What determines the screen quality of a tablet?

The screen type, brightness, and resolution determine the screen quality of a tablet. A screen type determines how colorful and bright the screen is. In addition, the resolution ensures the sharpness of your screen. The more pixels your tablet has, the more details you'll see during a game or video. With a bright screen, you can watch that same video in the garden in bright sunlight too. Do you often watch movies on Netflix? HDR ensures you're watching vibrant colors.

Tablets have different types of screens. The screen type determines how colorful and bright the images are. More expensive tablets have an IPS panel with LED technology or an OLED screen, for example. With these tablets, colors truly pop on the screen. More affordable tablets often have a TFT or LCD screen. The display of news websites and social media apps on such tablets is fine, but you can't watch movies and series in high quality. Colors look faded and the screen isn't usually very bright.

The resolution determines the sharpness of the images. Average tablets have a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. On those tablets, you can watch a movie in Full HD. The higher the number of pixels, the sharper the image. There's also the PPI, pixels per inch. The more pixels per inch, the sharper and more detailed the images. Want to edit photos and videos as well? Choose a tablet with a higher resolution and PPI, which is what the iPad Pro and Samsung Galaxy Tab S series tablets have.

The brighter the screen, the better the display in an environment with a lot of ambient light. The brightness is expressed in candelas per square meter, or nits. The higher the number of nits, the higher the maximum brightness. An average tablet has a screen of about 450 nits. Does the screen have less than 450 nits? The screen might not be legible if you're watching a movie on a sunny day in the garden. You won't have this problem with more expensive tablets with 600 nits, for example.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) affects things like the color gamut of the screen. The contrast between colors is high and colors look vibrant on a tablet with a screen that supports HDR. Black is truly black, for example. HDR only works with HDR content. Streaming services like Netflix and Apple TV offer movies and series in HDR. There are different types of HDR, HDR10, HDR10+, or Dolby Vision. The screens of more expensive tablets support HDR.

At Coolblue, we have various categories to determine the screen quality and recommended usage situation.

• Mediocre: the quality of videos isn't high. You can use the tablet for social media and news websites.
• Standard: you can watch videos in Full HD, but the colors aren't vibrant. It's suitable for YouTube videos.
• Good: colors look vibrant. You can watch movies in Full HD quality.
• Very good: you can watch movies and series in high quality. Even 3D games at the highest settings look sharp.
• Excellent: you can game and watch movies and series in the highest quality. Images are razor-sharp and the colors pop on the screen.