Screen too blue, jagged text?

[MentatYP]

First of all, new member here. Hi everybody!

My wife and I went to an AT&T store today to check out the Captivate (and the Aria for her, which she loves). I was very impressed with the Captivate (TouchWiz haters should give 3.0 a chance. I thought it was quite nice.) except for the screen. 2 issues:

• Screen is too blue, color balance is too cold.
• Jaggies on browser text when zoomed out--more so than other phones with the same or similar screen resolution zoomed all the way out. It looked like maybe there was a lack of text smoothing at that zoom level, which made text harder to read than, say, a Droid X zoomed out. I tried it on engadget.com and theonion.com and saw the same behavior.

I know this could be misconstrued as trolling, what with this being my first post and all. I'm truly not though. I went to the store wanting to love this phone and be ready to buy it, but the screen issues I saw were very unexpected so I wanted to check with y'all to see if I'm just missing something. Is there a way to change the color balance of the screen? Is there a text-smoothing option somewhere that I can turn on to make browser text more legible zoomed out? From my time playing with it I loved everything else about the phone, but these screen issues are deal breakers for me. Thanks ahead of time for any help/insight.

 

[Simba501]

First of all, new member here. Hi everybody!

My wife and I went to an AT&T store today to check out the Captivate (and the Aria for her, which she loves). I was very impressed with the Captivate (TouchWiz haters should give 3.0 a chance. I thought it was quite nice.) except for the screen. 2 issues:

• Screen is too blue, color balance is too cold.
• Jaggies on browser text when zoomed out--more so than other phones with the same or similar screen resolution zoomed all the way out. It looked like maybe there was a lack of text smoothing at that zoom level, which made text harder to read than, say, a Droid X zoomed out. I tried it on engadget.com and theonion.com and saw the same behavior.

I know this could be misconstrued as trolling, what with this being my first post and all. I'm truly not though. I went to the store wanting to love this phone and be ready to buy it, but the screen issues I saw were very unexpected so I wanted to check with y'all to see if I'm just missing something. Is there a way to change the color balance of the screen? Is there a text-smoothing option somewhere that I can turn on to make browser text more legible zoomed out? From my time playing with it I loved everything else about the phone, but these screen issues are deal breakers for me. Thanks ahead of time for any help/insight.

That's so ironic because I just got a Captivate and my girlfriend loves the Aria as well, hehe. Anywho, I haven't seen a setting to adjust color balance, but I've taken the brightness down all the way and it looks stunning. This screen with the brightness up is just too much. And in the browser there are two settings that could help with your concern: "text size" (normal is default, also large and huge are available), and "default zoom" (medium is default, also far and close are available). Since it is desktop style browsing, it'll look zoomed out (to show the entire page). With pinch to zoom, it's very fluid in zooming into text and zooming back out. However, those two settings I mentioned could be the tweak you are looking for.

 

[MentatYP]

That's so ironic because I just got a Captivate and my girlfriend loves the Aria as well, hehe.

The Aria is a sweet little phone, isn't it? I might've considered it for myself if it had a slightly bigger screen and a better processor. Then again it wouldn't be an Aria at that point so nevermind

Anywho, I haven't seen a setting to adjust color balance, but I've taken the brightness down all the way and it looks stunning. This screen with the brightness up is just too much. And in the browser there are two settings that could help with your concern: "text size" (normal is default, also large and huge are available), and "default zoom" (medium is default, also far and close are available). Since it is desktop style browsing, it'll look zoomed out (to show the entire page). With pinch to zoom, it's very fluid in zooming into text and zooming back out. However, those two settings I mentioned could be the tweak you are looking for.

Thanks for that info. I'd rather not increase the text size--if I wanted to do that I could just zoom in a bit, which does fix the jaggy issue at full zoom out. I want the text to be more legible at fully zoomed out text size like other phones with 800x480 resolution or higher. From what I've read elsewhere it doesn't look like there's a solution to this or the blue color balance on the screen. Too bad. The Captivate would be almost perfect for me if not for those two issues, and it's something that would bother me every time I turned on the screen. Just can't deal with that.

 

[pjs2004]

Yeah, I'm very picky about phone resolution and graphics, and the first time I looked at the captivate and compared it to the iphone4, that did bug me. There's like a matrix of dots over the whole screen. The iphone4 screen is very clear and text is legible down to the smallest size you can see. It's pretty great that way. But, for me, this phone has way too many other things that are great so it was a trade-off. After a week of using it, I'm used to it now and it doesn't bug me.

 

[whippingboy]

I do think it odd that smartphones don't have color adjustments (even if just some general presets) That being said- the demo you saw may not be representative of what you BUY. I bought 3 EVOs (mom, wife, me) and all 3 had different color casts! Many people may not think of it unless you lined them together- mine was reddish, mom's yellowish- and my wife's bluish- which by comparison- looked the most neutral on white and gray.

No idea if the Samsungs are just as inconsistent- but if you like the phone- you may want to take a look.

As far as the "Jaggies" it's because the SAMOLED is TOO sharp. The TFT of traditional LCDs are rather soft by comparison and the samsungs contrast/color vibrancy only exaggerates the pixel depth on the screen. You notice it even on the homescreen- some love it- (makes for a much sharper vibrant comparison to EVO) others hate it.
I would tweak the TEXT settings in the browser- just to be sure you can't live with that before you write off the phone. "medium" may be perfect for an Evo - but may not be for the Galaxy- SO WHAT? set it to 1 size smaller or bigger- NOT zoom- and see if that web experience is a deal breaker- to not try it is just a bit shortsighted- no offense.

As far as the iphone 4 yes, the resolution is great however- can someone confirm for me if it does text wrapping when you pinch zoom? Someone showed me theirs- and it didn't do it! I don't care how sharp text is- if I can't pinch zoom & word wrap the text... that's unacceptable.

 

[MentatYP]

brandonrc,

Thanks for the suggestions. You make a good point about screens differing from copy to copy, so I'll go to another store and hope for a better screen. While I'm there I'll try the text tweaks suggested here to see if they fix the text issue. I'm hoping for a better experience my 2nd time around.

The text issue really isn't a deal-breaker, but the blue screen is. If I could find a screen with reasonably good color balance I think I could live with the text issue (assuming it's even an issue once I mess with text size and zoom settings in the browser).

 

[MentatYP]

I went to a different AT&T store today and they had 2 demo Captivates up, although unfortunately not side-by-side. After a bunch of running between the two phones while trying to remember what the previous phone's screen looked like, it looked to me like one of the phones was as badly blue as I'd seen before but the other one looked pretty good. I could still tell that the color balance was a bit on the cold side, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the other Captivates I saw and probably wouldn't even occur to me if I hadn't been looking for it.

On the jagged text issue, setting default browser text to "large" fixed it at the expense of less text visible on screen at one time obviously. Basically it's a work-around like doing a slight pinch-to-zoom, except that it realigns all the text and makes it fit unlike pinch-to-zoom on the Captivate (is the Incredible the only one that realigns text when you pinch-to-zoom?), so in that way it's actually a better work-around than doing a slight zoom. I'd be happy with that.

As a side note I also stopped by the Verizon store and double-checked the Incredible (also AMOLED) to see if it renders text the same way. Maybe the Incredible does more text smoothing than the Captivate, because at full zoom out the Incredible didn't have the weird jagged text but the overall sharpness was also less. I really need to have all these phones side-by-side to do a proper comparison.

So now the questions are, "Am I up for a bit of color balance lottery? Am I willing to play the exchange game until I find one that looks good enough?" Couple that with the GPS issue and I think I might have to ride the fence a bit longer.

Thanks again to everybody who replied. This has been an educational experience for me. Who knew there could be so much sample variation between screens? Not me.

 

[whippingboy]

(is the Incredible the only one that realigns text when you pinch-to-zoom?)

The EVO has it- and the samsungs do too- it's just funny. After you pinch to zoom- tap the screen ONCE and the text will reflow. This has caused many a reviewer to say the Samsungs don't have word wrap when pinching to zoom and it's just false.

In the Epic forum we have a discussion about the Pentile Matrix screens of AMOLED and SAMOLED vs typical lcd. I know the Incredible (well the older ones anyway) use AMOLED which vs. SAMOLED= the AMOLED use an extra layer of filter or glass (I forget which) which puts one more thing between you and your pentile matrix of OLEDs. It's possible this layer blurs the display a bit and offers a "smoothing effect". (kinda like looking through slightly fogged glass.)

I too wondered about RGBW and best that I can tell- RGBG has green subpixels that are 1/3 as large as the green and red- but you have 1 green for each red AND green subpixel. VS RGBW where all subpixels are the SAME size- thus more uniform and may reduce the moire or "screen door" effect you see causing grain - this MAY (Again I say MAY) also create a more neutral display tech depending on the shade of white and a quad gamut vs. tri gamut with 2x green subpixel(albeit at 1/3 size) density.

I'm guessing RGBW is more expensive and may have less color pop with increased brightness something a cellphone doesn't really need.

But- I'm NO authority on the subject.