Database Users

My Screen Images seems poor and dithered...

Just got my nice new XDA2...
And I am dismayed to find that the screen colours/wallpapers etc, all seem to be dithered images in a low colour depth.
Instead of smooth gradients, it seems banded from one colour to the next, and shades are made up of dots instead of many colours.
As this has 65,556 colours, I was not expecting this.
Its much like a real pc running in too low a colour depth - but unlike a real pc where this can easily be changed to 24bit or 32bit colour, I can find no such option on my XDA2. Anyone got any ideas, or is it really this bad (because that's how I would genuinely describe it - bad...)

Bumping ^
Anyone?

Same problem we all have, I think it is down to pixel alignment as if one tilts the top of the Xda II backwards the pixels and display appear how one would expect.

I feel cheated, i used to have a Dell X5 Advance. That display was flawless. Now i cant use some colors, especially blue. It gets really messed up...
Its sad

I still never found a satisfactory explanation, as it STILL looks as though the screen is simply NOT displaying anything like 65K colours...

Discovered this bug early on, but found a workaround. The problem seems to be a contrast issue (too high). Use the Pictures application and adjust the contrast of your pictures one notch downward.

I had an iPAQ H5555 before the XDA II (and a long list of iPAQ's before the H5555 ) I have no complaints over the display on my XDA II colours are crisp and clear, focus contrast and brightness are fine also.
Are you having problems with the default wall paper themes or other inages you have installed?

I have problems with any image used as the today background.
Even those created in Paint Shop Pro.
On my PC, they are smooth, gradiented fills, and blend smoothly.
Soon as you put them onto the XDA2 however, and it gets 'Banded' terribly. Legs appear in what seems like just two colours, a light flesh pink in the mid, and another lighter colour for the outline - a sharp jump from one colour to another - no gradiented fill in between.
Alas, I can't of course attach REAL screen shots, as in so doing the images would appear fine on here, as the images really ARE fine - its only their appearance on the XDA2 that goes haywire.
A simple example of what I mean, SIMULATED however, is as attached.
I have done this simply by posting a view from my window, in true colour 24K format, and then a copy of it, with the colour depth reduced to just 256 colours, with no error diffusion used.
This is almost EXACTLY what the resultant appearance is like on my XDA2. But sure enough, as some users say, if you ANGLE the XDA2, this becomes a lot less pronounced.
I am at a loss to understand why it does it at all however, becuase as far as I know, current screen technology does not need to suffer an issue such as this.
Mmmmmm.....

I have not found any sollution to the problem.

I am saddened to say, but it seems like it's the phone to blame.
So much for 65K Transflective being the bees knees.
I have designed a batch of about 60 themes for the phone, using photos. No matter what quality I save at, or even saving as .bmp based, half of them look terrible, with skin tones such as legs being made up of a lighter outline colour, with a big pool of a darker colour in the middle - TWO colours used to make up a part of an image that should be 100's of colours.
Terrible.
Even worse, I notice now, that this applies to Windows Media Player, playing back videos too.
If you angle your head/the XDA2 a certain angle, this reduces the effect. But I mean come on.
Obviously (based on my last comment there) this is a limitation of the screen technology.
Not impressed by far is all I can really say.

This annoys me too.
It feels like somewhere deep inside the XDA2 there's a hardcoded 4096 colour setting left over from the XDA 1. It's especially noticable on web pages.

You should bring this device back to where you got it from and test it side by side with another XDA II using the same themes.
The quality of my screen is perfect and the colours are all vivid and no banding appears unless the theme itself has banding.
I had an iPAQ 5455 that had the same problem as yours, colours appeared to only show 4096 colours 8bit. I sent back and it was replaced with another one that had a perfect screen.
Cheerio
Howard

Mmm - now this topic is getting interesting...
Anyone else think that there is a problem?
I have hinted all along that it's as if the XDA2 is only displaying images in a limited number of colours, and to now hear other people saying the same kind of thing makes for interesting reading...

hmmm
maybe i'm totally wrong, but: do you use CLEAR TYPE ???
i did activate it, and realized that eg. in the phone application the "talk" or the "number" buttons did really look awful.
so i turned clear type off, and my problems where gone... or was it all imagination ? i don't know ...
just a thought
servus ize|man

I do use it, so I'm about to experiment, and report back.

Was worth a try, but alas, no difference on my XDA2.
Just chose a couple of my themes that seem poorly 'dithered' and colour 'banded'.
Turned Cleartype off.
Did a reset...
And the themes look no different or better alas.
Damn.
Thanks for the suggestion though mate.
It REALLY does seem as if the 65000 colour XDA2 is forced into running with just 4096 colours - possibly even less.
But the way or angle you look at the screen makes all it look different, so then again, this could be an inherit issue, and in effect, 'feature' of the screen technology.
A very poor one if so, given the hype of how much much better this new screen is over the original XDA.
Probably one of the poorest that I have seen...

Here's my image quality.
I took your good image and put it onto my machine and took a screen shot. Here's the sample.... no banding!
Cheers

Exactly the same for me: no banding, good quality.
Perhaps something is wrong with your device.. :roll:

Er no guys...
Because that was just a SIMULATED screen shot, which I don't even use on my XDA2 - I just took a photo I had from my back window, and recoloured it down to 256 colours, to simulate what I see (as this is EXACTLY what it looks like with other themes).
I SHOULD have done it with a real theme I use, but in this case I hadn't.
I will post a theme file that is bad for me, and you can try that if you like...
My problem of course, is that all my many themes, are ADULT based images of my gf and her gf etc, so not suitable to post in a general forum such as this.
I have attached a screenshot of one of the 'tamer' ones though.
The screenshot, taken straight from ActiveSync Remote Display, appears FINE on a PC - it's on the DEVICE that it looks bad though.
So take a look at the screenshot, the area where I indicate bad 'banding' then run the also attached theme on your device, and tell me if you get 'banding' where I indicate, when you put the theme on your actual device?

Shadamehr,
It's the result of too much contrast. Try this:
1. Take the background bitmap you used for your theme and copy it to your XDAII.
2. Load the Pictures application and view the picture you just loaded.
3. Click Edit|Brightness And Contrast and adjust the contrast one or two settings downwards until the picture looks okay.
4. Save the picture, copy it to your PC and us it in your theme.
5. Try your new Theme on your XDAII and see if the banding problem goes away.
Hope this helps,
Rene

Color depth issues

While going through some photos it occured to me just now that the color depth seems skewed a bit. Its like looking at images on one of the old 4096 color devices. As far as I can tell there's nowhere inside of wm5 to change bit-depth on the display and the only thing I can guess is that one of the programs I installed recently may have tweaked a registry entry somewhere. Are rescoe photo viewer or conduit pocket artist known for this kind of behavior? Other than that a few games are the only other 3rd party apps I've installed.

The display on the Universal shows 16 bit (565) but the pictures themselves are 24 bit. If you look at them on a PC you will see the full quality.

I'd be willing to accept that explanation if it wasnt for the fact that not so long ago the image clarity was exceptional... the color depth and apparent dithering has gone from amazing to hardly tolerable. I was poking around inside morphgear and saw that it had driver changing options and that the configuration menu (graphics or otherwise) seemed to make the display go a bit wonky.

Hrmmm... attempted a hard reset and still no better. It did occur to me that I hadnt really done anything graphical until recently and not TOO long ago I had an LCD replacement done by pocketpctechs.com. Does anybody know if they use the OEM LCDs or if maybe I would have gotten an old 4096 color model?

You could try and check with the attached testpatterns.
They are basically three vertical gradients - greyscale, red, green, and blue
Each gradient in turn is composed of 3 columns
left column: 16bit - Rx5bits (32 levels) Gx6bits (64 levels) Bx5bits (32 levels)
middle column: 24bit - RGBx8bits (256 levels)
right column: 12bit - RGBx4bits (16 levels)
There's two files - one with dithering and one without (banding). The dithering method used is a basic Floyd-Steinberg which is used in most dithering engines next to a regular dither (not included, but I have one of those in the same kit
Be sure to view the image full-screen, as otherwise you will run into resizing issues
What you'll be looking for, essentially, is which of the two left/right columns most resembles the center column. Unless you have a full 24bit device, there should be either banding or dithering occuring, and the center column should look like the left or right column.
If you're not sure - load the image, take a screengrab ("Magic SS" functions with VGA), and attach the result here for us to peek at. I'm *assuming* that it would grab the actual output data and would thus get us the screengrab post-bitreduction

well, it would APPEAR that everything is in order, in the standard non-dithered image the left column matches up best visually to the center which would indicate a 16bit display, as the device is rated. however, in all my time of graphics work, downsampling a 24bit image to display on a 16bit display has never produced such unsightly results

magicss will force the saved BMP into 565 (16 bit). For a true 24 bit screen capture use my ScreenShotCE program (search Handango)
(of course this is a red herring since the screen is 16 bit, and not 18 or 24 bit.)

yeah, the point was to get a screengrab of what he's actually seeing - not what's being sent to the driver -before- downsampling/etc.

low color deth on display
I have the some problem about.. the color deth is low, I have bad quality, it look like 4096 colors, the today screen, the pics, the movies.. everything, I tryed a hard resert, but nothing to do..
Some help ???
MDA II - WM5 2.01a

OK....Check WIKI

And attempted to search but found nothing. I am the owner of a Dash (Excalibur), but have two friends running Wings and they would like to know how to change around home screens. Ruttensoft and MadBeetle seem to be geared towards different sized screens.
Any software out there to efficiently change the screens?

Go to Settings, then TODAY, then under ITEMS

Apologize for not being more clear. I would like to create my own homescreens

Use any popular photo editing software (Photoshop, Paintshop, even IfranView) and crop/shrink the image to a 320x320 resolution. Send the image to your phone... Menu > Set as Today Background. Set the parameters you like (transparancy and the such) and hit OK.
Unless of course you want to change the colors of your Today screen too... then you'd have to use something like ThemeGen to create a theme from scratch and export it as a .tsk file.
Personally, I just use SKTools. It allows you to change all the colors from within the program. No need to create theme files or anything! Plus you get a much wider range of colors.

freakingwilly said:
Use any popular photo editing software (Photoshop, Paintshop, even IfranView) and crop/shrink the image to a 320x320 resolution. Send the image to your phone... Menu > Set as Today Background. Set the parameters you like (transparancy and the such) and hit OK.
Unless of course you want to change the colors of your Today screen too... then you'd have to use something like ThemeGen to create a theme from scratch and export it as a .tsk file.
Personally, I just use SKTools. It allows you to change all the colors from within the program. No need to create theme files or anything! Plus you get a much wider range of colors.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That easy eh? I need to dump my Dash!

Samsung Vibrant Wallpapper Expanded?

I just recently bought a Samsung vibrant from t-mobile and i want to set a background of a photo. At first it tells me to crop a certain part of the photo then expands it and looks all pixelated. I searched around and theres this app called "wallpaper set and save" which didnt set the whole image as the background. is there any way of setting a full image as a background and the phone auto adjusts?

jhuynh92 said:
I just recently bought a Samsung vibrant from t-mobile and i want to set a background of a photo. At first it tells me to crop a certain part of the photo then expands it and looks all pixelated. I searched around and theres this app called "wallpaper set and save" which didnt set the whole image as the background. is there any way of setting a full image as a background and the phone auto adjusts?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Android lets you crop the picture when it's too big. If you touch the edges of the crop square, and drag it out, you can change the size of the cropped area, you might be able to drag it out all the way to encompass the entire image. Also, it shouldn't be pixellating the image unless the resolution is way low, like 170x200 low.

raduque said:
Android lets you crop the picture when it's too big. If you touch the edges of the crop square, and drag it out, you can change the size of the cropped area, you might be able to drag it out all the way to encompass the entire image. Also, it shouldn't be pixellating the image unless the resolution is way low, like 170x200 low.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
if u want them to fit PERFECT the Image has too be 960x800 i will be makin wallpapers so stay tuned -----here are some of my other i tweaked for the MT3g & Nexus but i was making the nexus 50 pixels larger instead of 960x800 i was making them 960 x850
http://picasaweb.google.com/neffstarr

the image is bigger than the full crop window. so when i try to crop it it crops half the photo and expands it to fit the full screen therefore making it pixelated. its a photo that wasnt taken by the phone btw.

I'm having the same problem. I downloaded some 480x800 wallpapers and when I try to set the wallpaper, it asks me to crop part of the image and does not let you encompass the whole the thing. How are you supposed to set the wallpaper?

As stated above, make the image 960*800.
-bZj
_____
-sent from my Samsung Vibrant via XDAapp

Ahhh, I see. It works now, thanks a lot!

I still find the whole cropping thing a pain. I had images set at 960X800 but the cropping tool never lets me select it properly. I either end up with a small black band at the top and bottom or I have to under size it. I found this on the Market that lets you just set the image without cropping and it works on the Vibrant: "Application Utility".

Alakar said:
I still find the whole cropping thing a pain. I had images set at 960X800 but the cropping tool never lets me select it properly. I either end up with a small black band at the top and bottom or I have to under size it. I found this on the Market that lets you just set the image without cropping and it works on the Vibrant: "Application Utility".
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Then you're doing it wrong.
960 wide
800 tall
crop to 100%
done.
-bZj

i have yet to crop anything and have a wide array of resolutions so far. Wallpaper set and save. get it.

Image dpi, bit depth etc?

ok developed an app and just decided to use images for buttons.
Made a nice glossy button in photoshop, added to my app and put it on my HTC HD 2 for a test.
Why does the image not look as smooth? like I can see the blend/gradient lines.
Does the dpi have any effect and bit depth? Image was made at 72dpi
Cheers

DPI only comes into play if you print your image. Bit depth might make a difference. I don't know offhand the color bit depth of the HD2's display, but if it isn't the same as your computer's display, your buttons will look different.

yep its the colour depth. PC, i'm using 32bpp where as most phones are at 16bpp.

What language is the pictures being used in? Recently I've found out that C# uses Bilinear image resizing, which means it inserts estimated pixels in with the image when resizing.
Try the following:
1) save the image as a 24 or 32 bit png
2) make the image the same size as the button

I'm using c# and I'm not resizing the image at all.
The other thing i have noted is that if I add a picturebox to my app and set the image to the same one I'm using for my button, again I make sure I display the image at its actual size, it looks better than what it does for the button.
Why is that?
Same image, displayed at actual size looks, better in a picturebox than it does in my custom control?