Rearranging Pixels For Performance

tepes writes "From bottomquark, A new method of sub-pixel rendering could make monitors cheaper to produce. ClairVoyante Laboratories developed the PenTile Matrix, which uses five sub-pixels instead of the typical three, to take advantage of the fact that the human eye is more sensitive to blue colors."

Comments

It is not Blue

[hottoh]

The human eye is least sensitive to blue. It it most sensitive to green, followed by red then blue. R

Re:It is not Blue

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

All they had to do was open a computer graphics text book to the section on colour spaces.

Peaks are:
Red at 630nm, green at 530nm, and blue at 450nm.

Its kinda a bell curve at each, with green having greatest sensitivity, followed by red then blue.

The human eye can distinguish about 128 different hues, and about 130 different tints (source Computer Graphics, Prentice Hall 1986).

Mr Thinly Sliced

That is a horrible article, the source is better

[victim]

The linked article is awful. You will not understand PenTiles from it. Go to the source to get the facts.

Briefly...

• Human perception has lower spatial resolution for blue, so have fewer blue pixles. this has nothing to do with intensity sensitivity.
  
• Apparently the column drivers on an LCD cost more than the row drivers. I have no idea why, but I will accept that. The pentiles use twice as many row drivers for red and green to boost the spatial resolution without requiring more column drivers.
  
• Much like cleartype, they can position pixels on other than the natural boundaries to accomplish subpixel effects. The example on the page is a special case of a single white point. Mostly this will be useful for smoothing edges.

It is a really well written desription, it is a shame Design Engineering didn't have an writer that could understand it.