Display colors in Spica with Eclair (JCE) + LkMod + LK2

[kih]

Hi everyone,

I just flashed my Spica and am now using the JCE firmware + LkMod + LK2. Isn't Android 2.1 able to support 16M colors? AFAIK the Spica display can do 16M. But even after the upgrade it seems to be still displaying video and images at 65K colors. Is there anything I should do to enable 16M colors?

[laplander]

http://www.androidcentral.com/androi...-screen-issues So it depends on apps, and the only app in Android 2.1 with TrueColor support is the browser. But i can't confirm this. I see a lot of dithering on the sample picture at the top of this page with my spica.

[kih]

So it's not something that's automatically enabled? And I thought that if I upgrade to Eclair, movies on my spica would start displaying better.

[Beany2010]

It's quite possible that 16 [65,000]/24bit [16,000,000] colour is enabled/disabled depending on how it affects performance - bear in mind that it has to address a larger amount of memory to accommodate the 15,500,000 extra potential colours, and if a movie has a very high colour range, the memory usage increases in respect of that.

My back-of-a-cigarette pack calculations, however, suggest that 320x480x16bit image requires 300k of memory, and that the same image in 24bit colour would require 460k of memory - per frame. So maybe not that much difference at all?

(Incidentally, I knew my high school computer science class would come in handy at some point in my life!)

It would be interesting to see if someone can hack the media player app to force 24bit colour to see if it causes any problems, though - but given how tight the Spica seems to run when playing back 320x480 MP4s and AVIs (I see occasional stutter) it might well be that the CPU only solution used in the Spica [with no GPU co-processor that I am aware of] is running out of puff as it is?

[kih]

I'm keeping my hopes up. I have another phone with a lot more pixels and just runs at ~500mhz and videos display better. The spica has an 800mhz cpu and less pixels, I'm inclined to assume that the hardware could easily do it. I wonder if it's the same with other android phones like the Hero running android 2.1. Or maybe there's a video player that would solve the it.

[4PLaY]

So do we have any updates on this issue?

[schermvlieger]

On the Spica, Android is reporting a display depth (bits per pixel) of RGB_565, which means 16bit, or a maximum of 65,536 colors simultaneous.
This is not only on the Spica, also newer Android devices are reporting this value.

I see a lot of mentioning of the Spica's screen supporting many more colors, but I have not seen this from an official source (Samsung) I am not saying these non-official reports are wrong; if someone with the appropriate technical knowledge opened up the device and inspected the hardware I am sure they came come to the right conclusion. But at the moment, Android thinks that the device cannot support more than 16bit colors.

If we can find a statement from Samsung that the display is capable of more than this, we can hold them to it; so there is your challenge.

In the mean time, we can try fiddling with the screen driver to see if we can make Android utilize more than 16bit color, which is a challenge for the developers.

[edit]

On the dutch samsung website, it is reported that the screen can support 262.000 colors

[yvliew]

i think it depends on the apps.. 3D gallery displays color banding while browser does not, even Real Player does not displays color banding issues.

[schermvlieger]

i think it depends on the apps.. 3D gallery displays color banding while browser does not, even Real Player does not displays color banding issues.

I think we need to be a little more scientific about this; I have made a program that checks the display capabilities and it reports RGB_565:

PixelFormat pf = new PixelFormat();
Display display = ((WindowManager) getApplicationContext().getSystemService(Context.W INDOW_SERVICE)).getDefaultDisplay();
int format = display.getPixelFormat();
PixelFormat.getPixelFormatInfo(format,pf);
int bits = pf.bitsPerPixel;

Maybe I am doing it wrong?

[gnomorra]

As far as you know is this issue present in 2.2 too?