After squirming through 1,000 of my closest friends and a battery of Apple reps to the iPhone 6 demonstration models on display after Tuesday’s unveiling, I was disappointed.

I thought they were fakes, with printed plastic screens simulating the iPhone experience until working units could be cobbled together. I confess, I was fooled.

The new screens are real, and they’re spectacular.

It’s not just the larger bodies on the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus that will impress iFans, nor the slew of new features designed to expand the company’s platform and do more with all that extra real estate. It’s the already top-notch screen, which Apple has taken to a new level. It’s simply astounding.

The Retina HD screen on the iPhone 6 is 4.7 inches with a 1,334 x 750 resolution — 38 percent more viewing area than iPhone 5S. The iPhone 6 Plus features an even bigger 5.5-inch screen with 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, providing 88 percent more viewing area and more than 2 million pixels. It shows. The screen is bright and beautiful, even in a well-lit area, and watching a few videos on it made me ashamed of the shoddy screens I’ve deemed acceptable in the past.

Put simply, the bar has been raised. Even slow-motion videos captured by the camera look astounding, of far higher quality than anything I’ve ever seen on a phone before. I watched a wet dog shake its jowls back and forth with joy, and marveled at the drops of slobber flying from his lips. Disgusting I know. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

To accommodate the bigger screens, Apple’s moved the power button off the top of the phone and onto the right edge, which makes it much more accessible. On the whole, however, the phones look a lot like the design you’re already familiar with. From 5 feet away, you’d be hard pressed to tell the 6 from the 5. We give Samsung credit for trying something new in the rounded screen covering the Galaxy Note Edge – now that’s innovativion.

Beyond the screen, the larger body means an overall bigger phone, something Apple’s balked at doing in the past. I’m still not sure why. The 4.7-inch iPhone feels great in the hand, fitting nicely in the palm and the pocket. I know many folks who think the 4-inch body on previous iPhones was the pinnacle of smartphone size. I’ve also watched them try to type on their tiny little keyboards and chuckled to myself. In my eyes, this is the perfect size for a phone.

That said, the iPhone 6 Plus at 5.5 inches felt almost too big. Phablets offer a trade-off of size for convenience, but millions are willing to make it. When Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy Edge in New York last week, one executive confessed that even he was surprised at how popular the oversize phones are. The Plus is bound to be popular, but it also felt like an awful lot of phone to me.

Apple’s doing a lot with that real estate, however – again, something other smartphone makers should take a cue from. Don’t just make it bigger, DO something with that space. Many apps have been tweaked to include new layouts specifically tailored to bigger screens. We’ll have more on the software interface in our full review of the iPhone shortly.

It’s worth nothing that both iPhones were wonderfully polished, of course. Just a few millimeters thin, they slip into a pocket easily (but don’t try that in front of Apple’s reps, as I did), and are light and sleek and impeccably put together. Apple has always made a wonderful gadget. These are nicer still.

We’ve gone in-depth on the new software, iOS 8, before, which includes a number of new features – mobile payments, HealthKit, time-lapse photography and more. I ran through a few apps briefly, which launched instantly and felt very responsive.