[deadcowboy]

Here's a weird thing I've got going on since I switched from the iPhone 5 to the Q10. I've been getting headaches and eyestrain from using the phone (and for shorter periods of time on average, at that).

I'm convinced this has something to do with the Q10's pixel arrangement. Has anyone noticed that horizontal lines have these little teeth on the edges? Every hard line looks as though it has a zippered edge. It's as if the pixel arrangement is arranged in a diamond pattern instead of a standard square pattern. It's really quite odd.

The other issue is that the Q10's screen does not sufficiently dim at nighttime compared to other phones (including the Z30). This is a little more obvious.

Has anyone else noticed the pixel issues, before?

[Thalestr]

Yes the Q10 uses a pentile pixel matrix which means it looks less smooth even at high PPI. In the Amoled display world, the pentile arrangement isn't ranked very highly.

Posted via Z10

[jojon2se]

What you are seeing is indeed the diamond pattern of one of the varieties of "pentile" subpixel layouts.

These types of screens use only half as many red and blue pixel elements as the advertised resolution would suggest, with every pixel having its own green one, but sharing the other two primaries with its neighbours.

Why do this? -Because blue OLEDs do not (yet) have as long a lifespan as green ones - this trick allows the manifacturers to juggle pixel intensity and surface areas, to make them last as long as possible, by firing them slightly dimmer.

The theory is kind of sound: The human eye has significantly higher density of green cones than the other two - especially blue, so it is more important that they are provided a high resolution image than the other two -- video compression ,too, keeps much less detail in colour space than in lumiance.
In practice, however, most people find pentile screens fuzzy and jaggy, as you describe, because while we are indeed less sensitive to blue, the screens are just too far from reaching what we can resolve -- it also does not help that much computer graphics is drawn orthographically -- its a little bit less disturbing with natural "rounded" imagery -- had we drawn more triangles it might have looked better. :7

The Z30 has a full RGB strip OLED, though, albeit of the zig-zagging kind, I believe.

[deadcowboy]

Thank you so much for this information. Really fascinating. I'll check in with the Z30 crowd about this, but I may as well ask here: so the Z30 has this pentile pixel arrangement as well (despite having full RGB subpixel sets 2,1,1 I'm guessing)?

EDIT:
Nvm, found this in a review at http://www.phonearena.com/reviews/Bl...Review_id3452:

2) AMOLED Screen - While it may be enough to say that it's better than say, the Z10's, I think it's worth noting the tech involved. The Z30 screen uses an S-Stripe matrix (just like the Moto X), which means that it ditches the Pentile display prevalent in so many AMOLED screens. It's a definite improvement over AMOLEDs found in the Galaxy S3, Q10, and Lumia 925.

So I think I may be ditching my Q for a Z30 until the Q20 is released (hopefully non-pentile). I did my first search, and found one thread that mentioned headaches with high-dpi pentile displays on Android phones. See if it helps anyway.

Thanks again, guys. Could not have found this information without the help.

[CarGuy1368]

I got headaches when I went from my BlackBerry Bold 9900 to my Q10. I see the jagged edges that you describe too. However, after the first few days of owning the phone, I got used to the display and the headaches stopped.

Posted via the super amazing BlackBerry Q10

[Bluenoser63]

Here's a weird thing I've got going on since I switched from the iPhone 5 to the Q10. I've been getting headaches and eyestrain from using the phone (and for shorter periods of time on average, at that).

I'm convinced this has something to do with the Q10's pixel arrangement. Has anyone noticed that horizontal lines have these little teeth on the edges? Every hard line looks as though it has a zippered edge. It's as if the pixel arrangement is arranged in a diamond pattern instead of a standard square pattern. It's really quite odd.

The other issue is that the Q10's screen does not sufficiently dim at nighttime compared to other phones (including the Z30). This is a little more obvious.

Has anyone else noticed the pixel issues, before?

How close (in inches) are you reading your screen from your eye?

[deadcowboy]

How close (in inches) are you reading your screen from your eye?

I've had the phone since June, and I've had these headaches off and on (but never this bad). I have a migraine right now, so I'm trying to figure it out (and I've found extended Q10 use has coincided with symptoms--Bardbarian is the first game that has glued me to the screen).

Phone use is always around a foot from my face.

Anyway, just talked to Verizon. $64 trade-in for a Q10 (that was just replaced for a bad keyboard). $500 for a Z30. So I'm trying to get this figured, today.