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Subject: Your eyes, they suck at blue!
A long, long time ago I wrote an article about human visual perception and how your eyes really don't see blue very well. The reality of it is quite staggering: you can have a nine times reduction in blue resolution before you notice it, and then you only kinda recognize that it's there.
While writing the version version of the article, I talked to a very nice lady at a company called Clairvoyante (now Nouvoyance), and we swapped a few emails about the technology she created, called the PenTile matrix. Basically, because your eyes couldn't appreciate full blue resolution, why waste money adding an equal number of blue pixels on expensive screens and the chips that control them?
The logic seems quite sound: your eyes are very sensitive to green, much less so to red, and less still to blue. For proof, I offer this image of Traci. In each version, I reduced the resolution of one colour, but not the others.
![[Image: http://nfgworld.com/grafx/Pentile.png]](http://nfgworld.com/grafx/Pentile.png "http://nfgworld.com/grafx/Pentile.png")
Check it out: if someone messes with your GREEN, but leaves the red and blue in high-resolution, you notice. When your red is messed with, you kinda notice. But if someone reduces the resolution of your blue by nine times, you can't really tell.
Anyway, the Pentile matrix was pretty cool, it used all the greens but half as many reds and blues. It made things a lot cheaper, and people wouldn't usually notice.
![[Image: http://nfgworld.com/grafx/suckblue-1.png]](http://nfgworld.com/grafx/suckblue-1.png "http://nfgworld.com/grafx/suckblue-1.png")
![[Image: http://nfgworld.com/grafx/suckblue-2.png]](http://nfgworld.com/grafx/suckblue-2.png "http://nfgworld.com/grafx/suckblue-2.png")
Clairvoyante became Nuovoyance and sold their technology to Samsung, and now the first time I've heard of it being used, it's available in Google's Android phone from HTC.
Over on ArsTechnica there's an article discussing this and how it makes direct comparisons of screen resolution tricky. In addition, as it demonstrates on pages 1 and 2, there is some colour fringing when you show carefully constructed images on these screens. It's a good point, but I wonder if it really matters. I mean, I get colour fringing on every monitor I've used with fancy font rendering too:
![[Image: http://nfgworld.com/grafx/suckblue-3.png]](http://nfgworld.com/grafx/suckblue-3.png "http://nfgworld.com/grafx/suckblue-3.png")
It's very cool to finally see this screen reach production. I've been following it for a long time.
Now I need to go find someone selling Androids in Australia. =)
While writing the version version of the article, I talked to a very nice lady at a company called Clairvoyante (now Nouvoyance), and we swapped a few emails about the technology she created, called the PenTile matrix. Basically, because your eyes couldn't appreciate full blue resolution, why waste money adding an equal number of blue pixels on expensive screens and the chips that control them?
The logic seems quite sound: your eyes are very sensitive to green, much less so to red, and less still to blue. For proof, I offer this image of Traci. In each version, I reduced the resolution of one colour, but not the others.
Check it out: if someone messes with your GREEN, but leaves the red and blue in high-resolution, you notice. When your red is messed with, you kinda notice. But if someone reduces the resolution of your blue by nine times, you can't really tell.
Anyway, the Pentile matrix was pretty cool, it used all the greens but half as many reds and blues. It made things a lot cheaper, and people wouldn't usually notice.
Clairvoyante became Nuovoyance and sold their technology to Samsung, and now the first time I've heard of it being used, it's available in Google's Android phone from HTC.
Over on ArsTechnica there's an article discussing this and how it makes direct comparisons of screen resolution tricky. In addition, as it demonstrates on pages 1 and 2, there is some colour fringing when you show carefully constructed images on these screens. It's a good point, but I wonder if it really matters. I mean, I get colour fringing on every monitor I've used with fancy font rendering too:
It's very cool to finally see this screen reach production. I've been following it for a long time.
Now I need to go find someone selling Androids in Australia. =)
BLEARGH