Database Users

Banding

Banding, otherwise known as contouring, is a digital artifact common to images, displays or apps of 16bit(thousands of colours) or less.
Gradient image
Viewing the 24bit image in the above link will not show banding on a 24bit display(3 x 8bit channels of R, G & B millions of colours) if viewed in a 24bit app.
If 32 distinct bands are seen, possibly with every 1/3 band being a green shade, then the screen or the image viewing application is not 24bit capable.
Viewing 16bit or lower resolution gradient images on your screen will also show banding.
The Android browser shows banding with this image while the Dolphin HD browser does not.
In short, the SGNote has a 24bit display, which will show banding if viewing 16bit or lower images or using a 16bit or lower viewing application.
More on screen bits

Im noticing lots of banding in lots of different apps :-/

Same here, also happens with Google apps like the Market. Not sure what we can do about it anybody has suggestions?

Bigmille said:
Same here, also happens with Google apps like the Market. Not sure what we can do about it anybody has suggestions?
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At least it is not the Note's display hardware that is the issue.
ICS may upgrade some Android OS apps to 24bit.

Thank You for this
This proves that Apps that display banding simply aren't rendering at 24bit.
I was leaning towards there being an issue with the screen as this problem was not noticeable on my previous android devices.
This clarifies everything.
Thanks.

qazzi76 said:
This proves that Apps that display banding simply aren't rendering at 24bit.
I was leaning towards there being an issue with the screen as this problem was not noticeable on my previous android devices.
This clarifies everything.
Thanks.
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You are welcome.
It bugged me too, until I got to the bottom of it.
Trust your eyes, the screen is glorious.

I too don't believe the hardware to be the issue. I suspect it's more to do with having a device with a smallish screen and a large 1280x800 resolution. Higher res images and videos look amazing. If the image is quite compressed (i.e. lossy) then the higher resolution screen will show this more than a low resolution screen. Garbage in, garbage out comes to mind. We need all apps and videos and images to be high resolution 24bit minimum to make the most of our amazing screen .

paulshields said:
I too don't believe the hardware to be the issue. I suspect it's more to do with having a device with a smallish screen and a large 1280x800 resolution. Higher res images and videos look amazing. If the image is quite compressed (i.e. lossy) then the higher resolution screen will show this more than a low resolution screen. Garbage in, garbage out comes to mind. We need all apps and videos and images to be high resolution 24bit minimum to make the most of our amazing screen .
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Excellent. I will put it in a drawer for a year or so then. Hopefully by then there will be some video I can watch.

seepage said:
Excellent. I will put it in a drawer for a year or so then. Hopefully by then there will be some video I can watch.
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ha ha . Listen, think of it like this. You've probably got a high resolution monitor attached to your computer. Do you prefer watching videos at 420p and lower or 720p and higher? No doubt the answer is higher resolution to match your monitor.
What Samsung has done is squeeze in a screen with similar resolution to a 13" laptop, but in a 5.3" mobile device! So we're going to come across lots of images and videos aimed at 'normal' mobile devices, which won't look so great on our high-res screen. To make the most of the screen you can copy 720p or 1080p high profile videos to your sdcard, and they will look incredible on playback, but they will also be large and it's a slow process, and if the video is long then it'll also hit the limitation with FAT max file sizes. Those issues aren't the fault of the screen though. It's simple really. If you want to make the most of the screen density then you have to provide it with good quality source material suitable for a high resolution screen.

Do you think that its just software? No hardware? Do you think that ICS will fix this?
I came from dell streak and its realy hard to watch on note specialy on dark scene.
even opening xda app it has banding problems

rockysiccion said:
Do you think that its just software? No hardware? Do you think that ICS will fix this?
I came from dell streak and its realy hard to watch on note specialy on dark scene.
even opening xda app it has banding problems
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It's definitely not a hardware issue because the screen is definitely 24bit colour. It displays well in the right app. You could swap apps for those that handle higher bit images. If you use Dolphin HD, possibly other browsers, webpages are seen in 24bit, if they are 24bit images. I don't know but there must be alternative picture viewing apps. Dice Player is a high res video viewer. As for system graphics, they don't look so bad to me. For games etc, it means living with banding until the maker upgrades? This is always the case on computers.
Be thankful Samsung have not rorted us.
Apple has ripped off it's customers many times selling lo-res screens as high res:
"Apple has received a new class action complaint alleging the MacBook
does not support millions of colors, but rather 16 bit color, which is
dithered to approximate millions of colors."
Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 16:37:17 -0500

I don't have a Note yet, but can somebody try with QuickPic, it has an option in it's settings to force decode in 32bit mode.
That could clarify if it is a software or hardware problem...

paulshields said:
ha ha . Listen, think of it like this. You've probably got a high resolution monitor attached to your computer. Do you prefer watching videos at 420p and lower or 720p and higher? No doubt the answer is higher resolution to match your monitor.
What Samsung has done is squeeze in a screen with similar resolution to a 13" laptop, but in a 5.3" mobile device! So we're going to come across lots of images and videos aimed at 'normal' mobile devices, which won't look so great on our high-res screen. To make the most of the screen you can copy 720p or 1080p high profile videos to your sdcard, and they will look incredible on playback, but they will also be large and it's a slow process, and if the video is long then it'll also hit the limitation with FAT max file sizes. Those issues aren't the fault of the screen though. It's simple really. If you want to make the most of the screen density then you have to provide it with good quality source material suitable for a high resolution screen.
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The video and photographs shot with the phone's own camera have the same problems as other video and pictures. Surely they should display OK.

Some Android apps only render in 16bit
seepage said:
The video and photographs shot with the phone's own camera have the same problems as other video and pictures. Surely they should display OK.
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The phone has a 24bit 16 million colour display.
Some apps, including the picture viewing gallery app do not display 24bit colour in the 24bit quality they were made. See here

Thanks, Xaddict, this all makes sense regarding 24- versus 16-bit rendering.
Still, shouldn't intelligent/adaptive codecs be able to bridge the chasm by re-rendering 16-bit source material into some sort of "interleaved" or "inferred" gradual gradation or gradient... a codec to "smooth" the blend, if you will.
It's a codec issue, isn't it?
I wonder if Samsung or ICS will solve this first, if ever...

It feels like the Note has the same display like the first Desire (Amoled) that I've owned.

Its been said that this is a software problem, I've never seen this fixed with a 3rd party custom ROM since the Galaxy S1 days. Even 'x' ROM still shows color banding.

Found a solution for the wallpaper. Install MultiPicture live wallpaper (free from market) Go into it's settings and select "Color depth", then select "True color (24-bit). If the image you selected and used is 24bit, there will be no banding in your wallpaper. Hope this helped, cheers

Depending on the wallpaper you'ed still see massive banding.

EarlZ said:
Depending on the wallpaper you'ed still see massive banding.
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It's not a software problem.
If anything, it's a low quality image being viewed on a 24bit screen problem.

[Q] Downscale screen resolution for more battery conserving

1080p contend is supported more often from apps because of the amount of supported devices, I wondered if downscaling the tablet's screen resolution to 1080p is supported by any rom and if it would save a few hours of extra usage to the tablet?

vodred said:
1080p contend is supported more often from apps because of the amount of supported devices, I wondered if downscaling the tablet's screen resolution to 1080p is supported by any rom and if it would save a few hours of extra usage to the tablet?
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I am no expert but I know that when you give the command to change the resolution it doesn't actually change it, it's more of a virtual/spoofing, to make the system think it's changed. So all the pixels will still be there. But when watching videos in 1080p the "upscaling" won't take much of your battery, if any at all. You won't notice it.

A digital screen only has 1 resolution. To use any alternate resolution it must be scaled to the screens native resolution so if you were to somehow force a resolution other then the native it would have to re-scale it to the native in order to display it which would require additional processing...

You could get better performance, in 3D applications for example but not better battery life.

I am asking for the SoC power consumption,logic says less effort saves more energy,current pixels to handle are about 4 million instead of the half that 1080p are
Though there might be needed optimizations as a modded kernel with different clock speeds

vodred said:
I am asking for the SoC power consumption,logic says less effort saves more energy,current pixels to handle are about 4 million instead of the half that 1080p are
Though there might be needed optimizations as a modded kernel with different clock speeds
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"Logic" that's ill-informed can be just as fallacious as a random guess. Your particular brand is working off of some very silly assumptions, and your second sentence really just highlights that. A modded kernel with different clock speeds? Please.
When you downscale an image, you have less pixels to handle only in the sense that the image becomes smaller. The actual display still requires that all of the physical pixels be addressed before it can display anything. The only reason that you see graphical performance improve in say, a computer video game when you're playing on a lower resolution is when the bottleneck is the graphics card rendering an image. If your computer is struggling with the output, then you have a different set of problems.
On a tablet, a game that's not built to the screen resolution (let's say it's designed for a 720p panel for the sake of argument) will keep load fairly light on the GPU for rendering, but the same amount of work as normal to display (although this is a simplification, it'll work for these purposes). That's because whether the content is 720p or 1080p doesn't matter-- the GPU still needs to figure out how to stretch it to the dimensions of the physical screen.
Bottom line, you're not going to save "a few hours" of usage. All the work you'd need to do normally will still be there, plus the chicanery of trying to transform all video output to 1080p again only for the physical screen to demand its normal resolution.

How do you explain the 3rd ipad (that your sighn shows you have) overheat from the SoC?The amount of retina display pixels caused it and overheat means power loss as far as I know.Anyway your ironic first setence made me loose any interest for rest of your post.

brees75 said:
You could get better performance, in 3D applications for example but not better battery life.
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This! I know I was playing Dead trigger and you can enable the advanced graphics for tegra gpus, and it was laggy, but after reducing the resolution (the game doesn't allow this, or didn't the last time I played it) the game was buttery smooth.
And no, video decoding doesn't care what resolution your screen is. It still has to decode the whole video and display all the pixels, weather they are upscaled or not. your battery won't be affected by that. Apps on the other hand, like games, are another story.

vodred said:
How do you explain the 3rd ipad (that your sighn shows you have) overheat from the SoC?The amount of retina display pixels caused it and overheat means power loss as far as I know.Anyway your ironic first setence made me loose any interest for rest of your post.
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Not sure what's worse, clueless people on a site called XDA-Developers or clueless people who refuse to listen to advice.
Whether the iPad has some kind of overheating issue is a completely different matter and can be caused by a number of things. The fact is that changing your screen's render resolution has almost no impact on your battery life. The GPU still has to upscale whatever is rendered to the Nexus 10's native resolution. The biggest drain on the battery is the display itself; it takes a lot of energy to light up a display with such a high pixel density and still be bright enough to see.

Irony is the worst of all,at least some people know what a question is as this thread is

When you ask a question you need to be able to accept an answer that isn't on your liking. You've had 5 people telling you in different ways that it won't help, if you don't want to believe us, then here you go this doesn't work on 4.3, just 4.2 and maybe earlier. You can change it and use it for a week and see for yourself. Just make sure you don't let autosuggestion cloud your judgement.

It's not the answer but some persons that give them that's not my liking

vodred said:
It's not the answer but some persons that give them that's not my liking
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Ahaha, says the new member who has demonstrated 1) that they don't know what irony is, and 2) that they have no idea how to ask for help. Hint: it's not "please validate my preconceptions." The only irony here is your reactions to the thread that you spawned.
My iPad has never overheated, or even come close, really. It's the same crowd of people who will complain any device "overheats" when they're doing something that is going to create thermal load. Newsflash: that will be just about any game or long-term video ever. The 1080p Nexus 7 gets warm under use as well-- oh wait, 1080p is some magical resolution that will fix all your woes, right?
Protip: overheating doesn't mean power loss unless your circuitry gets pushed outside of standard operating conditions and loses conductivity due to thermal deformation. On a desktop PC, it might mean power loss from running the fans up, but as mobile SoCs use passive dissipation, this is a non-starter. Heat buildup is a byproduct of using a processor to do things.

Video conversion

Just picked up this phone the other day and I'm trying to find out what the best settings would be to convert video files like movies and shows that would take advantage of the FHD screen. I tried to convert a movie and compared it to the same file that I had converted for my old phone which was the HTC Evo Lte but it seemed darker on the S5 for some reason.

casual167 said:
I'm trying to find out what the best settings would be to convert video files like movies and shows that would take advantage of the FHD screen.
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You are short on details, so we can only guess at your preferences, whether you are a demanding videophile or just want a decent rip, with minimal effort. Whether you convert on a PC or on the S5 and numerous other questions..
Since it's not at all clear what you goals are, I'll just describe what works well for me, with very good, high quality results.
Using Handbrake:
Use the Android preset, which is quite good. This defaults picture size to 720p. I have done a lot of side by side testing and while I would default to 1080p for Blueray rips intended for viewing on a projector, TV or notebook, there is no visible advantage on a 5.1" screen. As well, ripping to high standards at 1080p often exceeds 4 GB, which is problematic on the Android filesystem. Whereas 720p results in a viable 1.5 - 2.5 GB file.
Confirm that large files size is disabled. i.e. choose 32-bit chunks.
On the Video tab, choose frame rate = same as source
Preserve ad hoc subtitles, the ones that the original English movie occasionally puts on screen when someone speaks a few lines of foreign dialog. On the Subtitles tab, choose Forced only.
.

Thanks for your response. Yeah sorry, I should've been more specific in what I was trying to do. Since all my videos are currently formatted for 1280x720 on my Evo, I wanted to see if there is a conversion for the 1920x1080 that would look better on this phone. I'll give what you said a try and check it out. When comparing the two side by side, the S5 seemed to be a little darker so I wasn't sure if it was because of the lower resolution of 720. Just wanted to get it to look as crisp on the S5 as the Evo

I wouldn't recommend that kind of conversion. First, what you are thinking of doing is called upconverting.. and it never works well when you start with a lower resolution source. If you started with a highbit rate blueray.. that is one thing. And event then it's arguable if there is any visible advantage to 1080 on a 5.1" screen.
But I'll bet good money that upconverting from your lower resolution rip will noticeably degrade your picture. Yes, it will have more pixels in the end but since they are interpolated pixels from a lower resolution source, you can expect all kinds of undesirable video artifacts to accompany that.
Crisp could refer to several things. I suspect that your S5 is simply revealing inherent quality limitations of your current movie rips that may not have been obvious on your previous phone. The way to get that kind of crispness back on the S5 is to make better quality e.g. higher bit rate, mutipass (HQ) encoding and so forth. Simply upconverting will do the opposite of what you are aiming for because the extra pixels will tend to be blury + add random artifacts from an upconverted source.
Second, the dark picture you refer to is no doubt a minor gamma difference between manufacturers. You could in theory lighten all your movies to make them subjectively brighter on the S5. But again, it will degrade the picture a bit at the same time since the frames need to be modified and transcoded. Trust me that you will soon adjust to a gamma difference between devices after a short amount of time unless the difference is huge.
Most videophiles don't play movies at full brightness anyway as picture quality is better at an intermediate screen brightness. So unless you are viewing in a brightly lit room, you could just increase the S5 screne brightness a little bit to more than compensate for the lower gamma.
.

3740
Ok that makes sense. I'm kind of a noob when it comes to this stuff so I appreciate you taking the time to explain it. I kept looking side by side and couldn't figure out why there was such a difference. Colors seemed to pop more on the Evo which I thought was weird but I sort of understand why now. Skin tones and everything just looked like it had less contrast. I spend a lot of time traveling for work so watching things is like 80% of what I do on the phone and getting the right format is important. I was looking at getting the LG G3 so would that mean that it could look worse because of the bigger size and resolution or would it be the about the same?

casual167 said:
I was looking at getting the LG G3 so would that mean that it could look worse because of the bigger size and resolution or would it be the about the same?
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The S5 screen is better than the G3 IMO. But you can decide for yourself.
If you want crisp images or images on the S5.. just encode your movies from high resolution sources e.g. bluerays --> 720, with high quality settings e.g. high bit rate. Converting existing movie rips from 720 --> 1080 though won't give great results.
The apparent lack of crispness or contrast is just the effect of having a more capable screen on the S5. A better screen will be both impressive when you have a high quality movie. And disappointing when playing something lower quality because it is also more revealing of flaws that would be less obvious on a lower resolution screen.
.

[Q] Downscale Resolution to 1080p to increase performance?

For me QHD displays are too much for a 5.7 inch phone. The exynos version looks pretty powerful, but I guess I`d rather have better performance than insane ppi.
Watching some on/off screen GPU benchmark reviews for the LG G3, Oppo Find 7 and S5 "Premium", the off screen (1080p) tests had an average of 51% higher scores than on screen (QHD) scores. I mean, WOW! That`s a lot! I can post the results here if you want to skip the trouble looking for it.
One guy on youtube changed his LG G3 resolution from QHD to Full HD using NOMone Resolution Changer and used Xposed to change DPI and font scale of native apps to make them work.
What do you think about this? This could possibly increase overall performance+battery life and definitely increase gaming performance.
The videos about resolution downscale on the G3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATk2xCSgp70
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csBhVcIBV64

Sounds like you need to stay with your note 3

... and reduce resolution to 720p

and, no one cares about benchmarks..

and... lol reading above comments make me laugh
why you bought note 4 if you want to reduce it's resolution, there will be 1080p device later if you want SD805

Daaaaaamn, this a deal breaker... If I cannot reduce the resolution of the Note 4 to 4:3 CRT TV 480i letterbox... I will not buy it, what a piece of crap! I was hoping to get at least 6 months of battery life on each charge with CRT resolution... I reduced to 320i my note 3 and it lasts almost a year on a single charge. The only problem is that I am having issues watching YouTube in HD for some unknown reason.

funny stuff!
we ***** and moan that we want QHD/4K/ultra definition on our "5 inch video screens", then once we get it, we complain that it uses too much battery life, so we have to "downrez" it..
you just cant make some people happy...

I'm more curious of how the screen will look like if in 1080p, especially the pentile effect. We know that we still see the pentile effect somewhat on Note 3, not sure on Note 4's 1440p screen.
Don't really care about performance.

I can't see any difference, but I can't see any pentile on 1080p phones too so...
Sent from my SM-N910C using XDA Free mobile app

if you reduce resolution to 256 x 144 battery life will be improved by a factor of 10!
much better than 1080p! OMG!

Is there any sound reason for bashing the OP ?
Just because he thinks a little bit different than you, maybe a step ahead of you ?
His idea is no nonsense.
If it IS possible to boost perfomance by lowering the resolution to e. g. Full HD, that would be quite beneficial.
Practical example: Let's talk about a game, "World of Tanks - Blitz".
Great game on the PC, not so great game on Android. Reason: Graphics are not the best. At present, there's a kind of universal version out, all reduced graphics to make sure the game works with most Android devices, even the weaker ones. Game publisher said they're working on a version you can adapt to the performance of your system. Hope they won't lie.
2560 x 1440 pixels is quite a number.
Rendering that many pixels WILL take a lot of processing power, WILL be quite a burden on the CPU and the battery.
So the results are likely to be: Great graphics but bad performance - or bad graphics because the game recognizes the overall performance as being too low for high details AND fluid gameplay.
Plus: You can watch your battery going down in no time, as rendering that mass of pixels will take a lot of power.
Let's say we've got a resolution of 853 x 480. SOUNDS like subzero quality, but don't forget the tiny screen (compared with a large PC monitor).
If it's possible to display 853 x 480 using the highest details setting, the result will look classes better than 2560 x 1440 with low details. You won't be able to spot single pixels, just a wealth of fine graphics.
So a reduced resolution and highest details will look MUCH better than highest resolution and low details. That's benefit one.
Second, gameplay will be vastly improved by a higher framerate and more CPU power for handling all the netcode and stuff.
Third, our battery will last far longer because of the lower battery drain.
Result would be a great looking, blazing fast game which won't suck your battery dry in no time,
And that's a reason to laugh at the OP, for bashing him ?
I do NOT know if reducing the resolution AND saving ressources is possible.
But IF it's possible, it would be a great step forward.
You will NOT able to see the difference between full resolution and reduced resolution on the tiny Note 4's display.
Only differences will be graphics and details quality - and higher speed, better framerates, more fluid gameplay.
And there will be always some room for compromises like slightly higher resolution and the like.
Now bash on if you still feel like.

Just a bunch of trolls. There are many people dowscaling resolution to play. I personally leave at 1080p all the time. Just restart and everything rescales to the right dpi.
Sent from my SM-N910C using XDA Free mobile app

I don't know of a way to reduce it to 1080p, but wouldn't it make more sense to buy an s5? Battery life was superb on my s5, still wouldn't swap it for my note 4 though, optimise your note 4, it holds its own in terms of battery life and performance.

All depends on why you got a note4, I love the s-pen, I like the added fingerprint reader and heart rate monitor, and like the better camera with OIS. I already can't see the pixels on my Note3 though, so why would I care if I downgraded my Note4 to "only" that same resolution? Having longer battery life and higher performance for all the bits that matter to you sounds like a much better plan than having more pixels than you can possibly see.

ve6rah said:
so why would I care if I downgraded my Note4 to "only" that same resolution?.
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You didn't get the idea at all. It's about making games run faster and with far better details. Same as with PC games.
Read my post!
Edit: It was me not reading the post correctly. Sorry !

I'd be interested in this also. I would love the ability to lower the resolution for a few apps I use on my note 4

I like this idea for performance in games and battery saving but you definitely can see the pixels on the Note3 and indeed any 1080p mobile right now. The extra resolution on the Note 4 really pays off for normal useage but games should be able to default to 1080p at the very least.
Phones should have a resolution change option like pc's these days anyway.

Chefproll said:
You didn't get the idea at all. It's about making games run faster and with far better details. Same as with PC games.
Read my post!
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Sorry, I think you misunderstood. I was agreeing with you. My point was that I don't really "lose" anything if I downgrade the resolution as on a screen this size I can't see individual pixels even at 1080 I was also countering those who said the OP should have stuck with a note 3 by saying that the note 4 has many other improvements as well, and that the resolution, though better on paper doesn't really matter.

ve6rah said:
Sorry, I think you misunderstood.
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Yes, I indeed did - I did not read carefully enough.
Just added a comment to my post regarding this.
Thank you for pointing this out !

NOMone resolution changer in the app store lets you bring it down to 1080P.

Anyone tried downscaling the display to 1080p?

Hi all,
I personally don't think there's much difference between 2.5K and 1080p on a ~5 inch display. Has anyone with root found a way to and tried down scaling the display output to 1080p?
If so do you notice any visible difference and has it noticeably improved battery life?
I'm not convinced how much difference it would make as the display itself would still be physically outputting 2.5K pixels but at least the processing side of things would only need to push 1080p.
Thanks!
Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

I searched for an answer to the same question. I doubt it's have much impact on battery life honestly. The gpu isn't working as hard, but that's not the biggest drain by far. The best reason to do this would be improved performance in gpu-intensive activities like gaming. However with this phone that hardly seems necessary.
(I suppose, theoretically, you might get better battery life during gaming)

1080p won't look nice on this screeeen

omnikai said:
I searched for an answer to the same question. I doubt it's have much impact on battery life honestly. The gpu isn't working as hard, but that's not the biggest drain by far. The best reason to do this would be improved performance in gpu-intensive activities like gaming. However with this phone that hardly seems necessary.
(I suppose, theoretically, you might get better battery life during gaming)
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My guess is the won't matter because the GPU will need to work just as hard. The number of pixels you push to the screen will always need to be converted to the number of pixels the screen is designed for. Pixels are more hardware related than software related.
A screen has several tiny LED's that illuminate to display the image on the screen. The 6p resolution is 2560x1440 which equates to roughly 3.7 million pixels. It has to display 3.7 million pixels. 1080 equates 2.1 million pixels but the 6p has to display 3.7 even if you only push 2.1 million pixels to it.
Depending on how well the Android OS is designed it wouldn't be out of the realm of reason to say that dropping the resolution to 1080 might reduce battery life instead of save it depending on how well the code is reused internally and where the interpretation of scaling happens in the chain.
I talk out my ass a lot so I am only guessing that the above is true.

Downscaling to 1080p won't do much for battery , the pixels still need to be lit, but the GPU will be less stressed, it doesn't have to render those extra pixels with new information, its just upscales

italia0101 said:
Downscaling to 1080p won't do much for battery , the pixels still need to be lit, but the GPU will be less stressed, it doesn't have to render those extra pixels with new information, its just upscales
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That's my understanding as well. It's still rendering at lower resolution, which requires less from the gpu, but then upscales to the native resolution. I'd still suspect this will improve battery while gaming, but not in general use. Entirely direction though.

It won´t look good on the screen, that´s for sure. Downscaling might only be needed if you want to play a heavy game which wouldn´t run fluid enough on the Nexus 6P, due to hardware limitations.