Help XXJD4 Color Banding

[vladvx]

Hi guys,

I just flashed my stock Spica with the XXJD4 firmware, all went well, but i noticed some troubling issues with color banding.
In every .avi file I play color banding really pops out, and the widgets show it too: for ex. the standard clock and YouTube widgets have a black shady background which should appear shiny, but on my phone you can clearly see 6-7 different bands of shades of gray.

What can I do ? Is this normal ? Because I read that the Spica screen actually has 16 million color support. Is it from the firmware or the hardware ?

 

[vladvx]

Looks like the horrible color banding on the widgets was caused by the launcher I was using, Helix. I switched to Launcher Pro and things got a lot better on the home screen front. Color banding is still there, but the bands are lot finer.

However, color banding is still very obvious in videos, both YouTube and local .avi files.

Any ideas ?

 

[Beerkan]

Can you post a piccy?

 

[vladvx]

Here's a photo I took of the phone while playing an .avi file (XVID, 624x352 pixels, 23 fps, 1186kbps) in Meridian Player.
I couldn't find a screen capture app for Android, but I think the photo is clear enough to see the obvious color banding on the wall. It's the same thing with the YouTube app.
Any ideas why this happens?

P.S. My phone info:
Baseband version:
i570EXXJD1
Kernel version:
2.6.29
root@SE-S610#2
Build number:
ECLAIR.XXJD4

The phone is not network locked and the software, apart from the unofficial XXJD4 firmware, is completely unmodified.
banding.jpg

 

[goomba]

have you tried playing your videos on another phone with a similarly specd display? Because I see the same things on my phone too, but I just attribute it to mid level quality video encoding.

I'm on XXJCE btw.

 

[Beerkan]

Low quality video compression would definately be the cause for banding on images rather than a fault.

But you said you had banding on widgets. Can you show an example of that? If defo doesn't sound right.

 

[vladvx]

@goomba
It's the only touchscreen phone I have, and none of my friends have phones with similar displays. So I can't test on other phones.

@beerkan
I had terrible color banding on widgets when I was using one the latest versions of Helix Launcher. Now I'm on Launcher Pro and things are a lot better. You can still see color banding, but only if you squint really hard.

I thought about what you said about low quality video encoding. I decided to test the screen by using a simple gradient image made in PS - a 24 bit-encoded (so 16 million colors) PNG file. I posted both the file and the image I took of the phone.

As you can see, color banding is there...and this time we can't blame it on poor video encoding.

Try this for yourselves and tell me what you see.

IMG_1506_small.png


test_gradient_small.png

 

[goomba]

@goomba
It's the only touchscreen phone I have, and none of my friends have phones with similar displays. So I can't test on other phones.

@beerkan
I had terrible color banding on widgets when I was using one the latest versions of Helix Launcher. Now I'm on Launcher Pro and things are a lot better. You can still see color banding, but only if you squint really hard.

I thought about what you said about low quality video encoding. I decided to test the screen by using a simple gradient image made in PS - a 24 bit-encoded (so 16 million colors) PNG file. I posted both the file and the image I took of the phone.

As you can see, color banding is there...and this time we can't blame it on poor video encoding.

Try this for yourselves and tell me what you see.

IMG_1506_small.png


test_gradient_small.png

Aright, tested. There is color banding on mine too

I'm going to bug people at the office and see how this particular pic show up on their phones.

 

[goomba]

Had one of my mates test it on his Nokia 5530 which also displays 16M colors and the banding shows up there too. I don't think 16 million is enough to actually render images/videos without any kind of banding. But I'm no expert. I wasn't paying attention until you pointed it out.

Ok we need a display expert here.