many of the comments blame the android 2.1 gallery app as the culprit for the color banding issues.
Anyways, I didnt buy the nexus one for taking serious photos or even looking at photos. Thats what my digital camera and computer are for. As for the display being 16-bit, big deal. The resolution is still great, and the colors are crisp and vibrant.
I took a look at that NASA picture and it looks smooth without any banding. I don't know about the color banding you posted above, but this is all suspect. Probably someone doing sloppy testing and/or biased.
I just went through my entire gallery, followed by looking at the very images they posted.
There is banding, but only if you really are looking for it. I have quite a few images where I took a picture in a dark environment, with flash on, and I really have to look to see the banding. This was a poorly performed and frankly, inaccurate test and and illegitimate, flame baiting article. I'm noticing Gizmodo seems to be more and more threatened by android and google, and post more and more anti-Android/Google content. What a joke.
I just went through my entire gallery, followed by looking at the very images they posted.
There is banding, but only if you really are looking for it. I have quite a few images where I took a picture in a dark environment, with flash on, and I really have to look to see the banding. This was a poorly performed and frankly, inaccurate test and and illegitimate, flame baiting article. I'm noticing Gizmodo seems to be more and more threatened by android and google, and post more and more anti-Android/Google content. What a joke.
Its my fault for attributing this article to Gizmodo, the actual article comes from displaymate.com
I dont think displaymate has an aint-android bias, but thats up for you to decide. Their test seems pretty straight forward to me.
I am a photog enthusiast and I hate color-banding, this issue is of importance to me as a potential purchaser of this phone. If your pictures look fine to you then no big deal. Be happy with your phone, you have good reason to.
You dont have to "defend" your Nexus purchase, I am just looking for some info from people who have the phone. Especially those who display photos on the N1 taken with higher end camera i.e. DLSR or highend P&S.
Last edited by kilofox; February 22nd, 2010 at 03:18 PM.
I dont think displaymate has an aint-android bias, but thats up for you to decide. Their test seems pretty straight forward to me.
I am a photog enthusiast and I hate color-banding, this issue is of importance to me as a potential purchaser of this phone. If your pictures look fine to you then no big deal. Be happy with your phone, you have good reason to.
You dont have to "defend" your Nexus purchase, I am just looking for some info from people who have the phone. Especially those who display photos on the N1 taken with higher end camera i.e. DLSR or highend P&S.
I'm not sure what app they used to view their images but keep in mind that there's been a lot of talk about the Gallery.app not rendering pictures correctly. I viewed that sunset on mars picture through the browser and I don't see any of they banding they showed. I also went to this site and viewed that gradient image and you can barely barely make out some really thin lines.
If you haven't seen a Nexus One screen in person yet it's all the convincing you'll need. Every single person that I've shown my phone to is amazed at how amazing the screen looks, most of them being iphone owners.
No lie, that kinda sucks. You'd think it would be Google to hold back all the stops and make the most kick ass phone... but they cut corners too--do no evil... pssh.
If you read through those Gizmodo comments you'll see how many Nexus One owners aren't seeing anything close to what that site shows. I'm sure Gizmodo has some N1's of their own that they could easily test it with, but instead they just show the results of someone else without trying anything on their own.
I'm not trying to defend the N1 or anything but what they show just isn't what most people are reporting. I noticed then viewing that gradient image in the browser that when you touch screen to scroll or zoom the image becomes "banded" but then once you let go it fully renders the image correctly; I don't know why it does this, maybe to make scrolling and zooming smoother?
I dont think displaymate has an aint-android bias, but thats up for you to decide. Their test seems pretty straight forward to me.
I am a photog enthusiast and I hate color-banding, this issue is of importance to me as a potential purchaser of this phone. If your pictures look fine to you then no big deal. Be happy with your phone, you have good reason to.
You dont have to "defend" your Nexus purchase, I am just looking for some info from people who have the phone. Especially those who display photos on the N1 taken with higher end camera i.e. DLSR or highend P&S.
I'm defending nothing. I'm giving you the straight facts: My phone is a Nexus One, and it doesn't have banding at even a fraction of that level. Not even close. I don't know if Displaymate has a bias, but that poorly performed test certainly doesn't make me think they are pro-android, and Gizmodo has a very obvious bias.
Regardless, based off of what I am looking at right now, I'm inclined to think they either they had a bad model, performed an illegitmate test for intentionally bad results, or simply did a piss poor job of a test on accident.
I'm defending nothing. I'm giving you the straight facts: My phone is a Nexus One, and it doesn't have banding at even a fraction of that level. Not even close. I don't know if Displaymate has a bias, but that poorly performed test certainly doesn't make me think they are pro-android, and Gizmodo has a very obvious bias.
Regardless, based off of what I am looking at right now, I'm inclined to think they either they had a bad model, performed an illegitmate test for intentionally bad results, or simply did a piss poor job of a test on accident.
Besides owning a Nexus, what is your background that qualifies you to determine that Displaymate performed a poor test?
Besides owning a Nexus, what is your background that qualifies you to determine that Displaymate performed a poor test?
I have none, and I'm not going to pretend I have any. I'm simply a nexus one user who just compared the results and noticed theirs are vastly different from mine.
Incidentally, if you want to see a bit of proof: Their shot My shot, heres all the way zoomed out and landscape and zoomed in(I just went through the really silly and overly long method of taking screenshots on an android)
I've now gone so far as to supply evidence. What did they do different that made their results so horrible?
EDIT: I'm hearing a bit about how they were using the default browser and gallery. I'll post comparisons later, when I get back from work. Dunno how that will turn out.
Last edited by semianonymous; February 22nd, 2010 at 04:42 PM.
iPhone is so washed out in color compared to Nexus. If you want to show how vibrant and beautiful your pictures are, use the Nexus.
Both images taken with the phones at 100% brightness. Picture taken with a Canon 5D Mark II with EF 24-70mm 2.8F L USM lens. Can go to my links and download the original 21 megapixels image.
@inspiron: You're right. So then the question is, are they writing their own android app for displaying these images? If so then it's probably their own fault they're not rendering properly.
Just checked Gizmodo's site again right now, the first picture in their post they said they took themselves by viewing that rgb gradient in the browser.
They defiantly are not using the photo gallery to display the image. The menu bar on the top does not display when go into the photo gallery.
If you want to see for yourself the "horrible" banding, just download UberColorPicer Demo from the market. You will see how smooth gradients are rendered from the N1. Not from some jpg bitmap images Displaymate uses.
Last edited by eriku16; February 22nd, 2010 at 06:44 PM.
(I just went through the really silly and overly long method of taking screenshots on an android)
Your test is invalid. You can't take a screenshot using software and expect to see display artifacts!
For illustration, you could take a screenshot while you use a black and white monitor, and the screenshot could still come out as full color. (It depends on when in the rendering stack the video data was extracted.)
The screenshot will contain the raw data that is meant to be displayed before the display processor optimizes it for display on the particular screen that is being used. The raw data will contain simple data like "make this pixel 100% white". The display processor on the N1 has to interpret that for the PenTile arrangement of pixles, where no single pixel is even capable of making itself white. Each pixel has to borrow either red or blue from a neighboring pixel in order to display white.
So get out a good digital camera and take a real picture please!
Hopefully this will make Google fix that ugly mess.
BUT
As with the touch screen test there full of crap and having tests done by morons.
Pic from left to right
nasa pic , n1 gallery , BnB gallery.
Taken with my cam so the AF beam may have skewed some of the res, but the quality of the BnB gallery is much much better then default gallery and in no way has the banding shown above.
OLED Displays (and AMOLED Displays) are inherently High-Definition displays. Technical specifications found all over the web show that all AMOLED Displays have a higher luminescence, higher contrast ratio and are all made to display "True Colors".
You can find this information with minimal searching and effort, so reports of this nature (and I take everything from Gizmod with a grain (or 50) of salt) are over stated and to just get ratings, page views and freak out the competition.
As stated in this thread already, this really just amounts to a software/OS issue.
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I took a look at that NASA picture and it looks smooth without any banding. I don't know about the color banding you posted above, but this is all suspect. Probably someone doing sloppy testing and/or biased.
I also took a look at the Mars Sunset photo and it looks smooth without any banding... in fact it looked better than the iPhone photo they showed on that web page. Maybe it's just me, but my screen looks better in all instances than my sister's iPhone, camera, web, games, etc.
Re: The Nexus One's Dirty Display Secret - 16 Bit Color
the gallery app is appalling, it drops t the resolution and the quality of the pictures when viewed. Luckily they are fine on your PC.
one thing I haver noted with the N1 screen is that it doesn't appear to be a square grid of pixels but more a hexagon arrangement. This is highlighted by single pixel width lines in apps displaying as a tiny ring of beads. I am wondering whether this unusual pixel alignment had anything to do with the artifacts some people are seeing?
I submit that there is banding in the iPhone image also. In fact the bands appear broader, which would imply a lower pixel depth. That said, they are less distinct, which would seem to imply rendering faults in the iPhone rather than the N1. The bands are more apparent towards the left half of the image. I am referring to the image pair on the linked site, BTW.
Also, a 3.7" mobile device doesn't render as well as a studio monitor which probably costs 2x as much? OMGWTF??
Well I've just viewed this image on my Hero screen (which is limited to 16k colour due to android 1.5) and it looks smooth as it does on my PC so even if it was 16-bit screen, it wouldn't look as bad as it does in their photos
If so, thanks. I will certainly add the N1 to my list of next phone candidates.
I think that's the consensus. I don't see this on my N1 either.
I looked at that Gizmodo page on my N1, and their comparison images looked different. If the N1 was the problem, shouldn't the two images look the same when viewed on the phone?
Yeah it's the crappy Gallery app. Also, the browser compresses images. I took an image of a sunset in the browser that had those awful "bands," downloaded it, then viewed it in Multi-Touch Gallery for Droid: no banding.
The camera app will also show high res uncompressed images, unlike the gallery.
I can't believe that any site called displaymate would overlook these issues before claiming the iphone is better at everything. Perhaps that was the result they wanted to find?
But I also can't believe how crappy the gallery app is. Mine thinks my SD card is empty all the time or randomly decides to rearrange the thumbnails.
THIS IS FALSE! IT IS 24-BIT. OLED will always offer better contrast, so the "washed out" display of the iPhone LCD is to be expected. However, at the end of the day, "washed out" doesn't necessarily equate to inaccuracy. In fact, in a comparison between the DROID, Nexus One and iPhone (three of the best displays on the market), using Konica Minolta CS-200 Chromameter, the DROID came out with the most accurate display (98%), with the iPhone and Nexus One being equally inaccurate (-40% and +40% of the standard color gamut, respectively).
However, what I don't agree with in the DisplayMate article is that the OLED display is "typical of a cheap display." Right now, Samsung is the most prolific manufacturer of OLED displays for mobile devices. At the production release of the N1, only Samsung had an OLED available. Is it still a new technology? Yes. Is it still in it's infancy? Yes. But is it cheap? No. It's about as good as it gets at this stage in AMOLED development. In that way, the N1/Desire got the best of what's out there as far as AMOLED (at the moment).
What's being touted now is SUPER AMOLED. This is the next generation of AMOLED that will be viewable in direct sunlight (which is another current drawback for AMOLEDs on the Omnia II, N1 and Desire). There's no news regarding how many bits of color will be available on these displays.
..
Last edited by sooper_droid12; February 23rd, 2010 at 12:06 PM.
Reason: Old data that I hadn't bothered to re-research. New data says 24-bit.
This is true and I believe one of the biggest drawbacks of the N1/Desire display. Honestly, there's no excuse for a 16-bit display on a high-end phone. The display makes up for the lack of spectrum with overly saturated colors. OLED will always offer better contrast, so the "washed out" display of the iPhone LCD is to be expected. However, at the end of the day, "washed out" doesn't necessarily equate to inaccuracy. In fact, in a comparison between the DROID, Nexus One and iPhone (three of the best displays on the market), using Konica Minolta CS-200 Chromameter, the DROID came out with the most accurate display (98%), with the iPhone and Nexus One being equally inaccurate (-40% and +40% of the standard color gamut, respectively).
However, what I don't agree with in the DisplayMate article is that the OLED display is "typical of a cheap display." Right now, Samsung is the most prolific manufacturer of OLED displays for mobile devices. At the production release of the N1, only Samsung had an OLED available. Is it still a new technology? Yes. Is it still in it's infancy? Yes. But is it cheap? No. It's about as good as it gets at this stage in AMOLED development. In that way, the N1/Desire got the best of what's out there as far as AMOLED (at the moment).
What's being touted now is SUPER AMOLED. This is the next generation of AMOLED that will be viewable in direct sunlight (which is another current drawback for AMOLEDs on the Omnia II, N1 and Desire). There's no news regarding how many bits of color will be available on these displays.
Dude, have you not been reading the posts? It's just the gallery app and the browser that are compressing the images. The display on the N1 looks better than my desktop's monitor. Seriously.
That review wreaks of iphone fanboism and propaganda... any reason to slam the Nexus One, the sites take their shots....
What I don't understand is why Dr. Soneira, with his hefty credentials went out of his way discredit the Nexus. There was no testing of other phones with AMOLED displays. It was just the N1 vs iPhone. His testing criteria was flawed and it was more like a biased fanboi comparison.
Last edited by eriku16; February 23rd, 2010 at 11:57 AM.
I retract my statement. You're right. I was going off old data from pdadb. They updated the information to include the N1 and Desire as being 24-bit displays. However, in researching the displays, I noticed that the AMOLED technology that Samsung employs is a PenTile matrix display, which is why they call it "Visual VGA," in that the actual resolution of the N1/Desire display isn't 800x480, but "appears" to the human eye as 800x480, due its use of a 2x2 sub-pixel structure. Based on an official at the company that Samsung acquired to make the AMOLED screens, he said what was important is what the human eye perceives and not what is actually there. Even so, this is likely to be why some people have noticed the N1 display to be "dotty."
Either way, I will retract my statements above. It is 24-bit.
What I don't understand is why Dr. Soneira, with his hefty credentials went out of his way discredit the Nexus. There was no testing of other phones with AMOLED displays. It was just the N1 vs iPhone. His testing criteria was flawed and it was more like a biased fanboi comparison.
Ah the "fanboi" defense.
If the Nexus Gallery is compressing images, then criticism is warranted. It is beyond me why a device with such a lovely screen would degrade pictures displayed on it.
Displaymate reviews monitors/displays of all types and brands, to inject fanboism into their reputation only reveals the true fanboi.... you.
No product is perfect... including the N1 or iPhone.
Last edited by kilofox; February 23rd, 2010 at 05:12 PM.
If the Nexus Gallery is compressing images, then criticism is warranted. It is beyond me why a device with suck a lovely screen would degrade pictures displayed on it.
Displaymate reviews monitors/displays of all types and brands, to inject fanboism into their reputation only reveals the true fanboi.... you.
No product is perfect... including the N1 or iPhone.
I don't agree or disagree with the findings; but if your are testing "Monitors/displays" shouldn't you be eliminating "software" factors?
For what it's worth, opening that pic in the browser doesn't produce that affect, so in the testing world this "test" should be invalid or viewed with some healthy skepticism (definitely would be at my company).
I don't agree or disagree with the findings; but if your are testing "Monitors/displays" shouldn't you be eliminating "software" factors?
For what it's worth, opening that pic in the browser doesn't produce that affect, so in the testing world this "test" should be invalid or viewed with some healthy skepticism (definitely would be at my company).
However they didn't use the phone's browser in their test. In the testing world you have to reproduce the test to validate the results.
A monitor is only as good as the software that drives it. And since its impossible to separate the N1 from its display... they should be considered as one.
To accuse Displaymate of fanboism or bias just because they have something critical about the N1 is a knee jerk reaction.
Long before the Nexus One launched, the media was filled with speculation, buzz, rumors, and excitement regarding the possibility of a "Google Phone". The rumors were put to rest when Google announced the Nexus One, the first ever Google ... Read More
The Nexus One's Dirty Display Secret - 16 Bit Color
