The Official HTC Desire Thread

[SiM]

(from the other thread, but regarding the desire)

For some reason the screen looks worse than my HD, side by side (small text is less clear). But I have only tested it with one web page (maybe the default android browser isn't as good as opera mobile)

Seems like I wasn't going mad. The screen on the Nexus One/HTC Desire is HUGELY flawed...

This final result of 392x653 in some sense describes the total effective addressable spatial resolution of the display, again sans signal processing. Conceptually—though this is not how the screen mapping is performed internally—you could think about this display as taking the 480x800 input image and scaling it down to 392x653 image, using subpixel positioning to reduce the apparent blurriness as much as possible.

The Droid's screen is dimmer and more washed-out than the N1's screen, but text is significantly sharper, to the point that the pixels on the Droid's screen are almost impossible to discern. I would trade resolution for some loss of color quality any day, because I look at a lot more text than photos on my phone. The fuzziness of text on the N1's display is visually distracting (at least to me), and it makes the screen much less functional when viewing zoomed-out webpages. It's also harder on the eye to read on the N1's screen, because when your eye sees something that looks fuzzy, it constantly tries harder to focus on it.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/...and-hacks.ars/

Sounds like to me that AMOLED is not good. +1 for the iphone 4

I need to decide what to do, I am leaning toward sticking with my HD for now, since web browsing is a priority for me and the desire is inferior at it! Well it renders and scrolls faster, but what use is that if you can't read the text properly!

I am surprised no one else has brought this up, because it is a huge downer for me

[AndyCr15]

I don't think anyone's brought it up, cause it's not a problem.

To be honest, I haven't read the article you link to, but many things like this have come up. There was a big arguement about shading not looking right, with banding, but then it turned out it depended on what software you use... in other words, software issue not hardware.

There are a few threads over on XDA in the Nexus forum about it. Generally it's the iPhone owners trying to stir it. My display looks awesome, as do all the Desire owners at work. I don't see any issues with text, very crisp.

[Singh400]

I haven't noticed anything odd about my screen. In fact I would say it is perfect. I was showing my Desire off today at work (pretty much standard practice now) and EVERYONE says (the first thing too) the screen is amazing.

[SiM]

I see this problem first hand on a HTC Desire right in front of me. To test it look at google news unzoomed on your desire, the text will be "dotty". On my HTC touch HD it is much more clear.

Don't get me wrong, the colours and brightness on the screen are amazing, just text clarity when zoomed out is poor.

Have you guys used an LCD 800x480 screen? Or were you coming from lower res devices?



It is hard to see in the pic above because of my crap camera, but I am not making it up, you can read the science behind the problem (the guy is not an apple fanboy and I sure as hell aren't either, search my posts containing apple hehe, been using HTC since 2005). The iphone4's 960x640 IPS screen won't have this problem... I really hope HTC come out with a higher res device soon! (should fix the text problem, even if it is AMOLED)

[Bunjiweb]

Having used the device myself a couple of times in the flesh I didn't notice this screen issue, is it definitely a device-wide issue or could it be particular batches of screens?

Anyway, It has to be better coming from a 480x320 screen on the HTC Hero...

Ben

[SiM]

Having used the device myself a couple of times in the flesh I didn't notice this screen issue, is it definitely a device-wide issue or could it be particular batches of screens?

Anyway, It has to be better coming from a 480x320 screen on the HTC Hero...

Ben

All of them have the problem, it is a limitation of these AMOLED screens, each pixel doesn't have it's own R,G and B subpixel.



The article I posted above is worth a read. Credentials of the author:

Luke Hutchison is an Android hacker and PhD candidate in computer science and computational biology at MIT CSAIL.

[SiM]

Scroll down to the Display section of this review for a good summary:
http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/th...edible-review/
(it is for the droid incredible which has the same screen too).

The other problem with the AMOLED screens is that it can't do grey properly, but I am not that bothered about that.

[MD]

MD I am so greatful to you for this, just rang O2 off my GF's phone (I'm on Orange) and asked to Order one and they were very obliging to do so, I get my Desire on Tuesday / Wednesday and paid £285 including delivery. I made sure with the guy on the phone that this does not affect my GF's contract in any way and he said that was correct, effectively I was buying a pay as you go phone that I could do what I like with.

BARGAIN!!!

Ben

Invoice is in the post

I haven't noticed anything odd about my screen. In fact I would say it is perfect. I was showing my Desire off today at work (pretty much standard practice now) and EVERYONE says (the first thing too) the screen is amazing.

The guy in the curry house last night couldn't beleive how good it was, he got out his 3GS and said its time to change.

-----------

Interestingly, I called o2 to get it insured (a VERY respectable £6 a month with £25 excess) - the lady I spoke to worked on the BB team and had just switched to iPhone - she said she'd heard good things about the desire and she went on to list all the things she didnt like about the iPhone (it wasa LONG list) but the biggest was the lack of ability to do more than one thing at once - she couldn't understand the whole popularity of the iPhone given how poor it was.

I guess when Android becomes less geeky interm of interface etc and more mainstream (maybe have different user guis for different skill sets?) it will be better...

[dangel]

Have you guys used an LCD 800x480 screen? Or were you coming from lower res devices?

My last phone (which I still have) is a touch diamond 2 - with an 800x480 screen (not only that, a small one so the pixels are very tightly packed so it's extremely sharp).

Not once have I even thought "this screen isn't as good as my TD2" and that's perhaps the best indicator that there isn't a problem (for me, anyway).

[Agent]

(from the other thread, but regarding the desire)

Seems like I wasn't going mad. The screen on the Nexus One/HTC Desire is HUGELY flawed...

Oh SiM , stop being so melodramatic after reading a few articles. This isn’t brought up because quite simply it’s not an issue. Now I’m not saying that other phones are not better in this regard, but to class this as a huge flaw is just plan silly.

You won’t ever see this in apps as they will render at a native resolution, and appear smooth and crisp for everything. Some of the very old 1.6 apps had colour issues, but I don’t know of any that haven’t been updated now. Web pages and text of that nature is slightly different, but again, has never ever been an issue for me. All this is handled brilliantly by the desire anyway – double tap on the screen the text and it will resize / scale it, so fit on there and keep the formatting perfect in 99% of cases (the best you can expect for a phone anyway).
Just to reiterate: The only time you would *ever* see any slight blurriness on text, is when you view a page that has a lot of content (like the front page of Hexus) and try to read it without zooming in…..and who the heck does that on a screen this size. Even if the res was triple what it is now, it just isn’t comfortable to read like that.

If anyone is put off by what SiM said, defo go into a store and test a phone.

[SiM]

Oh SiM , stop being so melodramatic after reading a few articles. This isn’t brought up because quite simply it’s not an issue. Now I’m not saying that other phones are not better in this regard, but to class this as a huge flaw is just plan silly.

Well I brought it up before I read the articles as it is an issue for me. I use my phone a lot to browse the internet, and the whole point of me getting a higher res device was so don't have to zoom in to make text clear - this is not the case for the desire which was evident after using the device for 2 mins (first thing I did was test google news with the browser and it looked worse than my HTC Touch HD).

Just to reiterate: The only time you would *ever* see any slight blurriness on text, is when you view a page that has a lot of content (like the front page of Hexus) and try to read it without zooming in…..and who the heck does that on a screen this size. Even if the res was triple what it is now, it just isn’t comfortable to read like that.

ME! (Well I might zoom slightly sometimes). I use minimum zoom so I can see most on a webpage at a time - it is the main way to shut up those low res iFanboys when they say "HTC Touch HD? Wtf is that?"

If anyone is put off by what SiM said, defo go into a store and test a phone.

I agree, obviously this is an issue to some and not to others. Regardless there is a problem, whether it bothers you or not, dismissing it as a non-issue is just denial (similar to the iFanboys who think 480x320 screen resolution is not worse than 800x480).

Sad thing for me is that I will probably stick with the desire, as I want to switch to android and there is no other non-AMOLED 800x480 device that is comparable

[Biscuit]

Oh SiM , stop being so melodramatic after reading a few articles. This isn’t brought up because quite simply it’s not an issue. Now I’m not saying that other phones are not better in this regard, but to class this as a huge flaw is just plan silly.

You won’t ever see this in apps as they will render at a native resolution, and appear smooth and crisp for everything. Some of the very old 1.6 apps had colour issues, but I don’t know of any that haven’t been updated now. Web pages and text of that nature is slightly different, but again, has never ever been an issue for me. All this is handled brilliantly by the desire anyway – double tap on the screen the text and it will resize / scale it, so fit on there and keep the formatting perfect in 99% of cases (the best you can expect for a phone anyway).
Just to reiterate: The only time you would *ever* see any slight blurriness on text, is when you view a page that has a lot of content (like the front page of Hexus) and try to read it without zooming in…..and who the heck does that on a screen this size. Even if the res was triple what it is now, it just isn’t comfortable to read like that.

If anyone is put off by what SiM said, defo go into a store and test a phone.

100% agreed. I can appreciate coming from the HD2 and maybe being a bit dissapointed with the lower quality of the screen however there are so many advantages to being on android over WM6.5 this tiny little flaw isnt even worth mentioning.

[SiM]

100% agreed. I can appreciate coming from the HD2 and maybe being a bit dissapointed with the lower quality of the screen however there are so many advantages to being on android over WM6.5 this tiny little flaw isnt even worth mentioning.

So you agree it is lower quality!

"Tiny flaw" is subjective... although it is not tiny for me, I will just have to learn to live with it as I want to use Android 2.X
(If only the X10 had 2.X, good build quality or HTC Sense, I wouldn't have this problem )

[AndyCr15]

I've not even noticed it (neither have probably 99% of users), so it can't be a very big flaw now can it?

[SiM]

I've not even noticed it (neither have probably 99% of users), so it can't be a very big flaw now can it?

It is subjective, 99% of users probably don't use the resolution to the full potential for web browsing, so won't notice it.

[Mossy]

I have not noticed it either....