Do all official Garmin watch faces in the Connect IQ pixel shift?

It's stated that not all watch face developers code their watch faces to pixel shift.  Do all official Garmin developed watch faces pixel shift so it's safe to use and not have burn in worries?

  • Modern Garmin watches actually use occasional dimming of the leds (at the level of the firmware) to reduce the chance of burn in.

    I havent seen any connect iq watch faces developed by "garmin" that pixel shift, but there are watch faces by 3rd party developers that have it or provide it as an option. 

    I think pixel shifting/jumping is still a useful option so I provide a jump time mode as aod option in my Connect iq watch faces

  • Can't speak for watchfaces, but more than one dev has observed automatic pixel shifting in native activities. According to one report, this can be seen by developing a data field with a white background (which you're not supposed to do for AMOLED) and adding it to a 1-field layout so it takes up the whole screen. You should see a tiny sliver of black background appear to move between all the edges of the screen (top, bottom, left and right), which would indicate that the entire contents of the display are being periodically shifted.

  • off topic…
    My two cents on pixelshift on OLED devices as a victim of burn in on 2 OLED TVs with pixelshift:
    it's just a cosmetic soothing pill, but in reality no protection against burn in, as the screen content is only shifted by a few pixels. This means that the main component of each object is always present in the same place. The result of pixelshift is merely a burn-in that is not sharply defined.
    Pixelshift would have to be like screen savers - but that's -of course- is not possible.

  • I agree that shifting just 1 pixel won't have much of a desired effect if you have more than 1 pixel wide content :)

    Pixelshift would have to be like screen savers - but that's -of course- is not possible.

    For aod this is perfectly possible if you just show time and jump all over the place :)

  • With a watch face on an AMOLED device. turning off AOD for general use, in effect is a screen saver, as the display is black most of the time, and only comes on for a short time after something like a gesture.  You'll also see a much longer battery life with AOD off - I see about 3x the battery in days.  It may take a few days to get used to though. For me, I prefer the longer battery life.

    With my watch faces I stuck with the original rules - no more than 10% of the pixels on, and no pixel on for more than 3 minutes.  If the firmware on newer devices does something more, or the display is more forgiving, that's fine, , but it keeps the code simpler to just use the same set of rules for all devices.  I've not gotten a complaint from a single user, I have WFs with 100k-600k downloads.

  • I agree that shifting just 1 pixel won't have much of a desired effect if you have more than 1 pixel wide content :)

    I wonder if this is why Fenix 8 watchfaces have digits that go from solid numerals to outlines when switching to "low-power" mode. I see a lot of complaints about this in the Fenix 8 forums.