You don’t have to wait until next week to compare the quality of the Xr screen to what’s currently out there: quality wise it will be more or less identical to the 8... it just has more pixels. If anything, the Xr could be better in terms of color reproduction, but for a “basic quality” comparison purposes, it can be considered the same as the 8 LCD.
In case you’re jonsing for another anecdote about Xr screen vs OLED, I just, for the first time, compared my wife’s 8 side by side with the Xs, here goes.
The Xs screen definitely “popped” more color and contrast wise, this was even before I put the 8 next to it, which is a good thing. When I put the 8 next to it, the whites/beige colors looked muddy on the 8 while the Xs looks crisp. Surprisingly though, the blacks in the 8 held up to the blacks on the OLED, but likely because of the bright lights. In a dimmer setting, I’d imagine the OLED would show its superiority for black. I watched a YouTube video on both, and I will say the video on the Xs was more pleasant, not because of higher resolution, but because of the color and contrast. Also, it was ever slightly larger on the Xs, but not by much. This was a 16:9 video, if it was a larger ratio video, the Xs would have been much bigger than the 8. That said, if I didn’t have them side by side, I probably would have enjoyed the video in the 8 just as much seeing how it’s such a small screen to begin with.
Now, the biggest problem I had with the OLED was viewing angles. If I even tilted it modestly, the colors turned from a pleasantly warm, yellowish tone to a much cooler blue. And I didn’t even have to tilt it much, maybe 5-10 degrees at most. While I don’t have a huge preference for one or the other color temperature, the fact that it changes so easily at such a shallow angle would bug the sh*t out of me.
As for resolution differences, as I alluded before, this was not a concern for me between the two displays at all. For the 8, I have to put the phone uncomfortably close to my face to see the jagged edges of small text. While the Xs probably won’t have as much jaggedness at the same distance, I would never put a phone so close to my face under normal use. As for video, on a screen this size, you’d be lying if you say you could tell a difference unless the 1080p video was near uncompressed and at a super high bit rate.
