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Super Retina Phone Screens: How They Work
Super Retina Display is the name Apple introduced with the iPhone X in 2017 to describe its first OLED smartphone panel. The upgrade from standard Retina to Super Retina represented a shift not just in density but in the fundamental display technology, moving from LCD to OLED for the first time in iPhone history.
The Move to OLED
Previous Retina Displays used IPS LCD panels, which produce excellent colour accuracy and high brightness but are limited by the structural constraints of liquid crystal technology — a persistent backlight, limited contrast, and a physical minimum thickness imposed by the backlight and filter stack.
The iPhone X's Super Retina Display used a custom OLED panel supplied by Samsung, with Apple applying its own colour calibration and optimisation on top. The shift to OLED brought true blacks, higher contrast, and a thinner display stack that allowed Apple to extend the screen closer to the edges of the device.
Resolution and Density
The iPhone X Super Retina Display measured 5.8 inches at 458 PPI — significantly above the 300 PPI Retina threshold. The higher density was partly necessary to compensate for the PenTile sub-pixel arrangement used in the OLED panel, which has fewer red and blue sub-pixels per pixel than a standard RGB stripe layout.
Colour Accuracy and Wide Gamut
Apple calibrated the Super Retina Display to cover the DCI-P3 colour space, the standard used in digital cinema, which is around 25 percent wider than the sRGB space used in most older displays. The panel also supported True Tone — a feature using ambient light sensors to adjust the colour temperature of the display to match the surrounding light, reducing visual fatigue.
OLED-Specific Engineering
Apple engineered the Super Retina Display to mitigate typical OLED weaknesses. Custom chip-level calibration compensated for the uneven brightness that OLED panels can exhibit at low intensity levels. Apple also developed a sub-pixel rendering technique to maximise sharpness given the PenTile layout.
