Database Users

SAMOLED Screen, Colors and you.

Been searching for a while trying to find some info on the color depth on the Super AMOLED screens on the Galaxy S line.
Reason being, I have to be very wary of what wallpapers I use on my phone, because many end up looking very bad. You see distinct lines in various gradients as if the color depth of the screen is just very low.
It's a little disconcerting, and confusing, given how great these screens are supposed to be.
For example, there is a new wallpaper Android Central (posted just the other day) featuring their new logo/mascot. The wallpapers looks fine on my LCD monitor on my computer, but when I put them on my phone, I see lines in the background gradient that shouldn't be there. It doesn't seem like the screen can render those 'in-between' colors.
Anyone have any insight on this? Is it in fact the screen? Are other phones like this too?
I did read something about the fact that Android 2.1 maxes at 16bit color but 2.2 remedies this limitation, but I'm not sure if this is accurate, applicable to the situation, or even true.
Thanks in advance.

Download the Acquarium free live wallpaper in the market. The colors look amazing on my phone. There's also the Avatar movie, in the bright scenes the colors really "pop".

Let's hope froyo adds that feature, I've noticed it too on some colors, but its a minor annoyance, I'm sure if android supported larger screen resolution like gingerbread will have, samsung would have put a 1280x720 screen in there. Maybe the S2
Sent from my SXY-T959

As a photographer I put several of my Hi Res works on my Phone. I did not even downsize them and just moved them to the phone so they would not be downsized automatically. I found the Gallery displays them perfectly, all be it with a slight over saturation. But the depth is great, really really good. I have used it as a mini portfolio, its that good.
However if I make any of them a wallpaper the phone dummies the shot way down and I loose sharpness, pixel depth, contrast, even that over saturation I spoke of. Its seems to me the shots are forced down to a "good" wallpaper size to not drain resources maybe? If a large hi res photo is not down sampled in small increments a little at a time it looses a ton of quality. But should not shots made for wallpaper from the market work well too? Maybe the Vibrant dummies all shots down for the wallpaper since all screen sizes are different?
Now if I could only get the Gallery to stop hanging on start up after the Ji6 update...ugh

It could be the stock gallery app that is ****ing up the wallpapers. I recommend using an app called "Wallpaper Set & Save" which allows you to set any size wallpaper without ****ing up the quality. Zedge is another great app with tons of dope wallpapers and doesn't destroy the resolutions of your wallpapers.

SeanFloyd said:
It could be the stock gallery app that is ****ing up the wallpapers. I recommend using an app called "Wallpaper Set & Save" which allows you to set any size wallpaper without ****ing up the quality. Zedge is another great app with tons of dope wallpapers and doesn't destroy the resolutions of your wallpapers.
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Cool! apps like that I was not even aware of. thanks.
I just tried Photoshop Express app for Android to set a Hi Res pic to wallpaper. Fail. It down graded it substantially, It must use the crappy internal phone method also. Gonna check out the recommended apps thanks.

Grainy Screen

I just received my Xoom WiFi today. Background info : I own an iPhone and a Macbook Pro. When I first started up the Xoom, the first thing I noticed was that the honeycomb graphics were a little pixelated. Then I noticed the same thing in the music players - the album covers seemed pixelated.
Am I just spoiled by the retina display? Even the camera seemed like it wasn't 'HD'.

No one has a reply?

The xoom has a higher resolution but the screen is not as vibrant as others. Not sure how you would see pixels b/c of that. I dont see any pixels but I do only have 20/20 vision and view at a normal distance.

I dont notice any pixelation.
Compared to my girlfriends ipad2, the colours are not quite as saturated. I do notice the blacks seem better on the xoom and easier to read text while a webpage is scrolling.
There seems to be 2 different screens used on the xooms. The dmesg output says I have the AU optronics one.

DroidBee said:
...Am I just spoiled by the retina display? Even the camera seemed like it wasn't 'HD'.
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Yes... But, I too own an iPhone 4 & Touch 4G, but you forgetting about the pixel density, not just resolution. In other words, a smaller display size given the same resolution will appear to the eye, to yield better visual results (notwitstanding color, screen technology, etc..)...
A fairer comparison would be between the Xoom and an iPad - where the Xoom has better resolution but a larger display surface...
As for album art, it really depends on how the software renders the graphic & its stored size, in which case I agree with you - Apple has a better design point...
Make sense?
Best to you,
John

Thanks for the replies!
I was talking about the album art of the sample media on it.

Video conversion

Just picked up this phone the other day and I'm trying to find out what the best settings would be to convert video files like movies and shows that would take advantage of the FHD screen. I tried to convert a movie and compared it to the same file that I had converted for my old phone which was the HTC Evo Lte but it seemed darker on the S5 for some reason.

casual167 said:
I'm trying to find out what the best settings would be to convert video files like movies and shows that would take advantage of the FHD screen.
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You are short on details, so we can only guess at your preferences, whether you are a demanding videophile or just want a decent rip, with minimal effort. Whether you convert on a PC or on the S5 and numerous other questions..
Since it's not at all clear what you goals are, I'll just describe what works well for me, with very good, high quality results.
Using Handbrake:
Use the Android preset, which is quite good. This defaults picture size to 720p. I have done a lot of side by side testing and while I would default to 1080p for Blueray rips intended for viewing on a projector, TV or notebook, there is no visible advantage on a 5.1" screen. As well, ripping to high standards at 1080p often exceeds 4 GB, which is problematic on the Android filesystem. Whereas 720p results in a viable 1.5 - 2.5 GB file.
Confirm that large files size is disabled. i.e. choose 32-bit chunks.
On the Video tab, choose frame rate = same as source
Preserve ad hoc subtitles, the ones that the original English movie occasionally puts on screen when someone speaks a few lines of foreign dialog. On the Subtitles tab, choose Forced only.
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Thanks for your response. Yeah sorry, I should've been more specific in what I was trying to do. Since all my videos are currently formatted for 1280x720 on my Evo, I wanted to see if there is a conversion for the 1920x1080 that would look better on this phone. I'll give what you said a try and check it out. When comparing the two side by side, the S5 seemed to be a little darker so I wasn't sure if it was because of the lower resolution of 720. Just wanted to get it to look as crisp on the S5 as the Evo

I wouldn't recommend that kind of conversion. First, what you are thinking of doing is called upconverting.. and it never works well when you start with a lower resolution source. If you started with a highbit rate blueray.. that is one thing. And event then it's arguable if there is any visible advantage to 1080 on a 5.1" screen.
But I'll bet good money that upconverting from your lower resolution rip will noticeably degrade your picture. Yes, it will have more pixels in the end but since they are interpolated pixels from a lower resolution source, you can expect all kinds of undesirable video artifacts to accompany that.
Crisp could refer to several things. I suspect that your S5 is simply revealing inherent quality limitations of your current movie rips that may not have been obvious on your previous phone. The way to get that kind of crispness back on the S5 is to make better quality e.g. higher bit rate, mutipass (HQ) encoding and so forth. Simply upconverting will do the opposite of what you are aiming for because the extra pixels will tend to be blury + add random artifacts from an upconverted source.
Second, the dark picture you refer to is no doubt a minor gamma difference between manufacturers. You could in theory lighten all your movies to make them subjectively brighter on the S5. But again, it will degrade the picture a bit at the same time since the frames need to be modified and transcoded. Trust me that you will soon adjust to a gamma difference between devices after a short amount of time unless the difference is huge.
Most videophiles don't play movies at full brightness anyway as picture quality is better at an intermediate screen brightness. So unless you are viewing in a brightly lit room, you could just increase the S5 screne brightness a little bit to more than compensate for the lower gamma.
.

3740
Ok that makes sense. I'm kind of a noob when it comes to this stuff so I appreciate you taking the time to explain it. I kept looking side by side and couldn't figure out why there was such a difference. Colors seemed to pop more on the Evo which I thought was weird but I sort of understand why now. Skin tones and everything just looked like it had less contrast. I spend a lot of time traveling for work so watching things is like 80% of what I do on the phone and getting the right format is important. I was looking at getting the LG G3 so would that mean that it could look worse because of the bigger size and resolution or would it be the about the same?

casual167 said:
I was looking at getting the LG G3 so would that mean that it could look worse because of the bigger size and resolution or would it be the about the same?
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The S5 screen is better than the G3 IMO. But you can decide for yourself.
If you want crisp images or images on the S5.. just encode your movies from high resolution sources e.g. bluerays --> 720, with high quality settings e.g. high bit rate. Converting existing movie rips from 720 --> 1080 though won't give great results.
The apparent lack of crispness or contrast is just the effect of having a more capable screen on the S5. A better screen will be both impressive when you have a high quality movie. And disappointing when playing something lower quality because it is also more revealing of flaws that would be less obvious on a lower resolution screen.
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Is there a way to lower the screen resolution from 1080p to 720p?

I hear they lower the res from 1440 to 1080 in the G3 so is there a way to lower the screen resolution in the G2 from 1080p to 720p?
I couldn't find anything about it in search.

Screen resolution of an lCD is a physical attribute, it cannot be changed. You can change the software to renderer the image so you would get a lower resolution data to show, and since android source is available, it is technically possible. I doubt anybody tried, because our device has a adequite computing power to generate 1080p images. On the other hand, lg g3 has almost same power, but it displays almost double size image. For g2, it won't worth the lost of quality.
The issue is, since LCD will display it on its physical resolution(there is no other way), your image quality will be far worse than the down sampled version. For example, if you render the sceen at 720p, and show it on a 720p 5.2" display, you will lose ~%55 of your data, but since you render your source on this resolution, will be sharp, just won't have so much detail. If you display this 720p image in 1080p display however, screen resolution cannot be changed, so your screen will try to calculate the missing %55, and then show you the result. Since there is no original data, it assumes the missing pixels were like the ones around them, which means your result will be blurry.
As a side note, old tube displays does not have a resolution, they can support various resolutions. We used to set resolution to our taste between speed and detail back then.

enigmanp covered the technical aspect of it and I'll just follow up with my own personal experience.
I had a chinese android tablet running at 2048x1536 resolution, the same resolution commonly found in iPad tablets.
My Android tablet sometimes perform sluggish because of the high resolution. Even though the CPU was a quad core 1Ghz, it's still chinese and the GPU wasn't great either. So I lowered the resolution and everything was blurred and not sharp at all (due to the reasons enigmamp explained above). I DID notice an improvement in overall speed, but apps started misbehaving and it was all a huge mess.
Now the only reason I did that was because I found my tablet lacking smoothness/performance. I just don't quite see why you'd want to do that on the G2 since the CPU and GPU can clearly handle even the most intensive 3D games on high detail. Could you please explain?

vPro97 said:
Could you please explain?
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Mainly to save on battery.
enginmanap said:
Screen resolution of an lCD is a physical attribute, it cannot be changed. You can change the software to renderer the image so you would get a lower resolution data to show, and since android source is available, it is technically possible. I doubt anybody tried, because our device has a adequite computing power to generate 1080p images. On the other hand, lg g3 has almost same power, but it displays almost double size image. For g2, it won't worth the lost of quality.
The issue is, since LCD will display it on its physical resolution(there is no other way), your image quality will be far worse than the down sampled version. For example, if you render the sceen at 720p, and show it on a 720p 5.2" display, you will lose ~%55 of your data, but since you render your source on this resolution, will be sharp, just won't have so much detail. If you display this 720p image in 1080p display however, screen resolution cannot be changed, so your screen will try to calculate the missing %55, and then show you the result. Since there is no original data, it assumes the missing pixels were like the ones around them, which means your result will be blurry.
As a side note, old tube displays does not have a resolution, they can support various resolutions. We used to set resolution to our taste between speed and detail back then.
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So why it doesn't get blurry on the G3 then?

If it's to save battery, I doubt you'll see much of a change.
The GPU is working on a smaller load but most of the time it's running at 200 MHz anyway. But I'm no expert, I'm just telling what I know and what I've experienced. I'll head over to the g3 thread to read more!

Reducing the number of pixels would help you to save battery if you are using a phone with AMOLED screen, sadly it is not the case with LG G2. So even by turning the resolution down, you are using pretty much the same amount of battery as you would with full 1080p resolution.
If you want to go ahead with it anyway, there are plenty of apps on the play store which does this. Just search "resolution" in the play store and you'll find them. However I don't think this will help your battery life at all, nor do I recommend it.

Late addition
Well, when i found out this was an option i just had to tinker. I have a G2 that is my daily driver and a S6 for back up. I changed it to 900x1600 480dpi and it works just fine. The camera touch focus is a little off, but otherwise it is sooper smooth now. I also throttle the CPU down. So both together I get a good experience and decent battery life. I know this is a late response, but to anyone out there with root and some lackluster performance might want to give this a shot. I needed to reboot once to correct some keyboard skewing. I also adjusted the height of the keyboard to compensate for the change in real estate. Works like a champ, no real noticeable degradation in viewing pics or videos. I'm going to try this on my Nook Hd+. It needs a shot in the arm (no pun intended).

villain222 said:
Well, when i found out this was an option i just had to tinker. I have a G2 that is my daily driver and a S6 for back up. I changed it to 900x1600 480dpi and it works just fine. The camera touch focus is a little off, but otherwise it is sooper smooth now. I also throttle the CPU down. So both together I get a good experience and decent battery life. I know this is a late response, but to anyone out there with root and some lackluster performance might want to give this a shot. I needed to reboot once to correct some keyboard skewing. I also adjusted the height of the keyboard to compensate for the change in real estate. Works like a champ, no real noticeable degradation in viewing pics or videos. I'm going to try this on my Nook Hd+. It needs a shot in the arm (no pun intended).
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it would be nice if you share a "how to" as well
i tried lowering the resolution on my tablet and G2 with some apps from the playstore - but only thing i got was an unstable device(s)...

desertmod1 said:
I hear they lower the res from 1440 to 1080 in the G3 so is there a way to lower the screen resolution in the G2 from 1080p to 720p?
I couldn't find anything about it in search.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
download terminal
write in terminal :
su [ENTER]
wm size 720x1280 && wm density 220 [ENTER]
new density: new resolution * current dpi / old resolution ( for e.g. 720*1280*480/(1080*1920) = 213), altough i tested, and it seems that 240 is the best (for me), but it looks awful, for me, so i will go back to full hd + 410 dpi
ofc root required )
anyway, please share with us if it will be any battery life improvement

enginmanap said:
As a side note, old tube displays does not have a resolution, they can support various resolutions. We used to set resolution to our taste between speed and detail back then.
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Now I miss those glory days of correcting CRT display alignment and freedom to changes aspect ratio/resolution beyond the DAC supported rate at the expense of mild irreversible eye's retina damage. Lol. :laugh:

Clarity/resolution

The LG V60 ThinQ has a crazy crisp display. Just kidding, this is automated text so who knows if this screen is any good. So, you be the judge! A higher rating indicates that it's extremely sharp and clear, and that you cannot see pixels with your naked eye.
Then, drop a comment if you have anything to add!

Very clear. The resolution is lower than my V30, I think, but it's not noticeable to me.

I honestly don't notice the lower resolution and because of that always had my previous phones set to 1080p to save battery.
Auto brightness has been a problem though, in low light the screen throttles back to 1% far too aggressively and 1% is too dim even in a pitch black room.
Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

The larger screen size and lower resolution combine for a noticeably lower DPI count, but I happen to think that higher (than 1080p) resolutions on (relatively) smaller phone displays are mostly a waste of battery life.
YMMV, but in my experience, there comes a point where the human eye can only resolve so much and the bump in the resolution of small screen displays just becomes overkill. I'll take battery life over resolution and even refresh rate any day, though I imagine higher resolution displays with higher refresh rates will only become more efficient over time, and I'll likely change my tune eventually.
I went from the V30+ to the V60 at the beginning of this month, and I feel like the new phone is a substantial upgrade over the older one in just about all categories that matter. And that's even considering that the former was rooted and the latter can't be!
The display is crisp enough, though clearly not cutting edge. Colors look at least as good as those of the V30. Viewing angles are fantastic without any noticeable (to me) color shift. It's probably the best we could have expected knowing that the display is relatively modest compared to this phone's 20202 (and some 2019) peers. And if you're fine with that, this shouldn't stop you from considering the phone. If, however, you DO want higher resolutions and higher refresh rates, you already know this phone's not for you and that you've got multiple options.

Mejilan said:
Viewing angles are fantastic without any noticeable (to me) color shift.
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I'm seeing very drastic color shift when viewing at about 45°, more noticeable on white screens. It's a greenish yellowish shift.
Otherwise I agree with the rest of your post. 1080p is plenty resolution and I'm fine with 60Hz refresh.

Mr_Mooncatt said:
I'm seeing very drastic color shift when viewing at about 45°, more noticeable on white screens. It's a greenish yellowish shift.
Otherwise I agree with the rest of your post. 1080p is plenty resolution and I'm fine with 60Hz refresh.
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Are there display variances across production runs, or something? Because I can't seem to reproduce this fault.
I'm not TERRIBLY sensitive to such things, but from what you say, it sounds like it should be blatantly obvious to the eyes.
And I don't suffer from any kind of color blindness that could possibly impact me.

Mejilan said:
Are there display variances across production runs, or something? Because I can't seem to reproduce this fault.
I'm not TERRIBLY sensitive to such things, but from what you say, it sounds like it should be blatantly obvious to the eyes.
And I don't suffer from any kind of color blindness that could possibly impact me.
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I haven't seen anyone else complain of this, so not site if it's an issue with mine specifically or what. Here's a short video I made that hopefully demonstrates the color shift.
https://youtu.be/naGHasaIjp0

Mr_Mooncatt said:
I haven't seen anyone else complain of this, so not site if it's an issue with mine specifically or what. Here's a short video I made that hopefully demonstrates the color shift.
https://youtu.be/naGHasaIjp0
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Huh. How did you get a plain white background to show up like that? (I suppose I can Google one up).
I'd like to test my phone out and see if I can get similar results.
It's a little hard to see in a YT video, but I definitely noticed SOME shift on your screen that I don't think I've ever seen on mine.
I imagine the effect is even more noticeable in real life, with the phone right in front of you.

Mejilan said:
Huh. How did you get a plain white background to show up like that? (I suppose I can Google one up).
I'd like to test my phone out and see if I can get similar results.
It's a little hard to see in a YT video, but I definitely noticed SOME shift on your screen that I don't think I've ever seen on mine.
I imagine the effect is even more noticeable in real life, with the phone right in front of you.
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I use this app.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iudesk.android.photo.editor
It's a photo editing app, but you can start a new image from scratch and select a background color. I set it to pure white, then zoomed in on it to fill the screen. It's definitely easier to see in person. I tried using by wife's Note 9 for the video, but I couldn't select a better refresh rate on it to prevent the banding.

Mr_Mooncatt said:
I use this app.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iudesk.android.photo.editor
It's a photo editing app, but you can start a new image from scratch and select a background color. I set it to pure white, then zoomed in on it to fill the screen. It's definitely easier to see in person. I tried using by wife's Note 9 for the video, but I couldn't select a better refresh rate on it to prevent the banding.
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I tried it out, and while I did notice a dimming or darkening of the white background at extreme tilts, I figure that's normal.
Doesn't quite look like what your YT video shows, but I'm not sure if that's down to the difference between watching a YT video of something and watching it yourself directly.

I've had the V30 and now this and I'm as happy with the screen on this one as I was with the V30. I couldn't care about the refresh rate. It's not like I'm watching a 60" screen. Overall it's a very good screen.

Mr_Mooncatt said:
I'm seeing very drastic color shift when viewing at about 45°, more noticeable on white screens. It's a greenish yellowish shift.
Otherwise I agree with the rest of your post. 1080p is plenty resolution and I'm fine with 60Hz refresh.
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I pissed that it's 1080P, however, people who say a 90+ refresh rate is noticeable is just experiencing placebo.
The human eye will never notice that.
Sent from my LG-H932 using XDA Labs

BROKEN1981 said:
I pissed that it's 1080P, however, people who say a 90+ refresh rate is noticeable is just experiencing placebo.
The human eye will never notice that.
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I've had higher resolution screens, and I can tell no difference between them and 1080p. Even 720p is hard to notice a difference.
When it comes to refresh rates, most people see a noticeable difference between 60Hz and 90Hz. My last phone was selectable between those two and 120Hz, and I couldn't tell a difference between 90Hz and 120Hz.

I can see the difference in resolution between the V30 and V60, it's just that 1080p on a phone doesn't bother me.
It falls in my "good enough" range. These aren't 55+ inch television displays, after all.
I also can definitely see the difference between a 60 Hz refresh rate vs a 90 Hz or 120 Hz refresh display.

my problem is with notifications in the top pull down... its virtually useless in landscape mode...