Mini Tablet Display Technology Shoot-Out

Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7  –  Apple iPad mini Retina Display  –  new Google Nexus 7

Introduction
A new generation of Mini 7 to 8 inch Tablets from three of the major manufacturers has just completed with the belated launch of the Apple iPad mini with Retina Display. Together with the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7 and new Google Nexus 7 (2013) they all should be, in principle, a notch down from the Large Size Flagship Tablets that we recently tested. But the Mini Tablets are growing rapidly in popularity and market share, so it’s a fiercely competitive category. As a result, they have some of the very highest technology displays with Quantum Dots, Low Temperature Poly Silicon, IGZO and/or high efficiency Backlight LEDs, all of which have a major impact on real image quality that we examine below.

The 7 inch tablet format was pioneered by the Barnes & Noble Nook Color, Amazon Kindle Fire, and (original) Google Nexus 7. After dismissing the smaller 7 inch tablets, Apple subsequently introduced in 2012 its own iPad mini, with a 7.9-inch 1024×768 display with a (surprisingly) much smaller Color Gamut and higher screen Reflectance than the existing models of the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7. A lot has happened to displays and display technology over the past year so this is much more than a rematch…

These new Mini Tablets all have higher than Full High Definition displays that have about 325 PPI Pixels Per Inch. At normal viewing distances a person with 20/20 Vision can’t resolve the individual pixels, so the displays appear to be perfectly sharp. With high resolution and sharpness taken care of (for now), there are many other equally important and even more challenging issues for Mini Tablets displays:
1. Picture quality as good or better than your HDTV (to entice you to watch downloaded content).
2. Excellent true color accuracy and accurate image contrast for high fidelity images of all viewed content.
3. Improved screen performance in high ambient light since Tablets aren’t used in the dark.

We’ll cover these issues and much more, with in-depth comprehensive display tests, measurements and analysis that you will find nowhere else.

Amazon provided DisplayMate Technologies with a production unit of the Kindle Fire HDX 7 to test and analyze for this Display Technology Shoot-Out article.

The Shoot-Out
To examine the display performance of the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7, the Apple iPad mini Retina Display, and the new Google Nexus 7 (2013) we ran our in-depth series of Mobile Display Technology Shoot-Out Lab tests. We take display quality very seriously and provide in-depth objective analysis and side-by-side comparisons based on detailed laboratory measurements and extensive viewing tests with both test patterns and test images. To see how far mobile displays have progressed in just three years see our 2010 Smartphone Display Shoot-Out and 2011 Tablet Display Shoot-Out, and for a real history lesson see our original 2006 Smartphone Display Shoot-Out.