yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Nexus One General] Jak Crow:
That's an unconfirmed assumption on your part. I've tested 3 devices with Screen Resolution: a G1 running android 2.0, an archos 5 running 1.6, and the N1 running 2.1. I have emailed the developer to confirm if my results are accurate or if they're affected by the OS versions, but I don't believe OS version has anything to do with it..
[Nexus One General] flarbear:
He didn't say that it depended on the OS that the device was running. He said it depended on the OS that the app was compiled for. The information you are providing here is irrelevant. What app/system utility did you use to query the information and how was that app compiled and what API calls did it use to get the information? That is the relevant information.

Keep in mind that there is a compatibility mechanism at play here. The Android OS will pretend to have a lower resolution so that older apps that expected all phones to be 320x480 will run reasonably well. The iPad apparently does this as well as reviewers claim that many apps demoed on it are simply shown with a zoom factor but clearly are rendering at lower resolutions. The "pretending to have a lower resolution" technique is quite common for platforms that start getting deployed on systems with significantly higher native resolutions as is the case with many of the newer Android devices.

In some sense your claim that Android is "running at a lower resolution" is partially correct. It will do that selectively for apps that are not marked as being aware of higher resolutions and it will allow newer apps that declare their knowledge to run at the native resolution if they so choose.
[Nexus One General] flarbear:
I don't think he is. Where do you see him say that?

In particular, he does say "The browser is a complex multi-layered piece of software and for that reason is a bad place to test and analyze the display, which is what I am doing in the article." The first time I read that I thought he was saying "what I am doing is testing the browser" - is that the way you read it? Unfortunately his comment has an ambiguous reference. "which is what I am doing" could be referring back to "using the browser" or it could refer back to "analyzing the display" and I think he meant the latter. In particular, the very next sentence is "I am reviewing the display system, not the browser" - which spells it out.

So, he apparently didn't use the browser. He used some unspecified piece of software that he believes qualifies as part of "the display system". If he used the gallery app then he is simply using another application which, while not as complex as the browser, is still fairly complex. But, perhaps that complexity is lost on him. In any case, if he is smart enough to identify that results from the browser may not qualify as a fair test of "the display system" then he is smart enough to recognize that his results are not very scientific if he does not include full disclosure of whatever software he ended up using to produce the display snapshots he shows.

He also says "the Nexus One is using a 16-bit display interface". No. That is false. The Nexus One provides a configurable interface for the apps. They can configure it to use 16-bits if they wish. That may even be the default (I don't know). But, it also provides them with the ability to request more color depth if they so wish. The gallery app appears not to do that, though. Other apps do request the proper color depth.
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
"The native resolution test patterns in Figure 1 clearly and definitely show that the Nexus One is using a 16-bit display interface."

I'm an embedded hardware/software guy, and I can't claim that statement without the phones electrical schematics or IC spec sheets.

If JonLech's post is correct, the RGBA_8888 indicates the OS is capable of 24bit color and 8 bit alpha transparency. Without the spec sheet for the display hardware, I can't determine if the hardware can accept or display 24bit color, other than by general observation, which isn't very scientific. I'm sure someone will eventually pull the specs out for us.
[Nexus One General] Oletros:
He is saying that because there is banding and then neglects the imagine without banding in the browser saying that the scaling algorithm and the dithering is different.
[Nexus One General] flarbear:
Reading more and more of his disclaimers it looks like he considers the software in the phone to be part of what he is calling "the display interface" and so you wouldn't need any hardware references. He's just waving his hands about where the error comes into play since he doesn't really want to become an expert on each phone he tests.

I can accept that, but he needs to spell out what he is considering part of the test - i.e. he needs to say that he displayed the images using "such and such" application and the results could be due to problems stemming from anywhere from that app down to the hardware.
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
I think you're right. "The display interface" may be up for interpretation, which as you said, may need to be defined more clearly.

I personally don't like marketing material that uses loosely defined phrases that are up to interpretation with claims of scientific basis.
[Nexus One General] Oletros:
New mail from Dr. Soneira at Appleinsider.

Funny
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
I'm flying in my LOL-Copter !
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
Specs

According to PDAdb.net, the Nexus One display depth is 24bit !

FYI, 2^24 = 16777216.

http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=specs&id=2200&view=1&c=google_nexus_one_us_htc_dragon

So, If this data is correct, that puts the physical display WAY above the capability of the iPhone at 18bit. Of course, this data could be wrong as its not direct from HTC or the display manufacturer.

If its right though, I know some folks who are going to look silly.

Try googling "nexus one amoled color depth" and every result that says the display is 16 bit refers back to the DisplayMate article. Every other AMOLED featured phone reference (Samsung mostly) and the link above quote 24 bit.

Thats the best I can come up with at the moment.
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
Samsung says...

Its a 24 bit display :)

http://www.samsungsmd.com/eng/text/AMOLED/ET-1-2-6.jsp

Time to kick back with a LOL-ipop.
[Nexus One General] pinkieiknip:
Screen bashing?!?

Just viewed the DisplayMate article on my Nexus One, which has the standard (latest as of now) Android version on it. I can see the picture of the Nasa Mars Sunset without banding, however, I did notice that when I open just that file in my browser, the banding does exist.

I've seen this with a few sites already, it's really a software bug, a 'crappy' implementation of the resizing/aliasing etc. When I start to move the screen around, to show different parts of the image, I see that when I'm holding down my finger and dragging it around, makes the banding go away COMPLETELY. It's as crisp as on any LCD monitor. When I let go of the screen, the banding appears...

So, maybe it just renders the screen, saves the memory and then shows a rendering, compressed to the wrong settings. I think that might explain the problem, I still consider it to be a bug.

To be short, this is completely an article for Nexus One haters, and not based on actual results, as they should have seen with further investigation. Ofcourse it's reproducable, but the testing methods are flawed. It's also very bold to state that the display interface is 16 bit based on these results. I think this will make a real dent in DisplayMate's reputation. Credability is zero to be honest...

p.s. There's an app for that, by which I mean screen bashing (or at least the result of it actually being bashed)
[Nexus One General] GNOve:
My nexus one have this problem. But I dont care.

Is not like im starring at a black or grey wallpaper for 12 hours without blinking.

i noticed it when I loaded the ipad wallpaper.

I like utilising my god given gift of viewing color so I hardly load dark wallpapers.

Colors FTW!
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
Its viral

In 2 days that DisplayMate article went viral on the net. The damage is done. Mission accomplished. All just before AT&T gets the HTC Desire.

We'll, if anyone makes it to this thread with any doubts, my suggestion is that you compare the phones for yourself, side by side.

PS: If your doctor says the Nexus One display is bad, get a second opinion :)
[Nexus One General] Jak Crow:
It's perfectly relevant. He expresses his belief the app in question is coded with/for SDK and OS 1.5 and the results on anything other than 1.5 would be inaccurate.

"Screen Resolution". It's in the market.

I asked the dev of "Screen Resolution", and he says the app should be version agnostic and is returning accurate results on all OS versions.

It's not just in the case of individual apps. It seems in the case of the N1 and the Archos 5, the OS' UI itself is running at a lower DPI than the screens' native resolutions. Obviously the intent is to keep elements finger friendly for the most part, but in the N1's case, it's using a home screen that's running at a mere 320x533, which is effectively the same res as the 1st gen android devices, and a complete under utilization of the N1's screen. At the very least, an increase to something like 480x640 would provide more real estate to work with while probably keeping things finger friendly. At the most, adding an user controlled option to change screen res and element size would be a perfectly reasonable option to add to the OS, especially when larger screens come along down the road. It would be a waste to have a smartphone with a 1024x768 screen while the UI is still running at 1st gen resolutions.
[Nexus One General] JanetPanic:
As the article I linked to explains, if an app is configured for min and target SDK of 1.5 then there is a bug in the API. This does not represent a problem with the capabilities of the hardware or for that matter any program with a target of 1.6 or above.

It is not agnostic if he specified a target of 1.5. Even if you feel that Google was willing to knowingly falsify the specifications on their own page and collateral this can be confirmed by generating a surface and building a border at the specified dimensions.

Which is more likely; that Google is knowingly falsifying the resolution of the device on their own page and collateral, opening themselves up for a class action lawsuit, or that the version of the API created before variable screen size support was added is reporting the resolution incorrectly. There are multiple articles on the subject of providing both legacy and large format screen support. All point out that you need 1.6 target.

http://developer.android.com/intl/fr/guide/practices/screens_support.html#strategies

Do you have any evidence of this outside of an app targeting a version of the API that does not support large screen formats?

EDIT:

This:

http://developer.android.com/intl/fr/guide/practices/screens_support.html

Might be of interest to you on explaining how Android handles screens of varying densities.
[Nexus One General] aniteshj:
Its a software issue in which it improperly caches and resizes a preview, or zoomed out version of the picture. But when you go to the original size of the image the banding goes away. And kabom. Amazing image, but the problem is the software that ****s up the preview as it were.

And...the panel HTC uses, last I checked, is a 24bit panel. So really...grow the **** up.

This is one site trying to make a name for itself by trashing a product.

Remember when some guy came out going ZOMG Halo 3 doesn't even run 720P? Like any other game? And yet it still looked great and played amazing, ditto with Modern Warfare 2 which natively is only doing sub 720p too. So people get off your high horses and realize that whether the article is true or fake (fake to me) it doesn't detract form the fact that, the display kind of destroys anything out there right now.
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
I'm stunned that the whole body of phone news/technology websites have latched onto this marketing drivel as scientific fact, just because the authors say it is methods were scientific.

DisplayMate has a big problem on their hands unless they can prove Samsung has misrepresented their product as being a 24 bit display, by proving it is only 16 bit.

They have not done so.

DisplayMate should retract the statement if they can't prove it.

I'm gearing up to launch a website dedicated to proving DisplayMate is wrong and discredit every website that blindly re-published their work as fact.
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
I went into GIMP and created a gradient test image as a 24bit PNG which is attached. I displayed it on my Nexus One in the Astro file manager and it looks perfect, no more stepped gradation than my workstations LCD monitor.

I took the photo with a 6 mega pixel Pentax Digital SLR camera in RAW mode.

It actually introduced more artifacts than what is visible to my own eye.

Here is the result, I suggest you try for yourself. Yes, the gallery app renders it stepped.

Edit: Crap, I didn't realize the images would be scaled and converted by uploading them here. I'll zip them and attach instead.

View attachment rotoimages.zip

Conclusion: The Nexus One has a superior display to the Apple iPhone.Some Android apps have display algorithms which distort the image prior to being displayed. The issue is with the viewer application, not the Nexus One hardware.

To all Internet publications: Feel free to quote me and you have my permission to use my test images.

Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, but I play one on the Internet.
[Nexus One General] Oletros:
I can confirm your results :)
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
Thank you for the peer review. Thats more confirming peer review than the DisplayMate article has.
[Nexus One General] Oletros:
Can you send your results to Dr. Soneirea?
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
WOW! Now this guy wants us to do HIS work properly, so he can profit? No way.

Does this sound like a typical doctor or scientist? :

Have you seen the assembly videos of the Nexus One on YouTube? Hardly a "low cost" or "slapped in" operation.

Who pays someone to GUESS?

WTF? It's clear but not clear that it's the hardware or software? He guesses that its a hardware problem, then postulates that Google could upgrade it with software. I'm sorry, but this is unacceptable research.

Even some websites have changed the references from "screen" or display to "apps" displaying 16bit.

The bottom line is, Dr. Soniera got sloppy, we busted him. He's not some independent academic doing these reviews for the good of the public. His article is a piece of marketing literature designed to promote himself and his products.

If I were him, I'd be afraid that computer displays are becoming so high quality, that no one will have a use for his snake oil any more.
[Nexus One General] SilentMobius:
This is due to the OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 subsystem, it only requires the following texture formats:

GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_4_4_4_4

GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_5_5_5_1

GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_5_6_5

All of which are variants of 16-bit

Ref: http://www.khronos.org/registry/gles/specs/2.0/es_full_spec_2.0.24.withchanges.pdf

The iPhone sidesteps this by adding the following extension:

GL_IMG_texture_format_BGRA8888

That adds 32bit (24bit+8bit alpha) texture formats to their implementation.

Now the opengl _framebuffer_ can be 32 bit on android, just not a single texture.
[Nexus One General] thechapel:
One thing I want to bring up that no one else has. People have linked screenshots directly from the phone that show dithering. If the dithering was hardware (which we know it isn't) then a direct screenshot from the phone at the software level wouldn't show the dithering and only the display when viewing it would show it. That is the easiest way to check if something is software or harder, if there is a discrepancy between them then you know what the culprit is.
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
To bad the iPhone LCD is only 18bit. Theres no fixing that.

I think if you take a 24 bit image and dither it to 18 bit, you loose image resolution because dithering takes several low depth pixels to make one high color pixel.

The iPhones display is already the lowest resolution in its class, dithering only makes it worse.

Edit: Dithering increases color resolution and decreases spatial resolution. I guess you can't get something for nothing, especially on the iPhone.
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
That sounds too scientific, are you a doctor or something?
[Nexus One General] thechapel:
Dr. Chapel to the rescue for all your cell phone display issues!
[Nexus One General] Avictus:
I'm not a fancy scientist or anything, but I just opened that test image you made in Astro and it looked absolutely perfect. It didn't look anything like the screenshot the article posted. It also looked much better than the screenshot they posted of the "superior" iPhone display.
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
Not a scientist? Cool, then you're my peer. Another peer review! Whoo!
[Nexus One General] flarbear:
Wrong.

It should definitely have a 16-bit interface even if it can do 24-bit color. Why? Because not all applications have the same needs.

An application that cares about the best quality imaging would only want to use the highest depth interfaces/configurations.

But, an application that has need to load a whole lot of images into memory at the same time on a limited memory device would much prefer to use a lower bit depth imaging. In particular 3D games typically need a lot of textures but they can tell their artists to make good looking textures that only require 16-bits of color depth. If they use the 16-bit images then they can fit a lot more textures in on smaller and smaller phones.

So, the truth is that a device should provide a number of options to the programmer to meet their needs and that a gallery application should take the option that uses the best bit-depth when showing an image. At best, the gallery app might want to load thumbnails into a lower bit depth representation so that it can store lots of thumbnails and animate them around, but when you click on an image, and especially when you zoom in on it - it should be reloading that one image at full res and full bit-depth for the duration of the inspection, but the built-in gallery app apparently doesn't.

So, yes, ding the N1/Google for using a 16-bit interface for functions that should be using a higher bit depth, but don't ding it for providing the lower-bit-depth interfaces in the first place because some applications they wish to attract (i.e. games) most definitely need those. Also, someone else claimed that the GL-ES spec requires the 16-bit interfaces so they would have to provide them even if they don't think the platform needs them.
[Nexus One General] grainysand:
Reporting from a Desire ROM: for what it's worth, when viewing Roto's images through HTC's gallery, there's no banding--there was, at first, but then I zoomed in. Banding disappeared. Zoomed out again, and no banding anymore. Interesting.
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
As a hardware/software engineer, the word "interface" has two meanings to me. But its the hardware one that I think of mostly, ie; the number of physical bus wires leading into the displays interface connector.

As a programmer, "interface" is shorthand for "api". I use api explicitly so as not to confuse myself. :)

FWIW, a display with a 8 or 16 bit hardware interface could display 24 bit color.

An api could have an 8, 16 or 24 bit interface, but that abstracts the hardware, so you really don't know what the hardware is capable of. It could be black and white for all we know.

I feel sorry for the poor saps who, after reading all the false headlines on the net, buy an iPhone thinking they did their homework. Very sad.
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
I wonder if the banding is due to the fast preview feature. I notice on my N1 that the gallery renders the image in stages. First its all low res and blocky, then it clarifies. I just assumed that was to it could slap them up fast, as they could be high resolution and quite large. Who wants to see each image raster scan down the display, or have a huge pause while it loads the frame buffer in the background?

If after all this, the bottom line is that all the fuss is about a "feature" of the gallery, I'm really going to LOL. Duh, let the image load up!

Edit: Nope, not on my test image. Its banded in gallery no matter what I do. In Astro its perfect. I don't notice the banding on my photos, so its misleading to use them for any testing of the software.

Edit2: I created a high resolution test image, 1920x3200, and I see gradient banding in Astro, as it scales the image down before displaying it.

View attachment roto-image-hi.png.zip

grainysand: It just hit me that you're on the Desire rom (I'm still on my first coffee). How you describe the gallery is exactly how I would want it to work! I wonder if the Desire gallery.apk from that rom will work on stock or Cyanogen ROM.
[Nexus One General] BrooklynAvi:
I make a conscientious choice to be thick. Even so, I'm pretty sure the post was about an article on Gizmodo.com not Displaymate.com. But I'll keep being thick.
[Nexus One General] ninjakettle:
oh dear, more coverage :

wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/iphones-lcd-screen-beats-nexus-ones-oled-display/#comments
[Nexus One General] deekjx:
This is a very interesting article and thread. I'm glad everyone got to the bottom of it. When the CDMA version becomes available, I'll probably try these exercises out for my self.
[Nexus One General] shallow70:
The OLED-Association responds to DisplayMate's Nexus-One tests

As a new poster I cannot post the link - google 'Barry Young from the OLED-Association has sent us his response'

part 3 of the displaymate saga was originally supposed to release on the 1st, but latest is it will be put up tomorrow.
[Nexus One General] rotohammer:
Barry Young's response could have been more scathing :) If it was me, I would have trashed everyone, DisplayMate, Gizmodo, and the 1000 copy cat sites that blindly posted the bunk.
[Nexus One General] flarbear:
FYI - the gallery app resolution issue is now in the Android issues list. Go here and add a star to raise the visibility of this issue in Android development:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6587

(You will need to sign in with your Google ID to click on the star in the upper left corner...)
[Nexus One General] Bryce2010:
I know this thread has been dead for awhile but I just wanted to confirm:

I have pretty bad color banding when using the grass live wallpaper. It's especially bad when transitioning from day to night.

Just to confirm everyone has this right? It's not a defect with my phone right? I'm just surprised when I google 'grass live wallpaper nexus one' there is no mention of the poor background picture quality.

Would you guys mind trying it? Is it that some displays show it ok but how could that be if it is a software problem?
[Nexus One General] Bryce2010:
Another screen shot attached
[Nexus One General] wrench115:
Just tried it for you I have no banding at all.
[Nexus One General] Bryce2010:
Oh come on you're kidding right? Can anyone else help? So once again I have a defective phone?

This is after I've already sent it in for a dead pixel and the red tint! They said they replaced the screen entirely! The red tint was improved but still slightly there so I thought it was fixed.

What should I do?
[Nexus One General] NexusDro:
I can confirm that mine doesn't have banding as well.

What version are you using? I'm using stock Froyo. But even when I had the old stock Eclair, I didn't see banding on that wallpaper at all.
[Nexus One General] Konqeror:
I have some mild banding as well, but I never use live wallpapers so it's not an issue with me.
[Nexus One General] dudebro:
same here but it's only on the grass wallpaper.

I never use it though so it doesn't bother me.
[Nexus One General] wrench115:
I'm on stock 2.2 froyo. Only had the phone for 2 weeks. Sorry man :(