[OnePlus 3 Guides, News, & Discussion] knpk13:
Note: long post, a bit off topic, but mostly about the display.

I was very worried about this, especially as I already on OP2 and was wondering whether I should get the OP3. According to anandtech, OP3 is amazing in everything other than the screen calibration, just like the OP2. So thanks for the clarification. :highfive: It's annoying that they didn't cover some topics like audio/DAC quality and community development support. The amount of source code released is staggering, on par with a Nexus, even dash charge will work as they will release the binaries as stated on their GitHub. We got our first custom rom within an hour of the op3 announcement, which I believe is a new record. Many famous devs from other devices are moving to the OP3, like arter97, DespairFactor and sultanxda. And we already have grarak.

But I was also wondering(since I don't have a spectrophotometer) whether the default color profile on custom roms for the op2 and op3 are accurate or whether they are same as stock. I tried the threads, but couldn't find a satisfactory answer. I assume with kcal it could be fixed, but atleast for the OP2 I have found no color profiles that claim to have been a result of accurate calibration using a spectrophotometer. So I just boosted the saturation a tiny bit and it looks much better. You are right that the display looks good though, but users will never know the difference if they aren't exposed to accurate colors right? I wonder how anandtech knows that the display colors seem off just by looking at it.

And like the other user said, this is actually odd because oneplus sells through the internet, not retail, so they have no incentive to calibrate to appear "vivid", whatever that's supposed to mean. So I basically don't understand why oneplus would choose to calibrate their display like this.

About the resolution, atleast on my OP2 and a friend's Galaxy note 5(stock, friend isn't a power user) compared side to side(at different viewing distances), I could tell that the note 5 display was way better/sharper, atleast to me. And I actually went in expecting my op2 display to be better.

I don't know whether that was because of the colors or actual resolution or something else. I could also notice how freaking blue the op2 display was when we compared high res black and white pictures. To be fair, the black and white pic on the note 5 looked a bit yellow to me.

:confused:

So to sum up, my questions are,

is the default color profile on custom roms for op2/op3 accurate unlike stock?

If not, is there an easy way to obtain an accurate display on these devices using kcal or something else?

Why do OEMs choose to calibrate displays inaccurately?

Is display accuracy a good thing or bad thing?

:confused:

Regardless, I am most likely going to purchase an OP3(although I'm still skeptical about the display), since as you said, the numerous advantages dwarf the few minor flaws, and it costs half as much as many flagships. I'm currently in India, but will be going to the US in August to study undergrad computer science (maybe get into Android development as well!). So I'm probably going to have to wait to purchase the north american model instead of the global one for LTE reasons, will have to check. Kinda sucks. I wonder why oems have SO MANY different variants of the same phone(especially Samsung). One reason I can think of is they can't fit in all the LTE and other radios required to support all frequencies/bands without compromising on other parts of the phone.

I personally think a cool phone for some people would be one that has one large compromise, but is near perfect in everything else, like design, performance, and dev support. For example, a phone without cameras, but near perfect in everything else. Maybe if the op3 eliminated the camera and poured that money into the display and other minor flaws, it would have been even better! Just my opinion though.

Edit: hey I just realized, that's the strength of truly modular phones!!! You can choose your own compromises, like no large camera in favour of using that space for a larger battery, or some other combo! Ugh, that was so obvious..