Database Develop

Nexus one screen: color and white shadow

Does anyone experience a "white shadow" problem on n1's screen?
when i read a document, i notice the margin area is not purely white, but there's "shadow" of text on the right
is this a amoled limitation of is it just me?
I will try to take photo if the explanation is not clear enough
another issue is that i've always found the n1's screen color to have a red hue
same for this, is it just me or do you have similar experiences?

Hey, no red hue but i do sometimes have a 'white shadow effect' which i notice looking at text, such as reading an email [not 100% sure if this is same problem as yours tho].
i was worried that this might be a problem with the screen but its just a fingerprint issue - all you need to do is wipe the screen!!
the finger prints left on the screen were what caused my white shadow, wipe the screen clean and all the text is evenly black.
magic

I have also seen this phenomenon, specifically in the web browser when there is a white background with back text. It doesn't happen all the time, but its fairly visable when it does. Perhaps this is a defective amoled screen issue? Or maybe just amoled screen artifacts.... not sure. Anyone else seen this?
Also this isn't a fingerprint issue, happens on perfectly clean screen.

I have the odd ghost shadows when reading black text on a white background too.

boxmander said:
I have also seen this phenomenon, specifically in the web browser when there is a white background with back text. It doesn't happen all the time, but its fairly visable when it does. Perhaps this is a defective amoled screen issue? Or maybe just amoled screen artifacts.... not sure. Anyone else seen this?
Also this isn't a fingerprint issue, happens on perfectly clean screen.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I see this too. I just chalked it up to a byproduct of AMOLED screens or something. Doesn't really bother me and I don't really notice it that much either.

boxmander said:
I have also seen this phenomenon, specifically in the web browser when there is a white background with back text. It doesn't happen all the time, but its fairly visable when it does. Perhaps this is a defective amoled screen issue? Or maybe just amoled screen artifacts.... not sure. Anyone else seen this?
Also this isn't a fingerprint issue, happens on perfectly clean screen.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
hmm that's strange because i do sometimes have exactly the same problem and can see the problem disappear as i wipe the screen. From my limited knowledge about amoled screens it seems unlikely that the pixels could be experiencing some sort of 'come and go' problem such as this. If someone could put up a picture...

Well for the record this is a very minor issue, I like my N1 a lot, its hardly noticeable. However I am interested in investigating it, and attempting to take pictures of the effect was well, less then fruitful.
It turns out my digital camera doesn't take pictures up close that well, its actually pretty terrible. I was trying to get a screen shot app to try to capture it but the ones on the market are only for root users, and I haven't made the plunge into root, yet.

kiddyfurby said:
another issue is that i've always found the n1's screen color to have a red hue
same for this, is it just me or do you have similar experiences?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have this problem and it's very off-putting.
Does anyone know if it's theoretically possible to calibrate the screen à la a computer monitor to reduce this reddish casting? In greyscale photos all shades have a very noticeable pink tone (not photos taken by the phone's camera).

I'm giving this thread a kick, because I also experience this 'problem' of having (faint but clearly visible) ghost lines or 'white shadow' when viewing small text/objects (Nexus One), especially noticeable in the browser. The weird thing is, it completely disappears when switching to landscape mode. Turning the brightness down worsens the phenomenon.
It is also reported at Google's Android support, sadly I can't report the link because of my newbie restrictions I also found one report of the Desire having this problem.
I would ask felow Nexus owners if they want to turn down their brightness and report if they also see this ghosting in portrait view (i.e. when viewing an article on nytimes.com fully zoomed out), so we can conclude if this is an insoluble AMOLED related issue or an actual screen defect of your phone (RMA/waranty-issue).

I have the text ghost image on white background. I thought it was software issue, but since it disappears in landscape view that might mean its a limitation of the pentile sub pixel layout.

I think this should explain it. It's not really the AMOLED, but how the "pixels" are actually laid out.
arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/secrets-of-the-nexus-ones-screen-science-color-and-hacks.ars

I read that this issue doesn't occur in the old Dolphin browser. I don't have my phone with me right now. Can someone try it? I doubt it has anything to do with the pentile subpixel arrangement. I mean if the part of the screen is supposed to be white, the pixel should display white, not grey. Probably a software issue, IMO.

I just checked, shadows on both. It's a screen thing.

My bad. You weren't using the Dolphin HD browser, were you?

Thank for your replies I don't think it is the browser though, the same problem persists in Gmail, Adobe PDF Reader and Documents togo, I suggest you use one of these applications to look at small text on low brightness. It might be a little more noticeable in de browser, but looks like it isn't a pure software issue. Can you confirm this finding?
@voiceunebunu: yes, I've read that, but that article concentrates on text fuzziness etc. because of the PenTile arrangement, but does not mention this 'ghosting-like' effect.
Of course this isn't such a 'big deal': I would rather have my screen calibrated so it doesn't show up al reddish and get a better screen view in daylight, but hey, I knew about those problems before I bought the Nexus, but this one seams to be very sparsely documented on the internet.
This effect reminds me of the first, monochrome LCD-displays, which also had this problem (only 100x times worse), especially if they grew older.

Possible work around?
Hi everyone,
I've found a work around for this!
Cyanogen 6 has a feature called "Render effect" and basically, there are options to change what and how colours are displayed.
The last three "calibrated" seem to be for the Nexus specifically. I've used all three and the "calibrated" and "calibrated (cool)" are my favourite. Both slightly change the colour output.
There is a slight yellow tint over whites. For my screen the ghost lines are greatly reduced (it used to be visible with normal size text and exceptionally bad when zoomed out). Now its only slightly visible when zoomed out!
Hope that helps!

Nexus One Gallery Issues?

Hello, whevever I try to put a wallpaper from my storage card via gallery or file explorer, Andriod forces me to crop the picture. It will only go crop to a max size of about 1/3 of the picture making the end result blurry. How can I turn this off or be able to select the wallpaper without cropping it? Sorry if this gets asked often but, i've been searching for a while now with no solution.... Thanks in advace!

PurpleSmurfLlama said:
Hello, whevever I try to put a wallpaper from my storage card via gallery or file explorer, Andriod forces me to crop the picture. It will only go crop to a max size of about 1/3 of the picture making the end result blurry. How can I turn this off or be able to select the wallpaper without cropping it? Sorry if this gets asked often but, i've been searching for a while now with no solution.... Thanks in advace!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Size them appropriately and use a png format before putting them on the phone.

All of them are in WVGA res. Most are also png.

PurpleSmurfLlama said:
All of them are in WVGA res. Most are also png.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Your home screen is WVGA resolution "per screenful". Given that you have 5 screens side by side, it actually needs a wallpaper that is wider than a single screen. Google it and you will find a lot of wallpapers for the N1 that are 960x800 so it looks like you need a wallpaper that is sized to be twice as wide as the portrait WVGA size...

I think I had a similar issue, and I couldn't find any mention of it.
It might be you are having the same problem.
That box you see when selecting a wallpaper is resizable. I had no idea at first, I only moved it around. It should be documented somewhere, but it isn't.
Press and drag near one of the borders of the box. Then you can expand it to the whole image.
If you already know of this, then just ignore me. But I was shocked to find out

Clarkster said:
I think I had a similar issue, and I couldn't find any mention of it.
It might be you are having the same problem.
That box you see when selecting a wallpaper is resizable. I had no idea at first, I only moved it around. It should be documented somewhere, but it isn't.
Press and drag near one of the borders of the box. Then you can expand it to the whole image.
If you already know of this, then just ignore me. But I was shocked to find out
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
lol, I could see how that would make a difference

Clarkster said:
I think I had a similar issue, and I couldn't find any mention of it.
It might be you are having the same problem.
That box you see when selecting a wallpaper is resizable. I had no idea at first, I only moved it around. It should be documented somewhere, but it isn't.
Press and drag near one of the borders of the box. Then you can expand it to the whole image.
If you already know of this, then just ignore me. But I was shocked to find out
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes this is my issue, but.... the picture cropper will only go the entire width of the photo but not the entire height. Hence, 1/3 of the picture.I do understand it's resizeable.

PurpleSmurfLlama said:
Yes this is my issue, but.... the picture cropper will only go the entire width of the photo but not the entire height. Hence, 1/3 of the picture.I do understand it's resizeable.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's to maintain the proper aspect ratio (800 high by 960 wide, I believe) to allow the background to scroll.
You might be able to find a third-party gallery app that would allow you to set a "portrait" sized wallpaper, but I don't believe that is a feature of the current Gallery.

Alright, well I do have some pictures that are 1200x1600 somewhere on my SD card. Just no where near as much as my other grahics. I have roughly 2,400 pictures total and about 2,350 of them are in WVGA res.... So this is a MAJOR inconvience.

PurpleSmurfLlama said:
Yes this is my issue, but.... the picture cropper will only go the entire width of the photo but not the entire height. Hence, 1/3 of the picture.I do understand it's resizeable.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ok, I see. Then like mentioned before, your images are not the correct size. Since the Android scrolls the wallapper as you slide from screen to screen it needs to be much wider.
The Nexus is 480x800. But the wallpaper needs to be 960x800.

Yes, but you see.... I'm using LauncherPro, and it gives me the option to stop the wallpapers from moving sideways when scrolling screens. Therefore, I only need them in WVGA resolution. It's not like the picture is going to be strectched because it will always stay in place. If only this option was able to be turned off.....

Wallpaper resolution

I've noticed poor quality of some images used for wallpapers and think I may understand why. Our phone's resolution is 320x480 but when you use a launcher with "x" number of screens, you seemingly need to multiply 320 by "x", since the image is stretched across screens.
Is that correct ?

From my understanding, you use the 320 x 480 for lock screen images and 640 x 480 for the Wallpapers. If it is any bigger than that, it won't do a lot of good because the Wallpaper selector only lets you use that much. Otherwise, let's say you have a 1024 x 768 picture or whatever, once you select that to use, it will give you a box that you have to expand to cover the picture. It will not expand large enough to encompass this, but rather will just do as much as it can and create more of a zoom in effect for your selection. This would also probably result in less than desireable picture quality.

the wall paper is not stretched to fit a specific number of screens......... the wall paper remains at 640......... the number of screens simply changes the distance of travel across the wallpaper....... this is why the wallpaper overlaps from screen to screen........ you do not see an entirely new portion of the wallpaper on each screen...... the amount of overlap changes with the number of screens
640 wide on a 3 screen layout..... main sees 160-480... left sees 0-320.... right sees 320-640
640 wide on 5 screen layout...... main sees 160-480... far left sees 0-320... near left sees 80-400.... near right sees 240-560..... far right sees 320-640
hope that clarifies it a little bit

copestag said:
the wall paper is not stretched to fit a specific number of screens......... the wall paper remains at 640......... the number of screens simply changes the distance of travel across the wallpaper....... this is why the wallpaper overlaps from screen to screen........ you do not see an entirely new portion of the wallpaper on each screen...... the amount of overlap changes with the number of screens
hope that clarifies it a little bit
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ahhh, that does make sense and I do recall seeing "overlap", like you suggest.
Reasons I asked was that I had used a black-carbon-fiber wallpaper that appeared to be zoomed on the phone. It was pixellated and poor quality. When I look at it in the Gallery or on my PC though, it's nice looking. Also, I had downloaded a few wallpapers that were in fact 640x480, so silly me re-sized them to 320x480, then was disappointed in how they looked.
I do still wish it had the ability to down-size pics as needed. It could still use the selection rectangle to select what part of the image to use.

[Q] Faulty screen?

I have a question about the screen on the SGS, i just got one and when i look closely on the screen I see small dots. Kind of like a chessboard feeling, I noted it first when I looked closely at the "Application" ikon in the bottom right corner. The four white fields look almost like small chessboards except that the "black" squares are more grayish and not black as in a real chessboard .
I'm wondering if my screen is somehow faulty or if it is supposed to look like that?

Jac_83 said:
I have a question about the screen on the SGS, i just got one and when i look closely on the screen I see small dots. Kind of like a chessboard feeling, I noted it first when I looked closely at the "Application" ikon in the bottom right corner. The four white fields look almost like small chessboards except that the "black" squares are more grayish and not black as in a real chessboard .
I'm wondering if my screen is somehow faulty or if it is supposed to look like that?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try to do a screen test. Type in the phone (*#0*#)

okey, what am I looking for in the screentest, I have done that before, as I recall there are just at series of color test, the pattern im speaking of is on the whole screen, almost as if it was low resolution or something, I saw some information on a thread about this, but I cant find it anymore.

Bring it to a service center/phone shop, compare it to whatever display models they have? If you see a difference, you can turn it in on the spot

Jac_83 said:
okey, what am I looking for in the screentest, I have done that before, as I recall there are just at series of color test, the pattern im speaking of is on the whole screen, almost as if it was low resolution or something, I saw some information on a thread about this, but I cant find it anymore.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can you do a pic of it?...

Jac_83 said:
I have a question about the screen on the SGS, i just got one and when i look closely on the screen I see small dots. Kind of like a chessboard feeling, I noted it first when I looked closely at the "Application" ikon in the bottom right corner. The four white fields look almost like small chessboards except that the "black" squares are more grayish and not black as in a real chessboard .
I'm wondering if my screen is somehow faulty or if it is supposed to look like that?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's called the pentile effect. Just google pentile. Its how it is there is nothing you can be about it, although from a normal distace you can't see it. Its most visible on gray i think.

bcam117 said:
That's called the pentile effect. Just google pentile. Its how it is there is nothing you can be about it, although from a normal distace you can't see it. Its most visible on gray i think.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Listen to this guy.
Samsung used a pentile matrix (one pixel now consists of 5 sub pixels - 2 small red, 2 small green and 1 large blue) for some strange reason. I'm only taking a guess here but I figure it has something to do with the way OLED screens degrade. Blue degrades the fastest so I guess it makes sense to have it the largest as it will then have more "say" in the colors that are made. This is the same reason people complain that their screen is blue when it's supposed to be white. It is this same layout that makes the grid pattern and text harder to read than retina displays.

Thank you for the information, I was worried that i had some "resolution" issue. And true enough at normal distance it's no issue. I only noticed it while comparing some stuff to a friends iPhone4.
I have a buddy with a SGS, gonna compare to his "just in case".
I've heard people talk about dithering so I thought I might as well ask, for example while starting the samsung app the blueish background image is indeed dithered on my device, is that normal? Also when playing a video (stock player) the menu where you can scroll consist of lines of gray instead of being smoothly gradient.

i have this gradient issue either. there are steps in color gradient, is this normal??
for example when u look at the grey parts of the battery when ure charging the phone while it's off. or the samsung apps loading screen. and many more...

Does anyone have the straight poop on wallpaper for HC?

I am having trouble with using custom wallpaper and need some input from you fine people. I understand our tab has a resolution of 1024X600 so plain, dumb redneck logic tells me a wallpaper image of that size will fill the screen perfectly and completely. However, that is not the case apparently.
If I put a 1024X600 image on the tab and select it as wallpaper, I am presented with a photo-cropping interface that FORCES me to crop the picture. OK, no biggie, it is high-quality at 300dpi, so I do that and it includes the whole picture I want displayed.
The problem comes when you actually go back to the home screen, the picture has been blown up so damn large that it only shows a small piece of the image.
Does anybody have any real specs on what format the wallaper needs to be in?

I've searched forever regarding this as well...and can't find a straigt answer. What's strange to me is that if you click on a picture on the web, and select set as wallpaper, it will be formatted relatively accurately (there's a little cropping, but not much) if you save the same photo, and set it as wallpaper through the setup screen, it's all zoomed in and cropped horribly.
I've used an app called Wallaby to set wallpapers. you can tell it to NOT resize the image you select, and it works OK.
Basically, what I've found is that even though the resolution is 1024X640, you actually need an image that's more line 1024 wide by 1920...the reason for this is that when you are presented with the "crop" screen, you select a box, but it will only actually show the top 1/3rd of that box as your wallpaper. If you make the box smaller, it will select the top 1/3rd AND zoom in. the odd part for my is that the box is not axis specific...you are only able to crop vertically AND horizontally, not one or the other.
If you pull out a wallpaper image from a rom, you'll see that it's REALLY tall, and the bottom 2/3rds are pretty much blank...that's how it needs to be made in order to look right on the tablet.
so, if you can locate an image that's 1024X1920, it will not zoom in, but it will only show the top 1/3rd of the image on the screen as wallpaper...

Hit up the market for MultiPicture Live Wallpaper. Free app. Easiest way to get the most of your wallpapers back in landscape. Most of the current versions of android are based around Portrait orientation so it crops to fit across a few smaller windows.
For those with newer devices that are landscape oriented, we get screwed. lol But, gladly this app is free to get what you need done at the very least. Has some other interesting features too, need be, but a lot are paid features, I think.
Hope this helps.

Flick ur pics from the market does a really fine job also.
Sent fom my OC'd CM7 gTablet

theclassicalgod said:
Hit up the market for MultiPicture Live Wallpaper. Free app. Easiest way to get the most of your wallpapers back in landscape. Most of the current versions of android are based around Portrait orientation so it crops to fit across a few smaller windows.
For those with newer devices that are landscape oriented, we get screwed. lol But, gladly this app is free to get what you need done at the very least. Has some other interesting features too, need be, but a lot are paid features, I think.
Hope this helps.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I actually have had multi-picture live since I first got the tab. It does something very strange with BoS. Multi-picture provides for screens 1-7 but the device shows screens 8-14 so it won't even configure correctly at all. I am sure it is the difference in res for screen.
Actually, I have been able to get both 1024X1024 and 1024X600 images to work with the regular wallpaper chooser. The problem comes after waking it up from sleep, the image is borked.
Tried Wallaby - absolutely worthless for me. Wallpaper Wizardrii is ok, but still difficult to work with.