my guess is that color draws no more power than b/w, but ... maybe that's wrong; if the B pixels are all "off", maybe the power draw is reduced. OTOH, if the W pixels (and there will be way more of them unless you also invert your display) represent highest-brightness, that could actually be worse than color!

that said: as great as the numbers are, which 1920x1080 (etc) are walk talking about, the real one, or the fake one?

and again ... wouldn't it be great we had real answer from Lenovo?

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Another person talked up thread about color vs black and white text. Does color display affect battery life much? I'm asking since I sometimes read black and white text on the Y2P for hours on end. Would switching to some black and white mode if available save battery life then?

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Black and white text changes nothing. But since you don't care about color you can always use "stable" Energy Manager mode - this mode turns yellow back into mustard, but according to my measures: if you get 5h 45min of working time in "daily mode", the "stable" gives you additional 40 minutes for a total 6h 25min of working time (470 vs 420 mA).

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To be fair, the screen has an RGBW pentile arrangement, meaning that the number of subpixels is only 2/3 of what it would be on a regular RGB stripe panel. This definitely affects image detail. You could say the color information resolution is somewhat below regular QHD. They get away with claiming it is QHD+ because there is fine enough control over the pixels to display black and white contours at QHD+ resolution, and that "officially" defines a resolution.

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Yep, that's pretty much the summary of this display.

If you're doing power measurements, the one that would be most interesting would be the difference between the RGBW high and low poer modes. Switching between the lowest power mode with bad yellows vs. the next one up that has "good" yellows. The power difference should be that the backlight is at half power on the lowest power mode. It would be nice to characterize just how much power saving you actually get in exchange for the muddy green yellows.

But for myself, as sexy as the 3200x1800 is, I find that life is much simpler and easier at 1920x1080. There's no visual indication that this isn't the native resolution of the panel, and Windows scaling for all applications at 200% (or whatever it is) makes everything work well with nothing too tiny to see. Game performance is good, battery life seems fine, and I never need to think about resolution. Also if the PenTile controller chip is really working right, it's already throwing away 1/3 of the image data at 3200x1800 so it should be actually happier and better at rendering the 1920x1080 into the physical 3200x1800 RGBW array (which is probably why it still looks so good).

At 3200x1800, your computer has to allocate memory for 3200x1800x3 bytes of information, so it's computing and storing 17,280,000 bytes in its frame buffer. But the RGBW display only actually contains a number of physical picture elements equal to 2/3 of that (and in high power mode it may not even be using the W pixels so it gets even worse down to maybe 1/2) so essentially you're oversampling the display by 1/3 to 1/2. So there's a substantial waste of memory and power in order to drive the display at "3200x1800". Yeah, it can produce beautiflly crisp lines at that resolution, but there are also these un-obvious costs and behavior which make running at 1920x1080 or 1600x900 very viable, and the PenTile technology means you get a much nicer result than you would with an RGB stripe display running at less than its native resolution.

One thing I've been disappointed with is the Kindle reader app. I have a few "Print Replica" textbooks and there seems to be no way to effectively use all the display with these books. In 3200x1800 mode I can't get it to even use more than about 1/4 of the display so the pages are tiny, and at 1920x1080 the extra wide aspect ratio of the display beans the book pages only come down about 2/3 of the height of the display (in portrait orientation). So far the Y2P (and probably any similar resolution / aspect ratio machine) is a really crappy book reader IMHO.

Z.

With regards to QHD+ resolution, do you guys think that text looks signifiantly sharper on the Y2P?   Also, would there be a difference reading web articles using a scaled up version of the desktop IE versus reading text on the metro IE?  

I have my resolution on max but with the 200% scaling.   In theory text should look as sharp as on a retina display iPad or iPhone, but I'm wondering if that's the case as I don't own those devices.

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Black and white text changes nothing. But since you don't care about color you can always use "stable" Energy Manager mode ...

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Ok.

Since the energy manager is up for discussion, does anyone know of a way to switch between the energy modes silently? For example using command line arguments? I'd like to not have to bring up that ugly GUI every time I want to do the switch. With a quick hotkey toggle I can see myself running in "stable mode" most of the time and then toggle over to high whenever I feel more CPU power is needed.

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Black and white text changes nothing. But since you don't care about color you can always use "stable" Energy Manager mode ...

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Ok.

 

Since the energy manager is up for discussion, does anyone know of a way to switch between the energy modes silently? For example using command line arguments? I'd like to not have to bring up that ugly GUI every time I want to do the switch. With a quick hotkey toggle I can see myself running in "stable mode" most of the time and then toggle over to high whenever I feel more CPU power is needed.

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The project is dead but:

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Idea-Windows-based-Tablets-and/Need-Help-Power-Mode-Changer/m-p/1380211

Indest, thanks. But can I see the source code for the application? I'm not keen on running unknown .exe files from the internet without verifying them first.

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Indest, thanks. But can I see the source code for the application? I'm not keen on running unknown .exe files from the internet without verifying them first.

 

 

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Then, I advice that you DO NOT run the program. I refuse to release the source code since no-one was willing to assist me with a simple project. This project did not require you to run the program, just to help edit the image sample (a png file).

But I will not share the code to have people recompile the program after I did all the work. As I said before, this project is dead.

Sorry for coming off as a d**k but, I am disappointed at the lack of response. 

Well, I gotta say that you kinda do come across as pretty vindicative here. A small, narrow tool like that for a specific computer model will lack monetary value so what is the point in holding back the source even if things didn't turn out as you planned? I had no idea of your application until you posted here, I bet most people didn't. No one can force you to do anything of course so I'm just trying to nudge you a little and appeal to your kinder side. :-)

Denes, Indes:

Indes is coming off, as he noted, like kind of a d**k, but ... seriously, it doesn't matter here, right?