[Japhy Riddle] was tired of creating pixel art. He went to subpixel art. The idea is that since each color pixel is composed of three subpixels, your display is actually three times as dense as you…
In my experiments, each full pixel still takes 3 subpixels, but…
If you drop a white pixel at X coordinate, it renders 0xFFFFFF on the RGB subpixels.
But drop a white pixel on X+0.33, it renders on GBR.
Drop a white pixel on X+0.67, it renders on BRG.
All three are valid white full pixels, just offset by thirds.
I guess that would more appropriately be considered ‘fractional pixels’ or something though. Still neat that if used properly and creatively, it can yield higher resolution graphics, of sorts…
Those tricks are actually used pretty frequently in modern graphics stacks, especially around things with fine edges like text. In those cases it’s called “subpixel anti-aliasing”.
Of course that all falls apart if the display doesn’t use a normal subpixel layout. OLED displays usually have an unsupported subpixel layout. Some of them even have a white subpixel that’s not controllable by the computer, which makes subpixel anti-aliasing impossible.
I’ve lightly dabbled into subpixel art, sorta.
In my experiments, each full pixel still takes 3 subpixels, but…
If you drop a white pixel at X coordinate, it renders 0xFFFFFF on the RGB subpixels.
But drop a white pixel on X+0.33, it renders on GBR.
Drop a white pixel on X+0.67, it renders on BRG.
All three are valid white full pixels, just offset by thirds.
I guess that would more appropriately be considered ‘fractional pixels’ or something though. Still neat that if used properly and creatively, it can yield higher resolution graphics, of sorts…
Those tricks are actually used pretty frequently in modern graphics stacks, especially around things with fine edges like text. In those cases it’s called “subpixel anti-aliasing”.
Of course that all falls apart if the display doesn’t use a normal subpixel layout. OLED displays usually have an unsupported subpixel layout. Some of them even have a white subpixel that’s not controllable by the computer, which makes subpixel anti-aliasing impossible.
I returned my first oled because of this. It was maddening reading and writing, and made any graphic design impossible.
Bought a new one this year and they seem to have solved the problem.