Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Does 90Hz REALLY matter??”.
With high refresh rate displays becoming more and more common in our smartphones, it’s becoming something that we expect from pretty much everything above $ 300. But can people tell the difference? We invited a plethora of people with different ages from different backgrounds to come and see if they could tell a difference between two phones. One set to 60 Hertz on one set to 90 they’ve been told it’s a psychology experiment and they don’t actually know the true nature of the test until afterwards, where I tell them today we’re using two pairs of phones, one power of room ex2 pros one set To 60, one set to 90 Hertz and a one plus seven pro and a 70 pro. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get hold of a second 70 Pro or a second 7 Pro.
So the test is slightly unfair there, but all that brightness settings were set to a hundred percent so that that perceived speed could not be changed, and, apart from that, they were loaded up with the same home screen the same wallpaper. The same preinstalled applications all ready for our test subjects to use. Would that all said and done, let’s see how they got on I’m going to hand you to Persephone one pair after the other.
Each pair is physically the same phone. I want to see if you think, there’s a difference between them when using them and if so, what is that difference exactly the same interface when you were when you dragged down the menu in the top one on the left is faster loading a web page, maybe Better Wi-Fi chips or bran: they both open up apps at the same kind of speed. This one feels like it just seems more authentic. It seemed pretty the same to me. I can’t see a difference between the two to me. They both feel pretty similar. It’S very little difference between them, if any at all. Really, I would have to say that they’re pretty much exactly the same phone sure I did this one feels slightly like that with me, but I’m not sure whether he isn’t again very similar interface. This one followed by a front-facing camera if I was being very thick yeah, there’s better definition on that image there, but I might just been the way I was hoping it or I took it or movement on my hands or something like that. I think what they believe makes it seem to be exactly losing their just for the same.
The latest thing I don’t see a large difference frankly, can’t see it if there might be totally novice, but I can’t see a difference either so yeah I mean I was expecting most people to not be able to tell the difference, and maybe a small percentage would But not almost the entirety of the participants, it’s quite funny because I didn’t tell them specifically what they’re looking for. They were kind of comparing cameras and speakers and the general speed of the phone the battery life and went into the settings to see if they could see anything, but no, they didn’t really notice anything. And, unfortunately, I have to kind of admit sitting there watching them. Try to compare the two phones from that distance, which was about three or four feet. I couldn’t tell the difference either they looked exactly the same, so why couldn’t the participants actually tell the difference? Well, I have a couple of theories.
The first one is that the difference between 60 and 90 Hertz just isn’t enough. It’S 50 % extra and it’s really not as big of a jump as you noticed when going from, let’s say 60 to 120 or 140 for hers. And that brings me to my second theory, which is that you see a lot of gaming displays mainly apps between 20 and 30 inches.
That’S are a hundred and forty-four Hertz, and maybe the size of the display in the distance from yourself to the display makes a difference as well so the perceived speed. So what does this all mean? Well that the general public, including some techy people in that group of participants, they just, cannot tell the difference between 60 and 90 hairs and even afterwards, when I told them exactly what to look for. It was hard to even then see the difference between the two. So you really need to know what to look for to actually see a difference, and even then that’s quite rare, which doesn’t bode well for the extra money that you seem to be paying for these 90 Hertz displays.
Although granted they are seeming to come down in price ever so quickly, but added to which the extra power that you need to drive those frames and very specifically, the battery life that you have to forego to achieve 90 Hertz. Well, that’s just something that does seem worth it. A perfect example of this is with the pixel for where, if you force 90 Hertz move to be on the whole time, the battery life just goes from bad to worse. Thankfully, however, it seems like the year 2020 is going to be the year of a hundred and twenty Hertz displays, and that gets me really excited, because I can definitely tell the difference between sixty and a hundred and twenty, with a difference in refresh rate like that, I mean it would be so much easier to tell the difference and we’d love to continue investigating this topic, comparing 60 to 120 or even 240 hertz displays, if that’s something that comes on extra in smartphones and even beyond smartphones.
It would be really interesting to see if we could compare the size of screens and the distance from the participants to really see if that makes a difference as well. If you want to see experiments like that, please let us know, because we’d love to experiment and try and get you that data and analysis to you via the Android Authority, YouTube channel and with that, it’s about time for me to go. Thank you so much for watching and it was really fun to do this experiment.
I want to give a massive shout out to everyone who participated, because without you guys, we wouldn’t be able to do anything with this and it was really fun to do and hopefully insightful for you guys as well. Please do like comment and subscribe to never miss a video like this one. I’Ve been around Thomas with Androids Authority and I’ll see you later. Peace .