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Screen Refresh Rate and Touch Sampling Rate in Smartphones


Today, smartphones have come a long way. Smartphones now come with excellent cameras, powerful hardware, better display and great battery life. But now along with these features, people are looking for phones with higher Screen Refresh Rates and Touch Sampling Rate. Both Screen Refresh Rate and Touch Sampling Rate are measured in Hertz(Hz) and are equally important to enhance user experience. But the importance of touch sampling rate is not hyped like the refresh rate.

Screen Refresh Rate
Screen refresh rate means the maximum number of times the screen/display refreshes in one second. If the screen refresh rate is higher then more frames appear in one second resulting in smoother transitions, animations while navigating through the apps and also we’ll get a smoother scrolling experience. We have phones that have 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz, 144Hz refresh rate displays.
Generally, phones spore a 60Hz display meaning that the display refreshes 60 times per second. It takes 16.6 ms to fully refresh a 60Hz display, 11.1ms for 90Hz, and 8.3ms for a 120Hz refresh rate display. 

Touch Sampling Rate
The touch sampling rate is a frequency of a screen to register a touch by the user. It means that the number of times the screen looks for input from the user. The more the touch sampling rate the times the screen will be ready to take the input. We have phones that support 60Hz, 120Hz, 180Hz, 240Hz and many other touch sampling rates.
A 60Hz touch sampling rate means that the display will look for the user’s touch input 60 times per second, meaning every 16.6ms the display will be ready to take input. For the 90Hz touch sampling rate display, it is 11.1ms, and for the 120Hz touch sampling rate display, it is 8.3ms.

Conclusion
Higher refresh rate displays make moving content look smoother. But most content, such as swiping through the emails and feeds don’t really benefit from anything above the standard 60Hz refresh rate. But with a higher refresh rate display, we can see things smoother than a 60Hz panel. This increases the load on CPU and GPU and may lead to processor throttling and also drain the battery faster. The higher refresh rate panel comes in handy while playing games that support higher refresh rates. But for me, the colour accuracy and display quality matter more.

On the other hand with an increased touch sampling rate, we get a faster registering of touch input and significantly reducing the touch latency. So smartphones with higher refresh rates and touch sampling rates will definitely enhance the user experience by compromising battery life.
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