Trying to cut through the jargon
Smartphone displays with adaptive refresh rates are able to run low and slow to save power while still bringing content like films and website content at optimal quality. But Samsung’s latest Galaxy S22 and S22+ don’t go as slow as they were marketed to be.
The S22 Ultra is able to adjust its refresh rate from 120Hz all the way down to 1Hz for extreme power efficiency — an improvement on the S21 Ultra’s floor of 10Hz. That hasn’t changed.
The lesser two versions of the S21 series, however, were stuck with higher minimums of 48Hz, so when we saw that the S22 and S22+’s displays were billed with 10Hz rates (via Internet Archive), we were impressed.
However, as caught out by Ross Young, CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants, on Twitter, the company appears to have updated the phones’ lower limits up to 48Hz. This is despite current messaging on the company’s product profile claiming the two phones do support a 10Hz rate.
We’ve reached out to Samsung for an explanation on the update and the resulting inconsistency.
UPDATE: 2022/02/15 12:48 EST BY JULES WANG
Statement
Samsung explains in its statement that while “the display component of both devices support between 48 to 120Hz,” the company used the 10Hz number to signify its “proprietary technology” that feeds data to the display at the lower rate. We can infer that the pipeline can tell the display what to update at 10 times a second, but the display itself will still refresh at 48Hz.
The display refresh rate was originally listed between 10 and 120Hz (10 to 120 frames per second), and we later opted to update how we communicate this specification in order to be in line with the more widely-recognized industry standard.Consumers can be assured there has been no change of hardware specifications, and both devices support up to 120Hz for super smooth scrolling.
Good to know numbers mean something again.
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