Huawei Honor 6 – Screen

One of the clearest signs that the Huawei Honor 6 is a phone to be reckoned with is the spec of its screen. For £250 you get a 5-inch Full HD display. This is one of the first devices we’ve seen to launch at this price with such a high-res screen, and from a big brand, too.

Looking at the Honor 6 next to the 2014 Motorola Moto G, a cheaper 5-inch phone with a lower-res 720p display, the difference is obvious. At this size, you do need 1080p if you want the pristine sharpness we’ve come to associate with higher-end phones.

The Honor 6 gets you 440 pixels per inch, which is excellent pixel density that far outstrips the iPhone 6.

It’s an LTPS LCD screen, designed for low power consumption. There’s no mention of IPS architecture from Huawei’s specs, but we noticed zero contrast shift at any angle.

Viewing angles are reasonably good, but with greater loss of brightness than you get in some rival IPS LCD screens. Top brightness is very good and colours are vivid. Those with particularly picky eyes will note that the Honor 6’s colours are marginally oversaturated, but not as distractingly as the recent Motorola Moto X. They’re larger than life, but not offensive to the eye.

The Huawei Honor 6 lets you tweak the colour temperature of the display, making it warmer or cooler. This doesn’t alter saturation, but warming up the display can make it appear more ‘relaxed’ if you find the colour a bit intense. The default setting is a little blueish, so we recommend having a tweak.

Aside from the slight oversaturation, the only other issue is the black level limitation that’s common to all LCDs, but a bit worse than the high-end average here. In lower lighting, the Honor 6’s black areas look quite blueish, which will become obvious if you like watching a bit of TV before bed. Some LCD phones offer better black levels, like the Sony Xperia Z3 and LG G3, but it’s not something you’ll notice in normal day-to-day use.

As long as you don’t mind the approach to colour, we can’t imagine many taking issue with the Huawei Honor 6’s screen. It also has a pretty good auto-brightness feature.

Not only can you make the phone alter backlight intensity depending on ambient light conditions; you can also set the relative level using a simple slider in the drop-down notifications menu. Other phones often revert to manual brightness as soon as you touch the slider.

One obvious question, though, is how does the Honor 6 compare to the Nexus 5 and OnePlus One? Those are the two main lower-cost 1080p phone competition.

The Honor 6 has far more vibrant colour than the OnePlus One, and the Nexus 5 appears to be the best of the three for colour accuracy. However, crucially, the Huawei is in the same league as these big players.