Motorola have taken some of their phones and nominally upgraded the displays to raise the game towards the level set by the iPhone 4 of >300dpi.
But, as measured by DisplayMate, the original Droid series had one of the best displays in a phone ever seen, with comparably high resolution and better colour reproduction than an iPhone4 display. Was this a display in need of changing?
And has the shift to a qHD Pentile display (540×960) been worthwhile for Motorola; should you buy one?
In a word, no.
Even by my usual standards, that’s an uncharacteristically blunt answer.
But why? Surely the Droid X and Atrix / X2 use the same size screen (4.3″ diagonal) but have 518,400 pixels instead of their older brother’s 409,920 pixels. That has to be better, right?
Wrong.
In our earlier article about the new Pentile RGBG displays, we pointed out that these displays had a resolution effectively 1.41 times lower than their headline one as the patterns which your eye could see were rotated 45 degrees from the main grid and expanded.
The new displays have 1,036,800 dots whereas the old ones have 1,229,760. Hold on, they have fewer dots?! Well, how can they have more dots per inch!?
They don’t.
The purple lines on this show the outline of the pixels and the black lines show the grid made out by the sub-pixels (white in this case)
But it’s definitely a higher resolution on paper – surely this is a clear win, right?! But, hang on, how about that whole issue of the Pentile layout?
| Droid X | Atrix | Difference | |
| H pixels | 480 | 540 | +12.5% |
| V pixels | 854 | 960 | +12.5% |
| Aspect Ratio | 16:9 | 16:9 | 0 |
| Nominal DPI | 228.6 | 257.1 | +12.5% |
| Pattern resolution (subpixel -> subpixel) | 228.6 | 182.4 | -20.2% |
On paper, the Pentile qHD display is 12.5% higher resolution than the earlier display but, in reality, your eyes see patterns which make the screen look like one that has 20% lower resolution than the older display.
Furthermore, the patterns you can see are considerably worse than the patterns you can’t see are better. aka, overall, it’s worse.
So, pick a new qHD Motorola phone because it has higher light efficiency, brightness and battery life but not because it has higher resolution: it’s actually a step backwards as far as effective resolution is concerned.
Kill PenTile. Burn it with fire.