google pixel 3a lcd screen free sample

In Union Repair store, we grade our iPhone screen into 5 different types of quality on the basis of different material assembled. The following is the full details of each condition.

It is with widely accept major complaint replacements for original parts, which keeps a right balance between price and quality. It has sustainable supplying chain in China, and all the components of the screen are copy quality. Typically, the LCD screen is from several different factories, the most popular 4 on China market are JK,AUO, LongTeng, and ShenChao. By comparing the brightness and sharpness of the LCD, we found JK is the best quality among them and the second best is AUO. No doubt, the other components on the screen are all copy.

It is better than After Market Basic cause it comes with original laminated flexes and the LCD panel. Other components like touch panel, frame(hot pressed), backlight, polarize lens, and OCA is all copy from different factories.

The core components (like LCD and flexes) is 100% original pulled from used iPhone while the frame and touch panel is copy. The touch panel and frame come together with cold pressed glue and assembled together with the LCD by the capable third-party factory which keeps its excellent quality.

No doubt, it is tear down from used iPhone with all the parts 100% original and working perfectly just like an original new screen, it has whatever the original new screen has. The only complaint about this quality is that some of the displays are with 1 or 2 scratches but still be welcome by our critical customers who are requiring good quality.

It is 100% original from Apple-authorized factories like Toshiba, Sharp, and LG. We get this kind of screen from the first level dealer. The touch panel of the screen is oleophobic coated which prevents from fingerprints when using your iPhone. And starting with iPhone 7g, the backlight from different authorized factories comes with a different code. Backlight from Sharp has the code begins with DKH/CON, from Toshiba begins with C11/F7C/FZQ, from LG begins with DTP/C3F.

10 Designed to charge Qi-certified devices. Use of reverse wireless charging significantly reduces Pixel battery life. Cases may interfere with charging and will reduce charging speed. Charge speeds may vary. See g.co/pixel/wirelesscharging for more information.

12 Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 work on major carrier networks. Contact carrier for details. 5G service is carrier dependent. See g.co/pixel/networkinfo.

14 Requires a 5G data plan (sold separately). 5G service not available on all carrier networks or in all areas. Contact carrier for details. 5G service, speed and performance depend on many factors including, but not limited to, carrier network capabilities, device configuration and capabilities, network traffic, location, signal strength and signal obstruction. Actual results may vary. Some features not available in all areas. Data rates may apply. See g.co/pixel/networkinfo for info.

15 Android version updates for at least 3 years from when the device first became available on the Google Store in the U.S. See g.co/pixel/updates for details.

17 Pixel 5 has a dust and water protection rating of IP68 under IEC standard 60529. Charger and accessories are not water or dust resistant. Water and dust resistance are not permanent conditions and may be compromised due to normal wear and tear, repair, disassembly or damage.

For the most part, the Pixel 3a XL makes the right compromises to hit a more affordable price point. This is the same Pixel experience you get on the full-fat Pixel 3 right down to the image quality. An affordable phone, however, this is not. In markets like India, fierce competition makes the Pixel 3a XL hard to justify unless an excellent camera is your primary motivation to buy a premium smartphone.

This device is no longer widely available. The Google Pixel 3a XL is now unavailable to buy from most retailers. If you are looking for an alternative device, check out our list of the best Android phones you can buy and the best budget phones.

Last year wasn’t all that great for Google’s Pixel 3 lineup. Plagued by a myriad of issues and an increase in prices, the phones shipped lesser numbers than the already limited volumes of the Pixel 2 series. Now more than ever, Google needs a more affordable entryway into the Pixel family. Bringing the same core experience as the flagships, the new Pixel 3a and 3a XL are designed to appeal to the average buyer who doesn’t care about specifications as long as user experience is great.

I’ve spent a full week using the Google Pixel 3a XL as my primary smartphone. I used the phone on Airtel’s network in Delhi as well as in Goa. The phone ships with Android Pie and the March 5 security patch. Our Pixel 3a XL review unit was running build number PD2A.190115.029.

The Pixel 3A series represents a bold new effort by Google to democratize the Pixel experience. The phone distills the flagship experience to its basics, drops the cruft and offers a clean vision of what Google wants Android phones to be.

For a phone that costs almost half the price of the full-fledged Pixel flagships, Google has done a remarkable job at achieving parity as far as experience is concerned. At no point in my week with the phone did I feel the Pixel 3a XL offered a significantly worse experience compared to the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL.

Pricing, of course, is relative. This is not a budget smartphone. An affordable Pixel at best, it’s more expensive than many affordable flagships in competitive markets like India. Using the phone is an intuitive experience and the Pixel 3a XL simply melds into your day-to-day use. Truth be told, the Pixel 3a XL left me conflicted. This is a phone that offers a truly fantastic user experience but is incredibly hard to recommend in key markets because of the sheer value and specs competitors offer.Google Pixel 4a: Your buying guide

Even in June 2020, with the Pixel 4a in the offing, the Pixel 3a XL offers tremendous value to buyers and is worth looking at if you are in the market for a new phone.

Box contents vary a bit across territories, but in India, the phone ships with earbud-style earphones in the box. The earphones have a 3.5mm audio jack. The 18W fast charger is the same that is bundled along with Google’s flagship devices.

Over three generations of hardware, Google has constantly cut design cruft away. As a result, the Pixel design language feels almost organic in nature. The 3a looks nearly identical to the Pixel 3-series in its minimalist approach to design.

Placed next to the Pixel 3 XL, the design of the Pixel 3a XL looks nearly identical. The major difference is the glass build has been switched out for polycarbonate. Like the more expensive models, the 3a XL too has a seamless transition between the glossy upper-third and the matte section.

You’ll find the same Pixel Imprint fingerprint sensor here as on the Pixel 3/XL, and the same single camera module. The Pixel Imprint fingerprint sensor continuously improves detection rate and security with repeated use. The Pixel 3a XL also includes the Titan M security module from the flagship Pixel phones. Titan M brings added security to the Pixel phones and is responsible for storing all biometric and lock code data.

Look towards the top of the phone and you’ll be in for a surprise. Google has backtracked from their decision to get rid of headphone jacks, at least for their budget models. The Pixel 3a has dual stereo speakers as well. There’s one in the earpiece, while the other is a downward-firing speaker along the bottom edge. The lower speaker, predictably, gets muffled every time you hold the phone in a landscape orientation. Speaker output is reasonably loud and while it doesn’t have the low-end output of some competing devices, highs sound clear and there is no crackling even at high volumes.

The front of the Pixel 3a XL is perhaps the most polarizing element of the design. The massive bezels along the top, bottom, and even the sides are not doing the phone any favors. In a world where manufacturers are going the extra mile to maximize screen real estate, the Pixel 3a XL proudly bears a positively ancient-looking forehead and chin. Google’s affordable Pixels definitely cannot compete with the stunning designs being put out by Android OEMs in this regard.

That said, there is something almost endearing about the design and the perfectly weighted build makes using the Pixel 3a XL a joy. The premium materials and excellent ergonomics go a long way in making sure that the Pixel 3a XL is comfortable to hold and use.

The Google Pixel 3a XL is equipped with a 6-inch OLED display. The screen looks tack-sharp and has all the traits of a great OLED panel, including vibrant colors and fantastic viewing angles. Our testing revealed peak brightness levels of just over 400nits, which isn’t all that great for a premium smartphone. While the screen was viewable outdoors, things weren’t ideal and a brighter screen would have definitely come in handy.

Set to adaptive mode, the display on the Pixel 3a XL is very accurate, with just a mild saturation boost that helps color pop. The implementation is very subtle, but should you want a more natural look, it’s possible to switch to an sRGB color profile. When switched over to natural, the display comes across as one of the most accurate panels around, with extremely neutral looking colors.

Google’s Pixel series has never really been about top-tier specifications. Even today, the top-end Pixel 3 ships with just 4GB of RAM and that’s exactly the amount of RAM you get on the Pixel 3a XL as well. This is paired with a Snapdragon 670 chipset. The phone is available in a single version with just 64GB of storage. This is way too low, and, after restoring my phone backup, I was left with under half that. While I don’t expect Google to add a microSD card slot to their phone, a higher storage variant would have been more than welcome.

No matter which way you look at it, the Pixel 3a XL does not offer the most value as far as specifications are concerned. However, a spec sheet does not make a phone. In my week with the phone, not once did I feel the phone was running out of steam. The entire experience has been polished to a sheen and I’m yet to run across a single stutter or lag. That’s exactly why you buy a Pixel smartphone.

There are, of course, some caveats to using a mid-tier chipset. Opening a large PDF took a few more seconds than I’m used to on a higher-end phone. Post-processing in the camera app takes a few more seconds than it would on the higher-end Pixels. This is, of course, to be expected when using a mid-range phone. The lack of the Pixel Visual Core also plays a role in increasing photo processing time in third-party apps.

RAM management continues to be iffy on the Pixel 3a XL. While the phone usually managed things well, there were a few occasions when the music player force closed when I launched an additional app or the Twitter app would load up from scratch. This is a direct result of the somewhat limited amount of RAM available on the phone.

While the regular Pixel 3 and 3 XL suffered from poor battery longevity, the Pixel 3a XL has been rather excellent. A large 3,700mAh battery cell paired with a lower-resolution display and a more frugal processor means that the phone comfortably lasts a full day of extensive use. During my week with the phone, I regularly got close to eight hours and above of screen-on time. At my briefing with Google, the company claimed improving battery life was a key goal while developing the Pixel 3a XL. My time with the phone seems to confirm their claim.

The bundled 18W USB-PD-compliant wall charger can speedily charge up the phone. Charging the phone fully from scratch took about 160 minutes, which is extremely slow as far as “fast-charging” solutions are concerned. Dropping wireless charging support as a cost-cutting measure might also be disappointing to some. It’s definitely a missed opportunity to promote the Pixel Stand alongside the phone.

A significant part of the appeal of the Google Pixel is its clean software build. The Pixel 3a XL is no exception. It ships with Android Pie out of the box and it guarantees three years of software updates. The phone has absolutely no bloat onboard. While you can read more about the software here in our Android Pie review, we’ll touch on some of the features exclusive to the phone.

An interesting feature that has carried down from the higher-end Google Pixels is Active Edge. Squeezing the sides of the phone triggers Google Assistant and lets you initiate searches and request without having to pull it up via a gesture.

Also unique and new to the Google Pixel 3a XL and the broader Pixel series is support for AR in Google Maps. Using the feature, you will be able to get direction information overlaid on top of a map of your surroundings. The phone is able to recognize buildings and surroundings and overlay visual signs over them. Unfortunately, this feature is not supported in India due to the lack of Street View data.

Call Screening is another feature unique to the Pixel series. In supported markets, the feature is able to recognize and live-transcribe calls from unknown numbers to reduce the number of spam calls. The Pixel 3a XL also gets the Now Playing feature that Google debuted with the Pixel 2 XL. Using an onboard database of a few thousand songs, the phone can recognize music playing around you and give you an easy-to-access history of all the tracks.

While the 3a retains most of the major software features of Pixel phones, there is one notable omission. The Pixel 3a XL does not ship with support for unlimited full-resolution image backups. We suspect that this was done to differentiate the budget Pixel from the premium device, but it is still very disappointing to see such a key element of the Pixel experience missing from the phone.

Over the last few months, Google has been quick to update the Pixel 3a XL along with the rest of the Pixel lineup. A big selling point for the phone is guaranteed updates, and true to its promise, Google brought the Android 10 update for the phone way back in September 2019. As of the time of the latest revision of this Pixel 3a XL review, the phone is up to date with the March 2020 security patch.

Google has also taken to adding fresh features via feature drops. This includes features like adding a boarding pass to Google Pay using a screenshot or the ability to access cards and passes by holding down the power button. Additionally, it is possible to schedule dark mode or change phone status using rules-based profiles.

One of the tent poles of the Pixel experience is a superior imaging experience. The Pixel 3a XL delivers that as well. The phone sports the same rear-camera module as the full-blown Pixel 3, and other than slower processing, there is practically no difference in image quality between the two phones. The rear sensor and all accompanying algorithms are exactly the same as on the Pixel 3 XL and the Pixel 3a XL.

However, the front camera is a step down from the dual-camera set up on the Pixel 3. The phone has a single 8MP camera with a fixed focus lens and 84-degree field of view. This is significantly lower than the 97 degrees offered by the wide-selfie camera on the Pixel 3. In other words, you won’t be getting as many people into the frame with the Pixel 3a series. The phone compensates for the lack of a “regular” camera by cropping into the frame.

The front-facing camera can capture great-looking shots but there is a noticeable reduction in quality compared to the selfies shot on the flagship Pixels. There is a bit more noise, the frame of view is lower and images are just a bit softer on details.

The Pixel 3a XL gets all the software goodies Google introduced on the Pixel 3, including Top Shot, Photobooth mode, and the much-vaunted Night Sight feature. Newly launched with the Pixel 3a XL is a Time Lapse feature that lets you easily capture, well, timelapses. The feature is quite straightforward and lets you shoot 10-second clips with images captured over 50 seconds, all the way up to 20 minutes.

Google’s HDR algorithms are some of the best in the industry and the Pixel 3a XL is able to capture images with excellent dynamic range. Shooting in strong sunshine, the phone managed to evenly light up the lifeguard while preserving the highlights on the water.

Close-up shots look great, with ample details and very natural-looking color rendering. There is a very slight saturation bump in the images, but it tends to give the final result an almost film-like character. While this is not the most versatile camera on the market (the HUAWEI P30 Pro would take the cake for that), the Pixel series is one of the most reliable shooters. It’s hard to get a bad shot with the camera of the Pixel 3a.

Low-light results are fantastic as well, with ample detail and limited noise. In adverse lighting conditions, the phone pops up a reminder to use the Night Sight mode. The latter stacks data from multiple images to reduce noise. The end result is a bright-looking image with limited noise. As it stands, Night Sight mode on the Google Pixel 3a XL is second only to the HUAWEI P30 Pro and its Super Spectrum sensor in its low-light image capturing ability. Here’s our Pixel 3 and HUAWEI P30 Pro camera comparison for a deep dive on both phones’ capabilities.

Video recording on the Pixel 3a XL goes all the way up to 4K at 30 frames per second. Fused stabilization using OIS and EIS does a very good job and the footage looks sharp and mostly free of noise. It is however not as versatile as the HUAWEI P30 Pro and the Galaxy S10 series, which offer more control and even HDR video recording.

Meanwhile, the Pixel 3a XL received astrophotography mode support late last year, which should make it even better for night-time long exposure photography.

12.2MP Dual-Pixel Sony IMX363 sensor, f/1.8 aperture, 1.4µm pixels, 76-degree field-of-view, autofocus with dual-pixel phase detection, optical + electronic image stabilization

12.2MP Dual-Pixel Sony IMX363 sensor, f/1.8 aperture, 1.4µm pixels, 76-degree field-of-view, autofocus with dual-pixel phase detection, optical + electronic image stabilization

It is incredibly hard to ascertain value to the Google Pixel 3a XL. Prices for the phone vary drastically depending on the market, but one thing is for sure, if specifications are a key buying criterion for you, the Pixel 3a XL will almost certainly not cut it.

The OnePlus 7 delivers a lot more punch as far as hardware is concerned for not much more money. In fact, in India you could net the top-end OnePlus 7 with 256GB of storage and still save some money over buying the Pixel 3a XL. Add to it other devices like the Redmi K20 Pro or Xiaomi Mi 9T Pro, among others, and the Pixel 3a XL looks like anything but a value proposition.

Take away the spec sheet element though, and the Pixel 3a XL delivers an incredible experience for the average smartphone buyer. The camera is phenomenal and unmatched by any phone at Pixel 3a XL’s price point, and even higher.

Ultimately, it comes down to your smartphone usage patterns. If you find yourself playing a lot of games or pushing your phone’s hardware with a whole lot of apps, it’s hard to make a case for the Pixel 3a XL. For everyone else, Google finally has a really good option that gets you the core flagship experience at a fraction of the cost.

The Pixel 3a XL takes the best of what Google’s flagships have to offer and brings it to a much more palatable price point. For the most part, Google has made the right compromises in delivering a phone that provides a legitimately great user experience, over a beefed-up spec sheet and half-baked software.

This is a phone designed for regular people who just want a phone that can capture great memories, deliver solid battery life, and will last them a good few years. For me, the Pixel 3a XL  is definitely worth a recommendation. The Pixel 4a might be coming up soon, but that doesn’t mean that the Pixel 3a XL doesn’t continue to deliver on what it set to promise.

Even in May 2020, the Pixel 3a XL presents excellent value. It can often be got for much lower than the sticker price and delivers on its promise of excellent imaging, fast updates, and smooth and clean user experience. Arguably, it is one of the best devices that Google has made. While we’ve seen rumors of an upcoming Pixel 4a, you can’t go wrong with the 3a XL if all you want is a well-performing budget phone with a fantastic camera and support.

That wraps up our Google Pixel 3a XL review. Would you consider buying one? Or will you prefer something with a bit more grunt under-the-hood? Let us know in the comments section.

Google’s newest handset, the Pixel 3a, has been making tons of headlines—at its forefront, it boasts the renowned imaging prowess of the Pixels’ cameras at a more affordable price range, and it maintains the simplicity and aesthetic of its pricier counterparts.

Much to my surprise, the Google Pixel 3a not only comes with flagship-competing cameras, but its display is among the most color-accurate in the smartphone world in its Natural color profile, which complements its imaging chops really well. It’s not really thatsurprising, though; Google has been leading the pack inchroma calibrationsfor a while now, and every Pixel phone so far has been very well-tunedfor color, even the dreaded Pixel 2 XL (which was plagued with other issues, but chroma calibration wasn’t one of them). However, the Pixel 3a display’s strengths end there.

The Pixel 3a uses a 5.6-inch 2220×1080 (18.5:9) Samsung panel with 441 pixels per inch. For a mid-range display, it"s considerably sharp, and it should appear as sharp as most flagships unless you tend to handle your phones really close or just have extraordinary visual acuity.

For the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL, Google put in excellent polarization layers that significantly lowered screen reflections and viewing angle tints, and those had to be compromised in cutting costs for the Pixel 3a. The Pixel 3a is using less-effective layers, shifting segments of the display towards red, green, or blue at small sudden angles and rainbowing out near the edges. They also don’t filter out as much incident light as current flagships, causing higher screen reflections, and allowing the OLED layer to bleed through and become more visible. The circular polarizer layer, which was introduced in the Pixel 2, was also omitted on the Pixel 3a.

The display brightness is bottom-of-the-barrel in typical Google style. The display gets just about as bright as any other Google phone, about 400–450 nits. There is most certainly a high brightness mode in the panel that Google does not wish to tap in to, but perhaps since the Pixel 3a has a mid-range panel it might not get that much brighter anyway. There is a lot to be desired from all of Google’s displays, as none of them are particularly enjoyable to use outdoors.

The Pixel 3a defaults to a color saturation-expanding profile that Google calls “Adaptive”, though I’m still not certain what’s “adaptive” at all about it. I’m still strongly averse to this decision, as I believe content should be originally served how it was meant to while keeping the setting to increase content saturation as an option. The Boosted profile is the Natural profile with a roughly 10% increase in saturation, though this profile should instead be a saturation slider since there is asystem resource that controls the saturation level of the displaybetween 0% and 200%, with Boosted simply setting the value to 1.1 (110%).

The color-accurate profile is the Natural profile, which I’ve measured to be the most chromatically accurate on the Android side of handsets in reproducing the sRGB color space. This is the profile thatshouldbe the default, given how accurate Google has calibrated it along with the news thatwide color photos are coming to Android, which wouldn’t work properly in the Adaptive profile due to its lack of color management. Unfortunately, the panel in the Pixel 3a does not fully cover the P3 color space since its red emitter does not get saturated enough. The white point in this profile, as well as in the other two profiles, appear completely accurate to D65, although Google lists the Pixel 3a to have a D67 white point. The tone response of the display tends to render color tones just-slightly darker than standard, resulting in a display with slightly more contrast than what is considered accurate. At the low end, the Pixel 3a has a bit of trouble reproducing very dark scenes, and it does clip blacks a bit more than other displays.

TheNaturalprofile is the accurate, color-managed profile that targets the sRGB color space for non-contexted color values. Despite Google’s specification sheet listing the Pixel 3a as having a D67 white point, I measured the Natural profile to have an astoundingly accurate D65 white point across its brightness range.

TheBoostedprofile is based on the Natural profile and, according to Google, increases saturation in all directions by 10%. This description isn’t completely faithful, however, since the perception of the boost in color differs for the three primaries: Green colors receive the highest increase in perceived saturation, followed by reds, and blues show almost no discernible boost. Furthermore, the boost in saturation for red and green isn’t in the same hue direction, with greens tinting slightly towards yellow, giving them a slightly warmer tint, and reds also tinting towards yellow, making them appear more orange. The profile is actually still very color-accurate, save for highly-saturated reds-to-greens.

The defaultAdaptiveprofile stretches out the saturation of all colors: Greens are saturated the most and tinted slightly cooler, while reds and blues are saturated about equally, with reds tinting towards yellow. The profile shares the same white point as the Natural profile, which differs from the Pixel 3 where their Adaptive profile has a cooler white point than the Natural profile.

Our display brightness comparison charts compare the maximum display brightness of the Google Pixel 3a relative to other displays that we have measured. The labels on the horizontal axis on the bottom of the chart represent the multipliers for the difference in perceived brightness relative to the Google Pixel 3a display, which is fixed at “1×”. The magnitude of the displays’ brightnesses, measured in candelas per square meter, or nits, are logarithmically scaled according to Steven"s Power Law using the modality exponent for the perceived brightness of a point source, scaled proportionally to the brightness of the Google Pixel 3a display. This is done because the human eye has a logarithmic response to perceived brightness. Other charts that present brightness values on a linear scale do not properly represent the difference in perceived brightness of the displays.

When measuring the display performance of an OLED panel, it is important to understand how its technology differs from traditional LCD panels. LCDs require a backlight to pass light through color filters that block wavelengths of light to produce the colors that we see. An OLED panel is capable of having each of its individual subpixels emit their own light. This means that the OLED panel must share a certain amount of power to every lit pixel from its maximum allotment. Thus, the more subpixels that need to be lit up, the more that the panel’s power needs to be divided over the lit subpixels, and the less power that each subpixel receives.

The APL (average pixel level) of an image is the average proportion of each pixels’ individual RGB components across the entire image. As an example, a completely red, green, or blue image has an APL of 33%, since each image consists of completely lighting up only one of the three subpixels. The complete color mixtures cyan (green and blue), magenta (red and blue), or yellow (red and green) have an APL of 67%, and a full-white image that completely lights up all three subpixels has an APL of 100%. Furthermore, an image that is half black and half white has an APL of 50%. Finally, for OLED panels, the higher the total on-screen content APL, the lower the relative brightness of each of the lit pixels. LCD panels do not exhibit this characteristic (barring local dimming), and because of it, they tend to be much brighter at higher APLs than OLED panels.

Google doesn’t have a history of having bright displays—at all—and the Pixel 3a is no different. This is more acceptable on the Pixel 3a, however, since it’s Google’s mid-range device. At 50% APL, which is a good pixel level to attribute to the typical brightness of a display, the Pixel 3a emits 442 nits, which is middle-of-the-road for displays without a high brightness mode and is completely fine for its price point. The brightness drops off to a minimum of 406 nits at 100% APL, which is also just fine. At these brightness levels, the display does have legibility issues outdoors, which users will have to keep in mind.

At its dimmest, the Google Pixel 3a can achieve a white level as low as 1.7 nits, which is dimmer than what most other handset displays are capable of (excluding handsets capable of DC dimming), including the Samsung Galaxy S10 (1.8 nits) and the Apple iPhone XS (1.8 nits). The Pixel 3a gets much noticeably dimmer than the Pixel 3 (-29%) and the Pixel 3 XL (-23%).

The gamma of a display determines the overall image contrast and lightness of the colors on a screen. The industry standard gamma that is to be used on most displays follows a power function of 2.20. Higher display gamma powers will result in higher image contrast and darker color mixtures, which the film industry is progressing towards, but smartphones are viewed in many different lighting conditions where higher gamma powers are not appropriate. Our gamma plotbelow is a log-log representation of a color’s lightness as seen on the Google Pixel 3a display versus its associated input drive level. Measured points that are higher than the 2.20 line mean the color tone appears brighter than standard, while lower than the 2.20 line means the color tone appears darker than standard. The axes are scaled logarithmically since the human eye has a logarithmic response to perceived brightness.

Most modern flagship smartphone displays now come with calibrated color profiles that are chromatically accurate. However, due to the OLED property of lowering the average lightness of the colors on the screen with increasing content APL, the main difference in the total color accuracy of modern flagship OLED displays is now in the resulting gamma of the display. The gamma makes up the achromatic (grayscale component) image, or the structure of the image, which humans are more sensitive in perceiving. Therefore, it is very important that the resulting gamma of a display matches that of the content’s, which typically follows the industry standard 2.20 power function.

The Google Pixel 3a has a fairly accurate display gamma, albeit just-slightly higher than standard, resulting in slightly darker color tones which are more prevalent in highly saturated patches.

The Google Pixel 3a slightly flops in rendering shadow details, consistently rendering shadows darker and crashing in luminance below 5% signal level. The Pixel 3a clips completely black at signal levels below 3% (color byte values below 7) at 200 nits, which correlates to luminance values below ~0.008 nits. This performs considerably worse than most OLEDs, including that of the Pixel 3 XL, but not as bad as on the Pixel 3. Google’s Pixel phones have consistently had subpar black rendering, and it is certainly due to their calibration and not hardware.

In the color accuracy plots below, the white dots represent the position of the Google Pixel 3a"s measured colors. The associated trailing color represents the severity of the color error. Green trails signify that the measured color difference is very small and that the color appears accurate on the display, while yellow trails indicate noticeable color differences, with higher severity at orange and red trails.

The Natural profile is as accurate as it gets—the Pixel 3a can reproduce the sRGB color space without blemish (save for black clipping). The profile has an indistinguishable-from-perfect average color errorΔEof 0.8 with a very low standard deviation of 0.5. The largest color difference we measured read aΔEof 2.5 at 75%-saturation blue, which is unnoticeable and appears accurate.

The Google Pixel 3a panel cannot fully cover the P3 gamut since the red emitter does not get saturated enough, but the Natural profile still reproduces the rest of the P3 color space really well. The attraction to the P3 color space does lie in those high-saturation reds, however, so although the average overall color difference of the Natural profile to the P3 color space is low, it is not a well-representative metric unless it can hit those deep reds.

The Natural profile is calibrated tightly with very little variance, maintaining an accurate D65 white point even at low signal levels. This means that there should be little-to-no discernible shift in the colors on the Pixel 3a display when rendering them at a different brightness, and the color will maintain its chromaticity when rendered at a lighter or darker tone. This is important since many displays shift the appearance of the colors, especially the white point, either warmer or cooler as brightness increases or decreases. The Google Pixel 3a display renders colors consistently throughout its brightness range in its Natural profile, and this is a very impressive calibration feat only similarly achieved by Apple. The Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL are not calibrated this tightly, most likely due to their wider gamuts, so it is very impressive to see it in Google"s mid-range handset.

Vendor panels are usually baseline factory-calibrated at or near their native gamut, so it isn"t unusual for color profiles with the widest gamut to be calibrated the most tightly. That doesn’t seem to be the case with the Adaptive profile, as we measured a higher variance from the profile than on the Natural profile. This is because the Adaptive profile isn’t just based on the panel’s native gamut, so it requires additional color mixing and LUTs at different signal levels to keep them consistent. The calibration is also imperfect since the profile targets a red primary that is not within the Pixel 3a panel’s native gamut. The resulting white balance for the Adaptive profile is still consistent, but the red and blue LEDs are quite finicky below 10% signal level.

Pixel Density312 red subpixels per inch441 green subpixels per inch312 blue subpixels per inchPenTile Diamond Pixel displays have fewer red and blue subpixels compared to green subpixels

Distance for Pixel Acuity<11.0 inches<7.8 inches for achromatic imageGoodDistances for just-resolvable pixels with 20/20 vision. Typical smartphone viewing distance is about 12 inches

Brightness442 nits @ 50% APL406 nits @ 100% APL484 nits @ 1% APLFair14% variance with APLDynamic brightness is the change in screen luminance in response to displayed content APL

Interested in the Pixel 3a? Join the XDA forums for the device where you can ask questions and share accessories, tips, tricks, and other mods. If you want to purchase the device, you can visit its product page on the Google Store. The Pixel 3a can be bought from the Google Store if you live in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, United Kingdom, or the United States.

Even if you can see the larger model of the Pixel 3a series on the pictures – you can use the instruction for your Google Pixel 3a as well, because the devices are constructed in the same way. You can find the matching replacement display for the Pixel 3a in our store.