It's to do with the way the pixels are coloured.
On a normal colour LCD screen, each pixel is actually made up of three sub-pixels, one each of red, green and blue. So although the stated resolution might be 1024x600, because of the sub-pixels, it's "really" 3072x600.
So on an ordinary colour LCD screen, five pixels look like this if we look closely enough:
lll lll lll lll lll
note that the pixels are square, each made up of three tall sub-pixels of Red, Green and Blue.
The Pixel Qi screen does it completely differently. It doesn't have sub-pixels at all. Only square pixels at around 200dpi. This, obviously, works fine for black and white. It the adding in of colour that's clever. The same five pixel shown above look like this on a Pixel Qi screen:
• • • • •
(well, except they're square, not round)
Yes - each pixel can only be a shade of one colour, not any colour. The colours are off-set on each row, so the colours appear as diagonal lines across the screen like this - depicting four rows of eight pixels:
• • • • • • • •
• • • • • • • •
• • • • • • • •
• • • • • • • •
Note that each block of four pixels does contain at least one pixel each of red, green and blue. So the colour resolution of the screen is at worst half that of the black and white screen.
In practice, because our eyes are much better at shade compared to colour, it's almost as good as 200dpi colour.
It's very clever - a much better trick than the old ZX Spectrum colour screen :-)
Quote:
Originally Posted by ProDigit
Yes, I saw it in the movie yesterday (after the post); thanks for correcting!
The color mode is like laptops but for some reason the B&W (non backlit) resolution is rated higher.
I wonder how they get to these measurements that B&W has a higher resolution than color?
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