Part 1 here.

Alright guys, here's part 2. Now I'm actually a little bit worried about posting this because I feel like this post is going to get very controversial and people are not going to believe what I found out. You'll see why in post.

I took these on on the same Sony DSLR, this time I fucked up a bit since I never expected to do a second part to this comparison, I didn't save the colour balance and forgot to adjust them from the one of the defaults. Due to this fuck up, all three screens look more blue than they actually are, but you can still compare them because it doesn't change the relative differences between them.

First I took a picture of the Pixel 2 XL box to use as a grey card, it means that if anyone was to ever compare their screen to mine they can use that to reference the white balance that I used. Thanks to u/anzenketh for giving me the idea. Luckily it also means someone can adjust my pictures to correct the colour balance.

I'm doing the comparison with my old S6, the Pixel 2 XL and my housemate's S8. The S6 is on the left, 2 XL on centre, S8 is on the right. One thing that I have to point out is that my housemate's S8 is a month old and he's got a screen protector on it which may or may not be affecting the test I don't know for sure but obviously I can't take off his glass protector just to do this test. Personally I don't think a glass screen protector is going to affect it that much but if anyone else has access to an S8, please do try to take pictures of the screen with the 2 XL box in the picture.

Also all three phones were set to use their most colourful display mode available so the Pixel 2 XL was on Saturated and the S6 and S8 were on Adaptive Display, which is their default, this was because I wanted their display profiles to be as similar as possible and I have read that saturated mode on the 2 XL improves the black crush.

Blue Shift

Again I've covered up the top part of the Pixel and S8 to make the screen sizes of all the phones the same.

Don't have side views since I forgot, but I imagine they are the same as front down views.

Black Crush

Used the same image for the first part of the test. The first picture is at full brightness and there's no noticeable difference between the phones. The S8 is the same as the S6 as far as I could tell. Only at the last 10% does the black crush issues start to appear. At around 5% or so the Pixel 2 XL starts to black crush quite noticeably.

Here's where shit gets weird. I used the same Youtube video at exactly 10:30mins. Like before, I turned up the shutter speed on the camera on successive each picture to try to equalise the brightness so that it's easier to show just the black crush. Again on the last photos I had to crank up the shutter time get a decently bright picture but to the naked eye all screens looked effectively the same as they were so dark.

What I noticed was that the S6 was worse than in the first comparison. The only thing that I changed was the display profile, I normally use AMOLED Photo on the S6, so what I did was change the colour profile on both the S6 and S8 to to AMOLED Photo and re-did the test using the exact same camera exposure settings.

Graininess

Same as in the first comparison. S6 and S8, both very uniform no issue at all. Pixel 2 XL, a little bit of grain.

Black Smear

Same as in the first comparison. I actually take back what I said in the first comparison about the 2 XL maybe being 5% worse, it honestly the same. S6, S8 and 2 XL all have smear, they are all quite noticeable and equally so.

Conclusion

Turns out, S8 screen has worse black crush than the 2 XL. Good news is that I noticed it was improved with a different display profile. Bad news is that the display profiles on the 2 XL don't change anything regarding black crush. This doesn't mean that Google might not fix it via software, but I does show that black crush can be caused by software and is not necessarily a hardware issue.

Haters will say that my housemate's S8 is defective but who knows ¯\(ツ)/¯

Overall the S8 is a better screen, I can't show it but the screen also seems smoother. I don't know if it's the refresh rate or the screen's response time (or maybe it's pixel retention, different to the image retention that people are talking about when discussing screen burn). Text scrolling is smoother and it has less motion blur. Might be interesting to see how this affects Daydream VR versus Gear VR.

I have a friend who's getting an iPhone X at the beginning of December, so maybe there could be a part 3?