Nexus One display resolution not really 800 x 480?

The folks at Ars Technica has certainly something that might bug all Nexus One owners – they have come up with an explanation on why the Nexus One with its AMOLED display still has reports from users that complain about blurry text rendering. This is one technically detailed article, but to sum it up in a nutshell, it could be due to the hardware involved as well as methodology that Google employed to show off the screen’s resolution. Basically, the cause of the anomalies are explained in the bullet points after the jump.

• The AMOLED display of the Nexus One has an unusual arrangement of pixels known as the PenTile Matrix developed by Nouvoyance. Each pixel consists of a double-width blue or red subpixel element and a green subpixel element.
• The PenTile display uses a series of local filter operations and subpixel positioning to approximate a standard RGB-striped LCD display.
• The actual hardware resolution of the Nexus One display is 480×800 pixels, but no pixel contains all three colors. If you remove the signal processing noted above, the total effective resolution of the display is actually 392×653.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Cellphones, Rumors, Top Stories