Acquiring one of 8 smartphones with best screen resolution featured on our list will mean you’ll never take your eyes off the screen. Yes, they are that good. Watching movies, looking at the pictures or browsing through the web will be a whole new experience with one of these smartphones.
As you all probably know, smartphone screen is made from thousands of dots known as pixels, short for picture element with each pixel containing a portion of the displayed image. The higher the number of pixels, the sharper the image. Pixels are the ones that count when it comes to resolution. So the definition of the “resolution” would be the number of pixels from left to right and the number of pixels from top to bottom. In terms of smartphone screen resolutions, you have probably heard about HD, Full HD, Quad HD (QHD) and Ultra HD/4K displays. Let’s cover that as well. Each of these tags presents a different vertical and horizontal pixel number ratio. HD and Full HD resolutions are something of a standard in the smartphone industry for the past couple of years, and their pixel ratio is 720×1280 and 1080 x 1920, respectively. Quad HD (1440×2560) became very popular recently while Ultra HD/4K (3840×2160) display is yet to gain some serious attraction.
Number of pixels is not the only thing that matters when it comes to determining how good a display is. Let’s say the smartphone has a resolution of 1080×1920. This means that screen has 1080 pixels from left to right and 1920 pixels from top to bottom. Now, we will assume that smartphone A has a 4.5 inch screen and smartphone B has a 5.0 inch screen but they both have 1080×1920 resolutions. Someone would assume that smartphone B will provide better content display due to having a bigger screen. Quite the contrary, smartphone A would have a better content display. This brings us to PPI.
PPI (pixels per inch) or pixel density is concentrations of pixels on a smartphone screen. This is basically how close pixels are packed to each other on the screen. Just like the number of pixels, PPI has great importance when it comes to the screen resolution of smartphones. Smartphone screens that have high PPI have better a screen resolution. PPI is calculated by dividing the diagonal size of the smartphone screen with its diagonal resolution. If you want to calculate your screen’s PPI without much hassle, you can do it by using this calculator.
Of course, high PPI doesn’t come without problems. The Higher PPI number means that the battery will be drained rapidly. Also, the studies have shown that when PPI reaches 300, the human eye has a difficulty noticing the difference. This is why some smartphone manufacturers like Apple keep PPI around 300. (If you have bigger concerns over your cell reception than your smartphone display, check out our list of 7 smartphones with the best antenna reception: 2016 models.)
To determine smartphones with best screen resolution, we used screen resolution and PPI as our guide. After checking numerous sources like Phone Egg, Phone Arena, Sony Mobile, Display Mate, among others, we managed to find what we were looking for. First, we looked at the smartphones with Ultra HD/4K (3840×2160) resolution. At this moment, only one phone with Ultra HD/4K (3840×2160) resolution is available on the market (others are scheduled for release) so it deserved the first place on our list, also having the highest number of PPI. Then we looked at the phones with Quad HD (1440×2560) and ranked them accordingly to their PPI, thus getting the rest of our list of smartphones with best screen resolution. Enjoy it!