[Galaxy S II General] deanwray:
Ok, so there are quite a few threads about colour banding, 4 or 5 I think. All/most saying different things, sometimes the same things in different ways :)

Neways, although I really didn't want to add to it, I wanted to show everyone a few things about android colour.

Note: In order to really do these tests you need to set brightness to 100% so there is a common mark from which to draw any conclusions.

I believe the following:

1. It's apparent that super duper amazing amoled plus and then some :) Shows more detail (maybe due to sub pixel processing nature of the screen).

2. Due to point 1. and added to the fact that by default and quite often chosen by developers that most apps are set to use the 565 mode (5bits red, 6bits green (human eye sees more green) 5bits blue) or 16bit mode for performance reasons. With this we see banding in some colour transitions (More so green)

3. There are many bitmaps/images/textures that have been palletised in conversion and compressed for in-app performance reasons. This also produces artefacts that can be seen on our wonderful displays :)

So in collusion to those points it quite impossible to say banding is a software problem or hardware problem unless:

1. You wrote the app yourself and have forced the 888 mode.

2. You compressed the resources (bitmaps etc) yourself and know that they should be perfect while also doing point 1.

(NOTE: you cant just use a browser or image viewer to look at an image and say well that shouldn't look like that without thinking about all of the above!)

Ok so how do we look at these things?

Well 1st off, I'm doing an nice app with a theme framework that uses lots of bitmaps for the default theme, so I put in the ability to change from 16 to 24 colour modes, so I can allow users to pick from SPEED or LOOK preference! This shows how both the SGS2 and TAB7 can have banding on a drop shadow, or not:

View example (View the 720p)

Sorry about audio, couldn't be arsed setting up a proper studio mic!

Also sorry about the blur box I HAD to use ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QlnuoNSdXo

OK so a few other tests on your own device

Test 1. UPDATED

Using the attached bandingTestUPDATED

Ok altered this little thing to show 2 photos I took, one of mighty mugs Prime!!! :) and one of a robin! The app forces 888 mode and allows you to switch images with settings/menu button. It displays at 100% so you cant zoom out or in, you can just view as is. For comparison these are the images in use :

Test 2.

Using the attached xda-gradtest

This is an app that is set to 888 and uses procedural gradients rather than bitmaps (as in the gradient is program generated rather than image based).

What you should see is only very slight banding in low greens due to our eye being very very very good at green colours compared with blue and red. There should be little or no banding on anything else.

More Info / Conclusion:

Well the gradientTest app is the best thing to look at, and the real test, the reason we see more banding on low green is 2 reasons.

The first:

Well we all see sh*t loads more green than any other colour (cause were ace) I recommend you look into human eye perception theory regarding both colour and detail perception as I have had to do over my many years in game console art development (wicked reading:) ).

Second:

I believe oled screens are not as good as others at low intensity low contrast due to the nature of how colour is processed.

I have many android devices ranging from the crappiest tablets you can buy of ebay, up to the best and even have iphone ipads also. I must say that with a finite gradient in 565 on the crap tablets and lesser displays, it looks better cause they are actually crap (dithered and filter to hell) :)

The same is true of this display I'm typing on now compared to another I have on my mac pro. One is an IPS pro colour variant of an LCD panel and one is not. Crap looks better on the lesser monitor! But Amazing looks amazing on the IPS pro panel that I HAVE to use for my 3D Graphics, Photography and Video work.

more..

If you plan to use apps that are set to 565, you have to deal with the banding or get a lesser display that just doesn't show it!

If you plan to use lots of apps (24bit)(888) that use low contrast dark green to black transition graphics, you will have to deal with the gradient banding :)

Alternatively

You could wait till the average target device has a minimum spec like the sgs2 and also a min OS of 2.3.* then probably most apps will have higher colour set and higher fidelity resources (bitmaps etc) in use :) But as it stands the mass market is much lower spec and the dominant os version is a mix of 2.1 and 2.2 devices

New info

previous to some 2.2 and all 2.1 android os defaulted to low colour if a developer didn't set it. Now in 2.3+ it defaults to high colour if they dont set it.

UPDATE 14 June

As some have mentioned (godutch etc) dnie (Digital Natural Image engine) by samsung is a colour/image processor that could be in use. Having looked at test 1 with the images, there is hardly any banding at all, but just a tiny bit I can see in primes left window. With this in mind and only mildly pissing me off, started to look at ROM and found many different " mdnie_profiles " that are apparently used and have different settings in each profile relating to all the major visual aspects (video, gallery blaaa blaaa)

So gonna have a play (these are in /etc/mdnie_* ) but I dont reccomend ne1 doing this unless you really know what your doing.

SO....

Hope this helps kill lots of thread activity on the same subject across multiple threads where info is getting hard to find and peeps just cant read all of those posts.

As always due to who I am I will say that I could be in part or on a whole wrong on this to any degree, but I believe this info to be correct as of the time of this post and this is only for the purpose of putting a few peoples minds at ease and also as information that doesn't sit 50 posts into some of these massive threads :)