News · 5 Dec 2010 · MTW Editorial Team
I just did some more testing and am fairly sure now that everything is rendered at 16bit throughout the OS in Windows Phone 7 (similar to WM5/6). The picture you see above shows the image found in this news posted rendered in the Android browser on the Galaxy S (left) and IE Mobile on the Samsung Omnia 7 (right). Keep in mind that both devices have exactly the same Super AMOLED panel. What is evident here is that dithering is applied to the pictures on Android. All you have to do is move the page around on the Galaxy S to see that it’s activated (the color dithering) when the page is standing still but when you scroll or pan the images will look identical to the ones rendered on the Omnia 7 in IE Mobile. So what I did next is save this particular image and then open it in the picture’s browser where I know that dithering is applied once you start zooming in:
Voila! No more nasty banding (well it isn’t all gone but it’s 10x better than before). The third picture below shows the HTC 7 Trophy thrown into the mix:
There’s some banding on the Trophy’s TFT LCD screen but it isn’t as nasty as on the Super-AMOLED (and doesn’t really show up in the picture because of the screen’s brightness sorry). So what’s the solution? Well Microsoft could easily enable dithering in the browser first. Secondly, the best solution would obviously be to have everything rendered in 24bit so applications and games won’t look like crap on Super AMOLED devices…but I guess that this is wishful thinking….
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