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Full HD Smartphones: Are they Worth it?

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S Aadeetya
New Update

Full HD is no longer a term you can associate with TVs alone, because the technology is now being used in just about every flagship smartphone today. After HTC and LG, many other major manufacturers got into the FHD bandwagon viz. Samsung with its Galaxy S4, HTC with its One model, the Sony Xperia Z, etc. Just as in TVs, a Full HD display in smartphones also implies a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. According to some sources, smartphones with 5-inch full HD screens may very well become the industry standard for handsets this year. But according to others, 720p displays are sufficient for a smartphone and 1080p is an overkill. They believe that Full HD resolution becomes important when your smartphone's display size increases beyond 6-inches.

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So the question is, whom do you believe? Let's find out what Full HD mobiles are really good for.

What you get in Full HD

Compared to HD, aka 720p, FHD resolution is useful for viewing 1920x1080 content without worrying about scaling issues. That's because rescaled content on smartphones that has been scaled for some other resolution, does not look very good. So there's a distinct advantage to having 1920x1080 resolution. To verify the value of FHD, we placed an HD and FHD smartphone next to each other and checked out image quality. The difference in picture quality was clearly noticeable. Images, videos and text looked much brighter and crisper on FHD phones. We watched youtube videos on both devices by keeping them next to each other, and we liked what we saw on the 1080p smartphones, because it made the video quality more crisper than on 720p.So the conclusion is that FHD smartphones give much better image quality as compared to HD.

So where's the catch?

It's no secret that phone displays are getting much bigger than they used to be. So to enjoy Full HD smartphones, you need a screen size of at least 6 inches, else you'll notice very little difference in image quality. However, on the downside full HD resolution chews up on your phone's battery life which could be a big compromise for many.

Are they worth it ?

Whether Full HD is worth it on a smartphone display depends on the use case. If you love to read e-books while traveling, watch movies or play games then you will love the FHD display. However, if you are just an average user who mostly uses his smartphone to access Facebook or to watch youtube videos occasionally, then it's not really worth spending extra for a full HD phone. After all, those extra pixels also add to the smartphone's cost.

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