OnePlus 3 launched ($399) Updated: reviews out

[LAwLz]

28 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Samsung also uses pentile displays on the majority of their devices. It's like they've given up on RGB. The last Galaxy S that had RGB was S2 and the last Note was Note 4 (if my memory is correct). I'm guessing it's hard to produce a good AMOLED RGB display while keeping the display quality up and the yields up. 

 

Pentile has evolved over the years as they've spend tons on R&D to solve the pentile issues (well, more like mask them) as it is a Samsung invention (patented too I'm sure) after all and one that gives them excellent production capabilities. They changed the shape and placement of sub pixels to hide the detrimental effects of pentile. The newest displays utilize diamond shaped pixels for instance. I think that started on the S5 or S6.

 

From what I understand, it still causes issues but the innovations along with increased resolution (and therefore pixel density) really helps a lot, yet there is as far as I know still noticeable effects of pentile (albeit less and less as it progresses). 

Yeah Samsung uses pentile too, but their screens are smaller and 2560x1440.

It might not be an issue on a 5.5" 1920x1080 screen, but I am will wait for a good analysis before making my mind up if it's an issue or not.

[patrick3027]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Yeah Samsung uses pentile too, but their screens are smaller and 2560x1440.

It might not be an issue on a 5.5" 1920x1080 screen, but I am will wait for a good analysis before making my mind up if it's an issue or not.

Can someone explain to me what PenTile is in layman's terms? ^^ Do you really think it will look worse than for example than a Galaxy S5? I don't quite get why it would look 'sub-retina' given it got a dpi over 400.

 

Already bought the phone though, UFS 64GB storage and 6GB of RAM for under €400 is quite hard to resist.

 

Biggest compromise on this phone is definitely the battery though.

[79wjd]

11 hours ago, dizmo said:

Well, we'll never see it utilized if it's not there. One has got to come before the other. Either the need, or the feature. Stop bitching.

The feature just leads to lazy ass coding. The need should come first (unless the need is in the forseeable life of the device, which shouldn't be the case....6gb of ram is ridiculous on a phone).

[tsk]

59 minutes ago, patrick3027 said:

Can someone explain to me what PenTile is in layman's terms? ^^ Do you really think it will look worse than for example than a Galaxy S5? I don't quite get why it would look 'sub-retina' given it got a dpi over 400.

 

Already bought the phone though, UFS 64GB storage and 6GB of RAM for under €400 is quite hard to resist.

 

Biggest compromise on this phone is definitely the battery though.

This is a diamond pentile display from the galaxy S7.



This is a RGB stripe display



To learn more read this.

[DocSwag]

OnePlus really knows how to hype their phones... I checked out their pop-up store and the line was literally 2 hours.... No joke. Needless to say I didn't wait in that line lol

[beach_boy98]

Seems to me if they are slipping away from their roots of just being as cheap as the can for the performance.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, patrick3027 said:

Can someone explain to me what PenTile is in layman's terms? ^^ Do you really think it will look worse than for example than a Galaxy S5? I don't quite get why it would look 'sub-retina' given it got a dpi over 400.

The pictures above shows it pretty clearly.

But I think this comparison is even better (source: Stuff-Review).

 

To the left we got the Galaxy Nexus. It has a pentile display at 316 PPI.

To the right we got the HTC One X. Full RGB 312 PPI display.

 

 

Despite being a higher PPI, the pentile display looks lower resolution. This is especially noticeable if you look at the blur or red parts of the strip in the Instagram logo.

 

If you look at the screen labeled "RGB" you can see that there is one red, one blue and one green "sub-pixel" for each individual pixel.

For pentile displays, it is often (but not always) one red, one blue and two green, which together makes "two" "individual pixels". This is sometimes called RGBG

 

So on a phone with a resolution of 1920x1080, these are effectively the resolutions you will have:

Red: 960 x 1080

Green: 1920x1080

Blue : 960 x 1080

 

On a 5.5" display, your effective PPI for each individual color would be:

Red: 262 PPI

Green: 400 PPI

Blue : 262 PPI

 

 

That's the gist of it. That's not to say that the screen on the OnePlus 3 will look like a 262 PPI display though. There is more to it than that (like how the subpixels are organized, how much space is between them, how large/small they are, the shape of them etc). But for certain things involving the red and blue subpixels, it will most likely not be as sharp as a full RGB display would be.

[Trixanity]

25 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

snip

Sharpness (or lack there of) as you say and the noticeable green tint to the display. Particularly on white backgrounds as your image clearly shows.

 

Some say PenTile is used because of burn-in or degradation concerns but I don't buy it. Samsung has used RGB displays in recent times and many users of for example the Galaxy S2 who still use that phone have not noted any issues and that phone is 5 years old.

 

I'm quite certain it's because of yields. That and the added complexity probably makes it difficult to work with. I'm guessing it's easier to advance the display tech with PenTile while keeping the costs low.

 

A good example of recent times is the Galaxy Tab S series. The smaller 8"~ version had PenTile and the larger 10"~ had RGB. If the RGB had very poor characteristics such as fast degradation, they probably wouldn't use it. However, the RGB panel was universally praised as being quite superior.

 

But I personally wish RGB was the standard and that they'd drop PenTile but that's not gonna happen because of [reasons].

 

I should add that it's funny how LG are the king of OLED in the TV business right now by using a WRGB subpixel matrix whereas Samsung has (at least previously) had to shut down production due to poor yields.. However, if I recall it's quite different to PenTile so there shouldn't be the same lack of sharpness and certainly no green tint because it isn't skimping on red and blue subpixels and the white subpixel is merely an addition to the standard RGB adding better color control and lower power consumption. And it's also funny LG hasn't been able to develop the same technique for smartphone displays, so they're basically stuck with LCDs... 

The tech industry is weird sometimes.

[dizmo]

6 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

The feature just leads to lazy ass coding. The need should come first (unless the need is in the forseeable life of the device, which shouldn't be the case....6gb of ram is ridiculous on a phone).

 

I don't agree with that. If there isn't 6GB available, why on earth would anyone code to utilize it? They wouldn't, because no one would have it, so no one would be able to use the thing they coded to work with 6GB of RAM.

One has to come first. It needs to be the physical memory. Sure, it might not be that way now. But someone's got to start it.

Bill Gates is often quoted (whether he said it or not) as saying "640k ought to be enough for everyone". Should everyone have just coded for 640k? After all, no one needed more, right?

[Celmor]

Loving it to see OLED screen and UFS storage.

I prefer the sandstone finish though.

I'm happy with my OnePlus X for now for which I bought the sandstone case.

[79wjd]

3 hours ago, dizmo said:

 

I don't agree with that. If there isn't 6GB available, why on earth would anyone code to utilize it? They wouldn't, because no one would have it, so no one would be able to use the thing they coded to work with 6GB of RAM.

One has to come first. It needs to be the physical memory. Sure, it might not be that way now. But someone's got to start it.

Bill Gates is often quoted (whether he said it or not) as saying "640k ought to be enough for everyone". Should everyone have just coded for 640k? After all, no one needed more, right?

Considering 4gb is still enough for the average users DESKTOP, 4gb should be way more than enough for a phone. 

 

Also, just look at the gaming market. Devs are ahead of GPUs, yet everything still works out.

[bcredeur97]

four.

[Trixanity]

6 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

Considering 4gb is still enough for the average users DESKTOP, 4gb should be way more than enough for a phone. 

 

Also, just look at the gaming market. Devs are ahead of GPUs, yet everything still works out.

I wouldn't say devs are ahead. It's more like devs hope the hardware will brute force the shit out of their shoddy coding. If they were up to the task we could probably utilize the resources (hardware) much better and could advance the industry forward considerably. 

[79wjd]

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

I wouldn't say devs are ahead. It's more like devs hope the hardware will brute force the shit out of their shoddy coding. If they were up to the task we could probably utilize the resources (hardware) much better and could advance the industry forward considerably.

My point still stands regardless of how you look at it. 

 

Either theyre developing for hardware that isn't available yet or GPU makers push out capable hardware which just leads to shitty coding. I personally think it's a little of both. 

[Celmor]

Had hoped Oneplus wouldn't be going the route trying to make their phone slimmer, adding a camera bumb and lowering battery capacity...

Even though camera seems to be quite good I'd rather have a phone like the OP3 but in a package like the Moto droid turbo so smaller but 1080p OLED screen, high battery capacity and management and rather ergonomic shaped than trying to like good while trying to slip out of my hand.

[Kimmers]

I had a pentile 720p display and it was truly awful. Samsung got around to using full RGBs with their 1080ps and then reverted back to PenTile on 1440p which in fairness isn't noticeable.

 

Either way, pentile should die

[LAwLz]

27 minutes ago, Kimmers said:

I had a pentile 720p display and it was truly awful. Samsung got around to using full RGBs with their 1080ps and then reverted back to PenTile on 1440p which in fairness isn't noticeable.

 

Either way, pentile should die

The Galaxy S 4 (their first 1920x1080 phone) was pentile too. I don't think Samsung have had any full RGB SAMOLED displays since the Galaxy S 2 with its 480x800 display.

[Deletist_Jerk]

I wish they had CDMA support. That's my only complaint. 

 

 

 

[Trixanity]

37 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

The Galaxy S 4 (their first 1920x1080 phone) was pentile too. I don't think Samsung have had any full RGB SAMOLED displays since the Galaxy S 2 with its 480x800 display.

The Note 2 (also a correction to my previous calling out of Note 4 as a RGB display) had some kind of RGB but in some freakish implementation. 

Quote

From Anandtech:

With Galaxy Note 2, Samsung has gone with an entirely new subpixel rendering matrix, which I’ve heard was going to be called S Stripe. Instead of the previous PenTile tech which used two subpixels per logical pixel (either RG or BG), this new subpixel geometry uses 3 subpixels per pixel (RGB) but with a green subpixel above the red subpixel and a long vertical blue subpixel.

And they do use RGB on their large Galaxy S Tab series (tablets that is, but maybe those are irrelevant to the discussion).

Both the S and S2 has RGB on the larger versions (roughly 10") whereas the smaller (roughly 8") use PenTile.

Say roughly because the screen sizes vary a little bit and because the aspect ratios are different (Tab S = 16:10 vs Tab S2 = 4:3)

 

Although I guess that I should clarify that Note 2 and the Tab S series are referred to as "RGB-like" so it's not like conventional RGB. It's all some form of S Stripe but, while not conventional, it is still RGB and 3 subpixels even if shaped weirdly.

 

Picture of the Galaxy Tab S 10.5" subpixels from Anandtech

Spoiler

 

[Kimmers]

5 hours ago, LAwLz said:

The Galaxy S 4 (their first 1920x1080 phone) was pentile too. I don't think Samsung have had any full RGB SAMOLED displays since the Galaxy S 2 with its 480x800 display.

Oh. I thought super amoled plus eventually got to the 1080p panels. 

[Senzelian]

On 14.6.2016 at 8:13 PM, Lehti said:

I own a OnePlus X and I have to admit I'm quite disappointed in the way OP is handling the updates. I haven't seen a security patch in months and in all honesty I gave up hope on ever seeing Marshmallow on it.

I recently got the update to Marshmallow on my OP2 and you can get a free copy of it on OnePlus' site. You just have to flash it yourself.

[Lehti]

2 hours ago, Senzelian said:

I recently got the update to Marshmallow on my OP2 and you can get a free copy of it on OnePlus' site. You just have to flash it yourself.

You see, I'm one of those persons that likes installing OSs on their PCs, but want their phones to "just work".

[ShadowCaptain]

1 hour ago, Lehti said:

You see, I'm one of those persons that likes installing OSs on their PCs, but want their phones to "just work".

Yaeh thats why my daily driver is an iPhone 6

 

I plan on getting an OP3 or something similar as a secondary device, for fucking around with, but I cant deal with android as something to rely on

[suicidalfranco]

7 minutes ago, ShadowCaptain said:

Yaeh thats why my daily driver is an iPhone 6

 

I plan on getting an OP3 or something similar as a secondary device, for fucking around with, but I cant deal with android as something to rely on

Pick the Axon 7 instead, 50 dollars more gets you a better display and an mSD card slot. Also it's DayDream ready if you ever want to try google's vision for VR, also ZTE is a bigger, older and established company and provides a better customer support across the globe.

[ShadowCaptain]

1 minute ago, suicidalfranco said:

Pick the Axon 7 instead, 50 dollars more gets you a better display and an mSD card slot. Also it's DayDream ready if you ever want to try google's vision for VR, also ZTE is a bigger, older and established company and provides a better customer support across the globe.

The Axon and Mi5 are both on my radar

Not seen much on the Axon here in the UK regarding price or release