[Nexus One General] flarbear:
A couple of thoughts on why some people see it more than others...

- I can hardly see any banding at all on the grass wallpaper during full daylight and I only saw very minimal banding at night. It seems worse during the twilight hours. People who aren't seeing banding - try during dawn dusk and evening hours and see if you see minor banding during those times.

- It may be affected by screen brightness. When you find it - try adjusting brightness to see if it becomes more or less noticeable.

- Look at the screen closely. When I'm wearing my contacts I can't get close enough to the phone to see the banding in many circumstances and so it wouldn't be a fair test for me to judge it then. When I'm wearing my glasses I can barely see the banding (they give me slightly better near sight) at about a foot, and I can see it very well if I remove the glasses and look at it just a few inches away. The dithering on the phone dialer, for instance, I can only see if I get right up to it - maybe an inch away. I never noticed that banding before until I looked at your screen shot and then I can only reproduce it on my phone if I look really really close.

- I'm pretty sure what I'm seeing on my phone with the grass wallpaper is the result of using a 16-bit source image or a 16-bit texture to hold it. I don't see how that can be a display hardware issue. I don't have a good explanation for why some people see nothing other than the following couple of observations:

- Your first couple of screen shots were really really awful. I have never seen anything that bad on my phone display ever. Your later screen shots are similar to what I've seen from time to time when applications use 16-bit images. Perhaps the people who aren't seeing the banding are only looking out for the really bad banding your first couple of screen shots showed and aren't really reporting the minor dithering of the later shots or aren't looking closely enough to find it?

- A combination of brightness level, some variation in screens (we've already identified that some AMOLEDs have a purple tinge and others do not), how closely they looked, and how sensitive they are to seeing the banding. I know at work I can sit side by side looking at a test image with some of my coworkers and some will see a problem and others won't see it until you point directly at it, so there is some variation in the human factor as well.

In any case, if the problems you are seeing on your display show up in the screen captures, then I can say that categorically a replacement will not fix the problem. The problem is in what pixels the software is telling the display to show, not in how the display is showing them. Though there may be enough variation in hardware to make it easier or harder to see on some phones - the fact is that the banding was present in the raw pixels and so a new display cannot make it go away completely. It would be better to complain to Google about the quality of the gradients and textures in their apps (dialer, weather widget, and wallpapers). Here are a couple of issues already submitted you can read and vote for:

Banding in radial gradients:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=767

Low res images in gallery app:

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

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