wrote:
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.
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.