Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Eldar on N8's display problem

Handset makers can buy displays complete with inbuilt system management incl. controller and driver, which are written by the company producing the screens. Some handset producers buy just the panel, some buy the panel and the system management but without the drivers. Nokia took their own path and bought the displays with the system management but wrote their own drivers based on the original one created by the makers of the screen.
The incorrect display of colours is a problem within the microchip containing the driver, which is built into the display and cannot be replaced by a Nokia Care Point without replacing the whole display. The cause of the incorrect display of colours is the incorrect calibration of the display. There is no explanation why the first batches had no issues with the display and how it only appeared later, but it definitely has to be a change in the driver. It is possible that the driver was being rewritten for the ClearBlack displays developed by Nokia which have an additional polarised layern and require a different calibration. It is however impossible to explain how this driver could end up on displays intended for other handset models."

I definitely do not possess the expertise to judge how realistic this explanation is. Assuming the above is more or less correct, the most frustrating part is that despite the cause of the problem being a software issue it can only be rectified by a hardware part replacement, i.e. we cannot expect this to be resolved by a patch in future firmware releases.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...