The Pestilent Pentile Display Discussion Thread

[jasaero]

Not sure what point your trying to make about "pushing pixels" here and really don't need to understand. Obviously you happen to be super sensitive to the Pentile "pixel pattern" and have decided that the technology will never be suitable for a phone display. I happen to disagree. I certainly notice the "pattern visibility" on the Bionic and other Motorola qHD Pentile displays, but don't find it nearly has bothersome or objectionable as some do.

I believe that higher PPI displays will make this pattern visibility disappear. I think of it like printed material. I can easily see the halftone dot pattern of a picture in the paper, but it is really hard, without looking very closely, to see the halftone pattern on a picture in the National Geographic or other high end printed material.

Also, even on a display like the current qHD Pentile displays, where the "pattern visibility" is noticeable by a lot of people, after several days to a week of use most people will cease to see the pattern. There are many forum posts about this phenomenon, called visual adaption.

Your GPU and CPU do extra work to refresh/redraw your screen the more pixels you have. An elegant/efficient design uses and few pixels as possible to the visual acuity goal of the display system. Pentile works against this elegance/efficiency. Technically you could have a 4" 1920x1080p display at some point I am sure, but would there be any point at all for it outside of projection use or something?

I suppose it's similar to MP wars with camera sensors. I am TOTALLY against them. I would rather they stuck to 5mp to maybe 12mp for large sensoor and refined the pixels to work better at gathering light. I would rather they stuck to a resolution/PPI we know can look perfectly fine to 99% of the population and refine the sub pixels at that static minimum resolution required to make everyone happy when done right and reduce the amount of data actually required to fully satisfy everyone's visual acuity. If they weren't mobile devices with computational power already restricted by battery longevity and such I would understand.

None of the engineers or technical people from any of these companies hawking pentile have ever stated or estimated what the compute overhead for the extra pixels is or in Moto's case if it is even less than the power savings gained by going to qHD pentile. It's very possible that 800x480 would reduce compute overhead from qHD enough to offset all power gains from Pentile. They would never admit such a thing though as it would negate the primary plus for going to Pentile in the first place as to many it doesn't even look as good at qHD as nonpentile did at 480p. Basically it's a farce to claim pentile helps battery life as it's only true at the same resolution when taking the whole visual system power to make images appear and refresh into account. If you have 50% more pixels to refresh you automatically have 50% more visual compute power required to power that display. The display compute power is probably only a very minor component of the compute power used overall, but the dimmer back light for similar brightness on RGBW isn't huge either or we would be seeing better battery life gains since that is the biggest power consumer on a smart phone getting used often.

I will probably be OK with Pentile eventually, but for now I don't think there is a large enough excess of compute power to justify them at the resolutions they are acceptable. This is particularly true if you want the most out of 3D android games and such. This little aspect is the reason I would now chose the Moto Spyder over the Nexus Prime if'n it comes to VZW around the same time with similar compute specs.

[spind426]

If you have a droid bionic set your background to Live Wallpapers- and select the Autmn leaves floating in water background. Go to your phones lock/mute screen and let the display sit for a minute whereas it will go dim. Then look at the chess board mistakenly referred to as a display screen.

[jasaero]

I am noticing the Atrix 2 is apparently nonpentile. Is this actually the case? Ask because most reports don't seem to have any confirmation from Moto and if it is, is it just a standard IPS with qHD? And if this is the first nonPentile Moto qHD is this simply because it was the only one early enough in development to make that happen as complaints about pentile on the first atrix became a clear issue that needed addressed?

To this day I am still confused how Moto went down this Pentile path? I am not a Bionic owner because of this and am pretty sure many others are out there not newer moto owners for this reason also. It may not be huge numbers, but I am almost certain EVERYONE who went for the pentile motos would have ANYWAY if the screens were standard IPS qHD and of high quality.

I am also curious if this was a cost saver and that drove the decision to not go with a high grade IPS qHD from the get go.

[FAUguy]

Here is a water-drop macro image that I took while using the Droid Bionic.
You can clearly see the RGBW PenTile Matrix used by the Bionic.
If anyone has a Droid Razr, or HTC Rezound, you can try the same thing with it to see if it looks any better:

[spind426]

Just sold my droid x for 187.50 on ebay only to buy a droid-x2 for 180.99. The pentile is much better on the droidX2 than the bionic. I know, i returned my bionic because of it. Funny thing is that the x2 is about 400 dollars cheaper yet scores in the 2600+ range in quadrant.. and the bionic/razr only get 2200. Funny

[FAUguy]

Here's the same water drop test with the HTC Rezound:

[Guest 214]

This is why I got the HTC Rezound instead of the Droid Razr...

[jroc74]

But the thing is....IMO at one's normal viewing distances ....can one really easily see any Pentile issues on the RAZR? Its Amoled vs. LCD all over again with the Rezound and RAZR.

And after being a big fan of LCD for so long...I think I'm in the Amoled camp now. The ONLY reason being is that pixels, screen door effect isnt as bad as some ppl say on the RAZR. I havent seen the Bionic or DX2 or D3 yet.....but on the RAZR its only noticeable if its very close to my face. And its not the entire screen, its letters, icons...havent really noticed it on pics yet.

At the closest of MY normal viewing distances...its not noticeable. Funny thing is it used to be when I first got the RAZR. Maybe I was measuring from the back of my head, my shoulder and not from my eyes...I dont know...lol As of right now....its to the point where I cant even see it at all. MY normal viewing distances is 1ft, 3in to 1ft, 9in. Anything past 1ft, 9in and its pushing being too far away to hold and interact comfortably.

Not noticeable on game, videos, websites to me. I'm not talking about water drop tests...I'm talking about real world use, situations. Thats why for these screens its best to see them in person....dont hold them extremely close to your face....do it at YOUR normal viewing distance. You may be pleasantly surprised. Folks that like Amoled screens....some arent impressed with the Rezound screen. Yea they comment on how sharp it looks....but after that...Its Amoled vs. LCD 2011..lol And I finally see why some ppl like Amoled screens.

IF your normal viewing distance is real close to your face....I dont know what to say.

[spind426]

It's a shame reading all these posts about "its not noticeable when i look at the screen from X amount of distance" and hearing people try and justify the fact that the screen is blurry. IMO i think its just unnacaptable, we need to simply let these companies know that we DO very much care about the picture quality of our phones. It makes me mad that i used a droid-x for over a year and LOVED it to death.. then upgrade to a bionic which looked absolutely rediculous? After playing a game on it for an hour i went into my kitchen and i saw a checkerboard effect on my dads face.. We need to kindly reject this wave of phones with pentile displays. Its just not cool. Its just not.. im tired of all these LCD LED AMOLED PENTILE QHD crap. JUST MAKE A PHONE WITH A CLEAR SCREEN ALREADY! sry

[jroc74]

I cant speak about the Bionic...

Sorry to disappoint you...but its not justifying anything...its being realistic. If I go thru the time to actually measure MY actual viewing distances.....its being realistic. Know the distance I can really see it clearly on my RAZR? 8-9in away...lol. And that's only letters, borders if icons. Not the ENTIRE screen. And thats if I concentrate on the letters, borders of icons.

Again, I cant speak for the Bionic...but after playing a game for an hour you saw a checkerboard patter on your dads face? Wow...lol. I assume you are just exaggerating cuz if that happened it woulda bother your eyes so much long before an hour went by that you would been stopped playing....

Bionic screen is bad as some ppl say? Cant say for sure. Maybe some of yall have above average eye sight, cuz I have good vision. But the RAZR screen is great...IMO.

[FAUguy]

I have good vision and can easily see the difference between the Droid Bionic and Rezound screen with it about 8-10 inches from my face. The Rezound is much sharper and clearer. The only thing I don't like about it is the poor viewing angles. If you're not looking at the Rezound head-on, you'll get some contrast shift if you look at it from even a slight off-axis angle. I haven't tried the Droid Razr yet.

[SeanPlunk]

I was playing with a friend's Droid 3 tonight and couldn't believe how awful it looked. When I tried a Razr I didn't notice the jaggies as much, but the D3 is just awful. My Droid X craps all over the D3's screen as far as sharpness is concerned even with the lower resolution.

[jasaero]

I was playing with a friend's Droid 3 tonight and couldn't believe how awful it looked. When I tried a Razr I didn't notice the jaggies as much, but the D3 is just awful. My Droid X craps all over the D3's screen as far as sharpness is concerned even with the lower resolution.

Agreed. I checked out the RAZR and the screen is MUCH more reasonable than RGBW Pentile LCD's of Moto at the same resolution. I would still prefer normal pixel arrangement at qHD though. I think 720p HD will fix RGBG AMOLED Pentile in smartphone sized screens on the Nexus though. I feel though that RGBW at 720p HD would still look off though, but be more acceptable, even if not quite acceptable to me.

ReZound does seem to be the Android phone to beat from a sharpness perspective though. Curious to see how it does on brightness tests though as Brightness is hard to evaluate in a store and even outside differences between best and worse brightness capable LCDs are pretty hard to see without a side by side unless one is just really bad.

[Susurro]

It's a shame reading all these posts about "its not noticeable when i look at the screen from X amount of distance" and hearing people try and justify the fact that the screen is blurry. IMO i think its just unnacaptable,

Just curious, first you rip on people for saying it isn't noticeable to them and than you say "IMO". So is it your opinion or fact that it looks worse?

Just like everything, it is a personal preference. Personally I like the idea of a 720p display, but in practice that Pentile qHD displays don't bother me at all and isn't noticeable to me in everyday usage. I do like sunlight visibility though and that does affect my normal usage.

[Kies]

AMOLED does make PenTile way less noticable. With LCD it looks worse..

Sent from my T-Mobile Galaxy S II 4G