Nokia Lumia 630 – Screen
The Nokia Lumia 630 has a 4.5-inch screen. This is becoming a norm for budget phones, and while people’s impression of what constitutes a ‘large’ or ‘small’ phone is changing constantly, it offers a pretty great compromise between display size and accessibility.
What do we mean exactly? You can still pull down the notifications menu while holding the Lumia 630 in one hand, but you have enough
First, we’ll cover the good bits. Colour is OK for a phone of this price. There is a slight blue-ish-ness to the blacks that makes us think Nokia labelling this a ClearBlack display is pushing it a bit, but for £100 it performs reasonably well.
For the uninitiated, ClearBlack is a stamp Nokia puts on the phones it thinks offer really good displays that provide a vibrant, punchy image. There’s no particular display tech involved ( there are both IPS and OLED ClearBlack screens) , but it is a generally reliable seal of quality.
What we’re most pleased to see is no sense of the display being recessed far beyond the top layer. Less advanced IPS LCD screen types tend to look a little washed out, partly thanks to being made of a number of discrete layers between which are tiny air gaps. But the Lumia 630’s screen is pretty immediate and vital-looking.
Angled viewing diminishes the brightness a bit, but as with most IPS LCDs, viewing angles are generally very good – there’s no dramatic contrast shift.
So what’s bad? Resolution.
The Lumia 630 display is 854 x 480 pixels in resolution, which is well below the 2014 standard for budget Android phones. We’d like to see devices of this size use at least 960 x 540 resolutions, if not 720p, as seen in the Moto G – a phone of roughly the same price.
This resolution also marks a step down in sharpness from last year’s budget Nokia Lumias, the excellent Lumia 620 and Lumia 520. Those phones use 800 x 480 resolution screens, but as they are so much smaller they both appear sharper than the Lumia 630. If you’re picky about screen quality, you probably won’t be 100 per cent happy with this phone.