[Galaxy Note II General] briang8510:
So before I post this i'd just like to say this is my 1st post, and because of that I was not able to share links to the websites that I wanted to. So if you would like to visit the websites that I point to where I have only quotes with no links, just Google "oled-info note 2 display" and the first website to come up should be where I posted essentially the same thing and you can see the websites I am pointing to. Thanks!

Ok so all of the talk on different articles and forums about the Note 2's display about it not being a pentile, but also not being the SAMOLED+ with the typical RGB stripe got me thinking. Before the pentile discussion began to get heated all over the web, everyone was concerned about their phones' PPI. But obviously once the pentile displays came out and veered away from the typical RGB stripe (maybe there have been other display types b4 the pentile but that’s kind of irrelevant to the point I am going to make) there became a whole ‘nother thing to consider when it came to display clarity. IMHO this clarity comes down to the smallest part that makes up the picture, and that, for all intents and purposes, is the sub-pixel, not the pixel itself.

Now personally when the Note 2 was 1st announced I was pissed that Samsung decided to make the screen bigger and lower the pixel count because I currently have the S3 with Sprint and for me personally, the bigger the screen the better because I use my phone for TV and movies all the time. Now I understood that they wanted to have a 16:9 aspect ratio, but then why not just increase the horizontal, or both, resolution, not decrease the vertical! Especially since it was not a SAMOLED+, but just a regular SAMOLED which obviously meant another pentile right? But then I started reading into the screen and found out that even though it does not follow the typical RGB stripe, it does in fact have all 3 red, green & blue sub-pixels in each pixel instead of sharing pixels like the pentile does, which is shown very clearly in this picture:"".

So this got me curious because as I stated before, at least to my eyes, the sub-pixel count seems to have a greater affect on image quality than just the pixel count itself, which to me was proven when I got my Sprint Galaxy S2 and even though it had the same number of pixels with a .52" larger screen than my original Galaxy S, the screen clarity on my S2 was noticeably better which, if you dont consider the sub-pixel difference, should not be true. So I decided to do a comparison between what I am going to call the "SPPI" (Sub-Pixels Per Inch) of the original Note, the S3, and the Note 2 as I own a S3 and as much as I would love to have a larger screen, I really would not be happy with the huge loss of quality that would normally come when you stretch the same amount of pixels by .7" as the S2 has a 4.8" screen and the Note 2's display is 5.5", and what I found out really surprised me.

So here's the math of how I got to my conclusions. 1st of all according to the information from Samsung that can be found here: "" the sub-pixel count on the SAMOLED WVGA screen is 768,000 and for the SAMOLED+ WVGA screen it is 1,152,000. Now a WVGA screen is 800x480, which comes to 384,000 total pixels, the Note 1 is 1280x800 which = 1,024,000 and the S3 and Note 2 both are 1280x720 equaling 921,600. Now at this point I needed to figure out the number of sub-pixels on each phone by doing a simple algebraic comparison of the number of pixels to sub-pixels between the WVGA screen and each one of the other phones, which is done here:

Note 1: 384,000/768,000=1,024,000/x and x = 2,048,000 sub-pixels

Galaxy S3: 384,000/768,000=921,600/x and x = 1,843,200 sub-pixels

Note 2: 384,000/1,152,000=921,600/x and x= 2,764,800 sub-pixels

Now at his point I needed to take the aspect ratio of each phone, which is 16:10 for the 1st Note and 16:9 for the other 2 phones, and use the formula on this website to get the horizontal and vertical “sub-pixel resolution”: "". In doing this I came up with the following resolutions:

Note 1: 1,810 x 1,131

Galaxy S3: 1,810 x 1,018

Note 2: 2,217 x 1,247

I then put that information in with the screen sizes in this website: "" and came up with the following “SPPI” results:

Note 1: 402.7 “SPPI”

Galaxy S3: 432.6 “SPPI”

Note 2: 462.5 “SPPI”

So in a similar scenario as the Galaxy S vs. S2 screen clarity comparison, as long as my calculations are correct, theoretically not only should the Note 2 have a better clarity than the original one despite having a larger screen and lower resolution, it should also be clearer than the Galaxy S3! I have to say I was shocked at that and very much look forward to actually holding one in my hand to compare against my S3. I’d like to hear some opinions as to whether in general people agree or disagree with what I came up with here and for anyone that has held the S3 and Note 2 side by side if these calculations hold up in the real world.

Thanks!

-Brian:)

**Quick edit: as someone on a different site pointed out to me, the screen size on the Note 2 is actually 5.55", not 5.5". So according to the members.ping.de dpi/ppi calculator that I used for this calculation, the "SPPI" for that device would actually be 458.3. Not that it really makes any difference, but if I'm gonna do all this work I might as well do it right :)