Honor's new phone to have brightest screen ever at 10,000 nits – but does that matter?
Honor plays a blinder - or does it?
Quick Summary
The Honor X80 Pro Max will have a 10,000 nit screen.
However, the high brightness mode will be a more typical 2,000 nits, leaving the remainder of the impressive brightness specs as marketing.
Honor's forthcoming X80 Pro Max phone will have a screen brightness rated to 10,000 nits the company has confirmed, alongside messaging that suggests it will offer a "high-brightness sunlight screen" (translated).
Screen brightness has become the new metric that manufacturers measure themselves against, with recent launches turning the dial on peak brightness. That's seen phones like the Motorola Edge 70 Fusion boasting 5,200 nits.
In the case of the Honor X80 Pro Max, the 10,000 nits display will represent a 67% increase in brightness over the X70 Pro Max at 6,000 nits. It sounds great, but what does it actually mean?
In reality, it means very little. It's undeniable that a mobile display that can produce 10,000 nits is an engineering achievement, but it won't enhance the day-to-day use of the phone.
Peak brightness applies to a very small percentage of the screen and it's only used to display HDR content. That allows pinpoint brightness – like a star in the sky – rather than this being a way to combat reflections and increase daylight visibility.
That's where Honor's marketing – via GizmoChina – should be approached with caution: it won't be using 10,000 nits to increase daylight visibility.
Phones typically have a high brightness mode (HBM) which is what you see when you step out of the house on a sunny day. When HBM is used, the screen is ramped up to counter the effect of high ambient brightness and reflections. It means content remains visible.
Phones with a lower brightness suffer in such conditions, but in recent years pretty much every phone now offers a high brightness display.
Ramping up the brightness has other side effects: it consumes battery at a much higher rate and it produces a lot of heat. Sustaining 10,000 nits across the whole display would probably cause it to melt.
Indeed, the HBM on the X80 Pro Max is 2,000 nits, which is well within the reach of most other recent phones. So in that sense, the high peak brightness of the X80 Pro Max doesn't matter.
Then we come to HDR content. Phones use high brightness is to display HDR photos. This gives an image a lot more contrast, with highlights that really pop off the screen.
But I've seen images on a TV capable of 10,000 nits – the TCL X11L – and those high brightness images can be uncomfortable to watch. While the scale of a phone is different, it's unlikely that anything will ever be shown at 10,000 nits on the display.
Finally, it's worth a mention of HDR standards in the movies. Dolby Vision and HDR10 both allow up to 10,000 nits in their specification, but current HDR mastering is around 1,000 to 4,000 nits.
Professional mastering monitors sit at 4,000 nits and this is typically the brightest HDR peak that Hollywood will master to. Theoretically, through Dolby Vision or HDR10 support you could watch a movie containing those sorts of peak brightnesses on your phone – but there aren't any movies mastered to 10,000 nits.
So, for Honor this is a marketing move for its X series device that otherwise offers Snapdragon 6 Gen 5, a 50-megapixel rear camera and a plastic frame. There's also a huge 11,000mAh battery.
If the Honor X80 Pro Max is to launch outside China, it will likely be renamed before it arrives.
