The Galaxy S10+ has a 6.4-inch curved display that Samsung claims to be the brightest and most colour-accurate AMOLED panel of its kind. Samsung has changed nothing fundamentally about the display compared to the one it used in its predecessor though, as demonstrated by its sub-pixel array. Two green subpixels must each share a blue and a red pixel, so the "dynamic" AMOLED marketing most likely signifies that the display is interrupted by the dual front-facing cameras.

The S10+ has a slightly higher resolution than its predecessor because of its larger aspect ratio, which is now 3040x1440 and 19:9, respectively. However, the S10+ has a 526 PPI pixel density, which is marginally lower than the 531 PPI density that we measured in the Galaxy S9+. It is also worth keeping in mind that Samsung sets the display to 2280x1080 pixels by default, which is listed as FHD+ in Settings. The company has done this to preserve battery life, but you can set the display to 1520x720, or HD+, to consume even less battery power. The S10+ retains support for HDR 10+ too, which Samsung describes as a “video enhancer”.

The S10+ has a subtly rounded display as its predecessor does. Samsung continues to include the edge lighting notification functionality that we have seen before, while One UI incorporates a system-wide night mode that Samsung Experience lacked along with gesture controls instead of traditional onscreen navigation buttons.

The device supports an always-on-display too, which we did not find intrusive during our tests thanks to our review unit’s low minimum brightness, which X-Rite i1Pro 2 measures at 1.58 cd/m². The use of pulse-width modulation (PWM) to control screen brightness may cause issues for some people though. The display in our review unit flickers at 236 Hz, which is a typical frequency for OLED panels, although it could cause eye strain and headaches for those who are PWM sensitive.

The display achieves an average maximum brightness of 610 cd/m² according to X-Rite i1Pro 2 and is 99% evenly lit, with the latter being particularly impressive and better than all our comparison devices. The display will get bright enough for use in most environments, but the iPhone XS Max gets marginally brighter, while DisplayMate reports that the S10 achieved over 800 nits in its tests.

By contrast, the APL50 test, which evenly distributes light and dark areas across the display, reports that our review unit reaches an average maximum brightness of 747 cd/m². Hence, we may not have tested the S10+ in a bright enough environment during our X-Rite i1Pro 2 tests. However, DisplayMate also recorded its S10 reaching 942 cd/m² in APL50 and a record-breaking 1,215 cd/m² in the APL 1 test, which tests displays by reducing the intensity of bright areas compared to APL50. We cannot confirm these values currently, but we are not ruling them out.

Addendum 04.01.2019: We decided to re-run our display tests using a strong light source following our initial results. Our new tests caused the ambient light sensor to adjust peak average luminescence up to 721 cd/m², which is 113 cd/m², or 19%, brighter than our review unit reached in our initial tests. Moreover, the display reached 923 cd/m² in APL50, 990 cd/m² in APL25 and a whopping 1,006 cd/m² in APL10. In short, the Galaxy S10+ has the brightest OLED panel that we ever tested and gets even brighter than the LG G7 ThinQ, which is mighty impressive.