the iPhone 14 Pro does not appear to tone map its peak brightness towards the maximum content light level of HDR10 with static metadata. It instead has a fixed roll-off depending on the user's brightness. Because of this, the iPhone 14 Pro will clip high-intensity colors and highlights at low brightness (shown in my measurements above), rather than rolling them off, deteriorating picture quality. Fortunately, the iPhone OLEDs support Dolby Vision, which takes care of dynamic tone mapping. The only phones I've tested to support proper metadata tonemapping are the Samsung Galaxy S22 series, which edges out the iPhone 14 Pro when it comes to absolute tonal accuracy.

Final thoughts

In many categories, smartphone improvements have been getting incremental and boring. For screens, color accuracy has been a non-issue for a good decade, and it seems the only real benchmark left is how bright they can get. It feels like it was just last week when 600 nits was considered "excellent" for outdoors, and we're rapidly progressing to quadruple that. But there are countless other qualities regarding the portal to your phone — both objective and subjective — and it's refreshing when I finally get to write about something that isn't just flexing numbers.

Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max rear

The iPhone 14 Pro Max not only packs some of the best display hardware in any product, but it also exudes technical finesse and thoughtful engineering. Compared to other companies, Apple doesn't bother with embellishing its screens with added vibrancy, nor does it inflate its brightness figures with unrealistic benchmark measurements. Instead, the company focuses on pushing the bleeding edge in screen and color standards, for better or for worse.

Mind you, the iPhone 14 Pro OLED is not perfect (what a surprise). There are calibration choices for other phones I prefer; for example, I would much rather have the low-brightness tone response of the Google Pixel 7 Pro or Sony's 2.4-gamma during fullscreen SDR video playback. Other phones also offer manual white balance adjustments, which is necessary to fix the metamerism failure for OLEDs. But despite it not being the absolute best in every category, this is the single most praise I have given any review, and I can firmly seat the iPhone 14 Pro Max OLED as the single most impressive screen I've seen on any phone available today.

Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max

The iPhone 14 Pro Max is Apple's biggest and best 2022 smartphone. In typical Apple fashion, it is both a powerhouse and an endurance beast, offering the A16 Bionic chip, a 6.7-inch display, and the Dynamic Island.