Naturally, you’re getting all the advantages of AMOLED here. Infinite contrast ratio, deep blacks and excellent viewing angles are all part of the experience on the Z2 Play, which leads to a fantastic display for the most part. This AMOLED also hits above 400 nits of peak brightness, which is generally what I consider a good mark for this type of display.
Color performance isn’t as strong. The Z2 Play is too cold by default, with an average color temperature around 7200K and a strong overrepresentation of blue throughout most of the grayscale. Issues are compounded by oversaturation: the display here produces 142% of the sRGB spectrum, which is well above, and these additional colors are not properly utilized by Android as the OS does not support color management. Due to the oversaturation issue, color accuracy isn’t great, falling around the middle of our tables. Greens and reds suffer the most from inaccuracy, while blues are comparatively better. The Z2 Play has fairly strong skin tone reproduction, though most other areas of our custom color test reveal inaccurate results. Most people will probably appreciate the strong oversaturated nature of this display, though it’s not suitable for those wanting accuracy.
The Z2 Play does have a software mode called ‘standard’ that attempts to fix the oversaturation issue, and it works to a limited extent. The standard mode has the byproduct of reducing grayscale performance by a fair margin, and it doesn’t truly correct most color inaccuracies. It also makes the display look like garbage relative to the default ‘vibrant’ mode, so I wouldn’t recommend playing around with the settings too much here.
