Glance in 1020 making no sense

[Coreldan]

I guess this might be discussed somewhere, but my fiancee recently got a 1020 (I have a 920) and I've never used Glance myself cos it make little sense on an LCD screen cos the whole screen would be on for that tiny bit of text. Now I was excited about my fiancee getting a 1020 that has an AMOLED screen so she could use Glance.

Turns out that some summer intern has probably coded the Glance and the 1020 too, despite it's AMOLED screen and capability to light up just individual pixels, the stupid thing also lights up the whole screen with this notevensodarkdarkblack, instead of just lighting up the pixels needed for the clock.

Is this really intended or am I missing something? I can't believe Nokia/MS wouldn't have the experience so far to do this right on AMOLED screens? Seriously, what the hell?

 

[Taigatrommel]

I wondered the very same thing. On my Nokia E7, Sleeping Screen (Symbians father of Glance) only lightened up the actual text. In a completely dark room, you couldn't tell where the screen borders were.

However as you described the 1020 emits always some light, even when it is displaying blacks. As such, blacks aren't as deep and black as they were on the E7s AMOLED screen.

What's interesting though: I also have a BlackBerry Q10 which not only uses a SuperAMOLED display, but has the very same problem of slightly luminared blacks like the 1020 does. The Lumia also has a pentile SuperAMOLED display, while the E7 had a standard RGB AMOLED (no super or anything added to the name) screen. I think it might be some sort of limitation of either the pentile matrix, that "Super"AMOLED stuff or even both.

As already said this not only appears with glance. Try looking at black themed apps in a dark room and you'll see what I mean, the very same effect,of slightly luminated blacks, even though they should be switched off at all.

 

[josh715m]

I guess this might be discussed somewhere, but my fiancee recently got a 1020 (I have a 920) and I've never used Glance myself cos it make little sense on an LCD screen cos the whole screen would be on for that tiny bit of text. Now I was excited about my fiancee getting a 1020 that has an AMOLED screen so she could use Glance.

Turns out that some summer intern has probably coded the Glance and the 1020 too, despite it's AMOLED screen and capability to light up just individual pixels, the stupid thing also lights up the whole screen with this notevensodarkdarkblack, instead of just lighting up the pixels needed for the clock.

Is this really intended or am I missing something? I can't believe Nokia/MS wouldn't have the experience so far to do this right on AMOLED screens? Seriously, what the hell?

I have noticed the same for the L925. I thought that was how is supposed to be. Kept wondering for a while why the black background has some little light having read that amoled screens can light up pixels as needed.
Can someone throw some light ?

 

[Coreldan]

I also come from Nokia N8 that had an AMOLED screen and I'm honestly quite shocked how WP8 apparently takes no use out of the biggest strenght of AMOLED screens. AMOLED screens have their downsides compared to LCD, but especially WP could achieve much more power efficiency if blacks were simply not shown at all.

Since Nokia has handled this just fine before, I think the party at fault here is Microsoft. I think the OS just doesn't support AMOLEDs properly, which seems weird that Nokia would keep putting AMOLED screens into their phones for no benefit.

 

[hprvez]

They're just inferior quality panels than what Nokia used in the past.

 

[Coreldan]

I have to bump this, cos this thread was fairly ignored.

Is this really normal behavior, does everybody have the whole screen lit up when using Glance? If so, I can't understand how people don't talk more about it. I keep hearing how great Glance is, but this is some of the stupidest stuff I've seen in the mobile phone industry probably for a few years. Does the 1020 (and other AMOLED equipped WPs) really not utilize the fact that blackest blacks comes from not lighting up the pixel at all?

 

[revanthpallagani]

Same case with my 1020 where the screen doesn't go completely black. While looking for an upgrade from 720, I wanted an AMOLED screen just so that I could experience 'black is black' property. Alas, that's not how it turned out.
Couple of months ago I did a slight bit of research on this and found out that AMOLED screens (pixels) are not completely turned off for black but are kept on by a faint current (voltage?). The reason for this is that the time taken to turn the pixel back on is reduced thereby reducing any kind of lag while there is another frame to be displayed. I don't remember what this called, try searching it online.

One thing I am sure is glance is darker on 1020 (AMOLED) when compared to my 720 (LCD). Looks like AMOLED is doing its job but just not as much as we expect because of the above reason.

 

[milkyway]

I wondered about exactly the same think when I first got my 1020. I had an N8 before and was used to "glance" at the clock where all the screen was black except the time.
It makes absolutely no sense to power up the whole screen when you have AMOLED