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Nexus One display and subpixel pattern

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Re: Nexus One display and subpixel pattern

#5
I consumed this article with much enthusiasm. It was filled with information and still very easy to read.

My immediate thought though: I wonder how much battery-time you would gain by making the device monochrome (black/green) when you just intend to use it to, say, call or perhaps even read something.

Maybe a mode like this already exists in Android? I don't have a Nexus one, so... :) Heck, if it doesn't exist, then I guess this might be an app for the Android app-store. Send me a cookie if you write one!

Re: Nexus One display and subpixel pattern

#6
800 horizontal pixels, but half of them can contain no red and the other half can contain no blue. Someone should cue the lawyers from the dithered LCD lawsuits. They will have a field day with this.

Re: Nexus One display and subpixel pattern

#7
post #5

I consumed this article with much enthusiasm. It was filled with information and still very easy to read. My immediate thought though: I wonder how much battery-time you would gain by making the device monochrome (black/green) when you just intend to use it to, say, call or perhaps even read something. Maybe a mode like this already exists in Android? I don't have a Nexus one, so... :) Heck, if it doesn't exist, then…

> It was filled with information and still very easy to read.

I completely agree--I knew nothing about how these type of displays work, and yet I found the article to be very understandable and enriching.

Re: Nexus One display and subpixel pattern

#8
post #5

I consumed this article with much enthusiasm. It was filled with information and still very easy to read. My immediate thought though: I wonder how much battery-time you would gain by making the device monochrome (black/green) when you just intend to use it to, say, call or perhaps even read something. Maybe a mode like this already exists in Android? I don't have a Nexus one, so... :) Heck, if it doesn't exist, then…

If (and this is totally hypothetical, I really don't know) the pixels respond non-linearly to power input, it might actually use less power to turn on all the subpixels to a low brightness than to make one subpixel really bright. It might take more power to go from 50% to 100% than from 0% to 50%.

Re: Nexus One display and subpixel pattern

#9

That's actually pretty interesting. I wonder if it was hard to do a subpixel rendering system for fonts (like ClearType)? I don't have a Nexus One so maybe the pixel density is high enough that they don't need to render fonts like that.

Actually, it does make it hard. To do subpixel smoothing correctly, you need to be able to keep the total amount of color the same -- so if you want to move a part of the glyph right one, you'd light up a red from the next pixel right and turn off blue on the last pixel in your line on the left. This becomes both much harder and less useful when not all pixels have all colors.

But you are right on the other point -- at 800x480 on a 3.7 inch screen has a ppi of 250 -- or just normal font rendering looks as smooth as subpixel rendering on a computer screen, and I for one would be hard pressed to distinguish between subpixel rendering and normal when looking at text at size 10 or so on that screen -- just because I'd have such a hard time seeing it at all.

I wish we could get proper OLED computer screens.

Re: Nexus One display and subpixel pattern

#10
post #6

800 horizontal pixels, but half of them can contain no red and the other half can contain no blue. Someone should cue the lawyers from the dithered LCD lawsuits. They will have a field day with this.

That's not accurate. The human eye uses primarily green to detect resolution. Red and blue are used for color.

I wish I could find it, but there was an online example, where someone took a picture, divided it into the three channels, then pixelated (mosaic) one channel at a time and recombined it.

When he did green you saw it right away. With red it took some pixelation before you could see it. And with blue it took a LOT of pixelation before you noticed anything.

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