Custom Wallpaper

[NDRisk]

Has anyone else tried changing their wallpaper to one of their own photos? If so, did you also find that the result was very blurry, despite the photo being of a high resolution?

I'd really like to use some of my own photos. I was thinking that maybe cutting them to the right size using photoshop would help, but I realized I have no idea what size the wallpapers would be. Does anyone know?

[Psyke]

well, the screen resolution is 1024x600 (or 600x1024, depending on how you look at it , but I don't know if that would reflect the size of a wallpaper because it pans a bit to both the right and left due to the multiple desktops. best bet would be to take a look at one of the wallpapers on the device and see what resolution it's set as.

[enoeske]

I set one of my shots as the background. It gives you window to crop the area you want as the bg. Its almost square because it pans left and right. Mine looks pretty good. I don't notice any blurriness. I can tell you that smooth gradients look like crap, though. I was hoping to show off some photos on the nice display, but anything with a real smooth gradient looks really bad.

I'm using this (square crop just left of center) currently, and it looks good.


This is an example of a photo that looks really bad. The model is fine, but the background is a splotchy mess of rings instead of a smooth gradient.

[pokee]

I have one of my hi res. photos set as wallpaper and it looks pretty bad...

[Psyke]

actually, even looking at hi-res photo's in the gallery doesn't work very well; I put a large 3888x2592 photo of my daughter where I can zoom right into her face on my pc and see it with absolute clarity, but not so with the Vox, which becomes very distorted. If you want to make a proper wall paper, you're going to do it on your desktop then transfer it over to the vox.

Now, I was reading something for android phones that should be applicable to tablets; When cropping/resizing a photo, you should double your width, so if the resolution of the screen is 1024x600, then your photo should be 1024x1200, so as to provide overlap to the side screens.. am going to try it out with the same photo to see how it works...

update - yup..difference was night and day. I mean, you still lose a bit of crispness when you crop a photo, but as long as you have a high enough quality photo to begin with (and I'm sure I'd have even more success if I went back to the raw version of the photo), it should be much better than the cropping that the vox does; I don't know if this is a problem specific to the vox or if it's an gingerbread problem in general.. it just can't seem to zoom into a photo and re-render it properly..

[NDRisk]

Originally Posted by Psyke

actually, even looking at hi-res photo's in the gallery doesn't work very well; I put a large 3888x2592 photo of my daughter where I can zoom right into her face on my pc and see it with absolute clarity, but not so with the Vox, which becomes very distorted. If you want to make a proper wall paper, you're going to do it on your desktop then transfer it over to the vox.

Now, I was reading something for android phones that should be applicable to tablets; When cropping/resizing a photo, you should double your width, so if the resolution of the screen is 1024x600, then your photo should be 1024x1200, so as to provide overlap to the side screens.. am going to try it out with the same photo to see how it works...

update - yup..difference was night and day. I mean, you still lose a bit of crispness when you crop a photo, but as long as you have a high enough quality photo to begin with (and I'm sure I'd have even more success if I went back to the raw version of the photo), it should be much better than the cropping that the vox does; I don't know if this is a problem specific to the vox or if it's an gingerbread problem in general.. it just can't seem to zoom into a photo and re-render it properly..

I tried this, didn't seem to work... are you loading the wallpaper using gallery? I cropped the photo to 1024x1200, loaded it using gallery, stretched the box to fit the whole picture, and the background came out looking fuzzy.

[Psyke]

Originally Posted by NDRisk

I tried this, didn't seem to work... are you loading the wallpaper using gallery? I cropped the photo to 1024x1200, loaded it using gallery, stretched the box to fit the whole picture, and the background came out looking fuzzy.

that's exactly what I did; took the 3888x2592 photo on my PC, cropped a portion of it using paint to reflect 1024x1200, transferred it to the VOX via SDcard, opened it in Galery, chose set as wallpaper, set the borders to full(which fit perfectly) and all was good.. I'll see if I can get a screen shot difference of the two tonight.

[NDRisk]

I tried it again with some other photos, and some worked better than others. I've found the original photo really has to be fully focused and crisp when you look at them full size (actual pixels) or else they can still end up fuzzy.

[Psyke]

Originally Posted by NDRisk

I tried it again with some other photos, and some worked better than others. I've found the original photo really has to be fully focused and crisp when you look at them full size (actual pixels) or else they can still end up fuzzy.

definitely helps, and the less compressed the photo, the better (ie using a raw file instead of a jpg file as a source). The picture I had taken of my daughter was on a bright clear day so I got good, fast, clear shot of her despite her movement. The cars in the background did end up looking crappier when zoomed in, but that was to be expected.