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?
SID 2011, the world’s leading display conference, features some new, eye-catching 10.1″ tablet displays from Samsung, as announced on Engadget, with a mind-boggling headline resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels, aka twice the resolution (and four times the number of pixels) of a conventional 1280 x 800 panel.
This is an amazing breakthrough and they should be thoroughly congratulated as should, if rumours are true, LG who are also likely set to announce something similar.
Less well-received was the news that this product would see the return of the sub-pixel layout known as Pentile: a trick where, for the sake of increasing perceived resolution and effectively shrinking the pixels, part of the colour information for each pixel is thrown away.
The OLED displays used by many HTC and Samsung handsets used this technique, resulting in many users complaining of a graininess to the screen and jagged edges on text and UI components, just like you’d see on older digital camera displays.
Digital Camera LCD screen showing jagged edges caused by RGB Delta sub-pixel layout.
Digital Cameras didn’t actually use Pentile, but often used another layout called RGB Delta, with the red, green and blue arranged in triangles. But why? Well, RGB stripe, the conventional approach for computers and smartphones, has its failings too, particularly when displaying softer, natural content like photographs. The camera makers chose RGB Delta because it was, in fact, better for displaying the pictures and that was the top priority.
So should you want a new Pentile LCD display in your next tablet computer, even if it has a high resolution? It’s clearly not a simple answer so that’s what we’re here to dig into.