Early PenTile displays often had a different arrangement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenTile_matrix_family#/media/File:Nexus_one_screen_microscope.jpg https:

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).