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The linked Subpixel Zoo article taught me that Pentile is still actually incredibly popular. My first Pentile screen was on my Motorola Droid 4 phone, and it w

The linked Subpixel Zoo article taught me that Pentile is still actually incredibly popular. My first Pentile screen was on my Motorola Droid 4 phone, and it was awful. Small text was often impossible to read depending on the color of the text and its background. The massive gaps between colors made solid red, green, or blue areas of the screen look like a checkerboard. It basically had a screen-door effect before VR became mainstream and made "screen-door effect" a household term. So it hit me as a surprise to know that Pentile is still popular and used today. I guess it's just gotten better? Smaller gaps between the subpixels? Maybe higher resolutions and pixel densities hide the weaknesses shown in my Droid 4?

wffurr 2y ago
>> Maybe higher resolutions and pixel densities hide the weaknesses shown in my Droid 4? That's exactly it. Droid 4 resolution was low enough that the subpixel arrangement was clearly visible. Newer displays are dense enough that subpixels aren't visible at all.
mdasen 2y ago
Early PenTile displays often had a different arrangement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenTile_matrix_family#/media/File:Nexus_one_screen_microscope.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenTile_matrix_family#/media/F... You can see that it's Blue, Green, Red, Green on the horizontal/vertical axis so each red sub pixel is separated by two green and one blue sub pixels. Modern PenTile displays usually use a triangular layout: https://static1.xdaimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/wm/2022/11/ip14pm_vs_s22u_subpixels-1.png https://static1.xdaimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/w... I'm not an expert at text rendering, but it seems like you'd be able to get an RGB sub pixel combination a lot closer together with this triangular layout than the linear one. But also, the Droid 4 was simply lower resolution. Apple moved to 330 pixels per inch in 2010 and the Droid 4 was 275 PPI in 2012. So the Droid 4 was poor resolution even for its time and the PenTile layout would make it even worse by removing a third of the sub pixels. Today, the Galaxy S25 has 416 PPI and the iPhone 16 460 PPI so it is dramatically more pixels. Pixel density would have the largest impact, but I think that the triangular layout that modern displays use probably also helps. You talk about the screen door effect and I feel like the triangular layout wouldn't have as much of that issue (but I'm not an expert on sub pixel rendering).

wffurr 2y ago

>> Maybe higher resolutions and pixel densities hide the weaknesses shown in my Droid 4? That's exactly it. Droid 4 resolution was low enough that the subpixel arrangement was clearly visible. Newer displays are dense enough that subpixels aren't visible at all.

mdasen 2y ago

Early PenTile displays often had a different arrangement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenTile_matrix_family#/media/File:Nexus_one_screen_microscope.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenTile_matrix_family#/media/F... You can see that it's Blue, Green, Red, Green on the horizontal/vertical axis so each red sub pixel is separated by two green and one blue sub pixels. Modern PenTile displays usually use a triangular layout: https://static1.xdaimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/wm/2022/11/ip14pm_vs_s22u_subpixels-1.png https://static1.xdaimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/w... I'm not an expert at text rendering, but it seems like you'd be able to get an RGB sub pixel combination a lot closer together with this triangular layout than the linear one. But also, the Droid 4 was simply lower resolution. Apple moved to 330 pixels per inch in 2010 and the Droid 4 was 275 PPI in 2012. So the Droid 4 was poor resolution even for its time and the PenTile layout would make it even worse by removing a third of the sub pixels. Today, the Galaxy S25 has 416 PPI and the iPhone 16 460 PPI so it is dramatically more pixels. Pixel density would have the largest impact, but I think that the triangular layout that modern displays use probably also helps. You talk about the screen door effect and I feel like the triangular layout wouldn't have as much of that issue (but I'm not an expert on sub pixel rendering).