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Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

With the proliferation of nonstandard RGB Bayer Matrices in consumer devices, sub-pixel anything seems dicey until we have an effective device awareness/translation layer.

I'm thinking we might make it to 8K screens before that level of coordination happens.

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Empirically, people can't manage even gamma properly, so imagining device dependent spatial orientation aware xforms seems like a stretch.

I mostly agree with you, especially for OLED. The use of "pentile", vert RGB, RGBY, and RGBW of various rotations makes it a pain. However, they already do super-resolution, transport compression, local dimming and other tricks in the display driver/TCONs. So something like this might be done locally, but you might also end up with weird results since just a couple of days ago a web demo on HN managed to screw up LCD pixel inversion. It's a case where there's rarely enough profit margin in doing something right in HW, while it can be done correctly in SW.

This isn’t about 3×1 red/green/blue subpixels, though it could be applied to it; the article only mentions that once. Rather, it’s about calculations at fidelity below one pixel, which turn out to be important for accurate and pleasant results even without ClearType-style rendering, especially if you’re animating size or position changes. I kinda wish variants of the last half-dozen paragraphs had been at the start also, to give context.

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