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Garmin MIP / AMOLED Palette

DaveBrillhart
1 day ago

I got fed up with the palette rendering on my MIP device. So I created a field to display all 64 fixed HEX values in a grid on all Garmin devices.

I have an EDGE 1050 AMOLED and a Forerunner 955 8-bit MIP.

The EDGE 1050 looks the same in the simulator, using the device snapshot feature, and to the human eye with a moderate backlight.

HOWEVER, while FR955's device snapshot looks the same as the simulator, it doesn't look the same to the human eye. I took a photo of the field's output and adjusted the photo so that this photo looks the same as it does in real life.

Disclaimer - I understand that different MIP devices render colors differently, so my FR955's display might not look the same as your Instinct or D2 or Venu.

Anyway, this might help some of you trying to pick contrasting colors that work well on an actual MIP display. For example, I need a nice light -vs- dark Orange. I can't use the simulator or a snapshot taken by the FR955... I need to pick from the photograph.

I sorted the HEX codes into color categories. Here is a table that shows which HEX value is rendered in the data field's grid positions. Grays, Blues, Greens, Purples, Reds, Yellows.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h1FF_-jGhttxPTIl7FJHenJtREbh57LzgM3Ts9gGbuQ/edit?usp=sharing

Here is the field, once it is approved, in the next couple days, which will render these 64 HEX codes on every CIQ device.

https://apps.garmin.com/apps/ff11a00c-b563-45d5-9cff-c9feff6b5f5e

  • 1 day ago

    I don‘t wanna be the smart guy, and it has no relevance to the purpose of this thread, but:
    EDGE 1050 does not have an AMOLED display. It‘s a LCD.

    AMOLED: light emitting diods (no backlight needed)
    LCD: Liquid cristall display with backlight 

  • 1 day ago in reply to mcinner1

    Oh thanks!! Is that the only Garmin device with an LCD? Love the display. They set the default to no backlight at least initially, which rendered the display black as if it was turned off LOL. Requires full time backlight to see anything. i wonder if the AMOLED colors are as vibrant and true to what most monitors display for the same HEX codes?

  • 1 day ago in reply to DaveBrillhart
    DaveBrillhart said:
    Is that the only Garmin device with an LCD?

    All Edge devices have LCD.

    Edge 1030 and 1040 series have a special kind LCD - transflective LCD: this means, there is an extra reflective layer under the cristall layer, which enables the use of the device without backlight in sunlight. Therefore Edge 1030 and 40 have good colors and visibility in bright light. But disadvantage: dull colors in dark sourrounding when backlight needed.

    Edge 1050 has a „normal“ LCD, but very bright backlight is possible. That makes this device better than predecessors.

    Amoled colors are vibrant and true (most mobile phones have it), but not as bright as Edge 1050.

  • 12 hours ago in reply to DaveBrillhart

    I think that it even depends on the monitor you're using with your computer. OK, probably nowadays most decent monitors would have a fairly accurate color displayed, but it's not hard to see that almost any 2 monitors, phones, tablets that are not the exact same "part number" will have different colors.

    Regarding the RGB values: as long as you display the exact RGB values of the palette a device has, (unless there's a bug in the simulator.json) the screenshot of the simulator and the real device will look the same, when you look at the same monitor. And yes, this would even be true the other way around: if you create a CIQ app that displays a png image on the real device, and you send it the screenshot that was taken in the simulator, then it would look the same (faint) colors on the MIP display, as the same screen that you took the picture of.

    But all the above only applies when your image only uses colors from the palette the device has! If you's try to display an RGB color that is not in the palette of a MIP device, then it'll 1st be "rounded" to the nearest color in the palette, and then you'll see whatever you see on the real device (and if you took a screenshot and look at it on your desktop computer, then it would look "better" than on the MIP display, but it wouldn't look the same as the original picture that you tried to display, because some of the colors were "rounded" to the palette colors.

    Anyway, I also learned this the hard way, when I tried to pick colors for the Wordle Plus, which on a MIP display look totally different than on the Mac I use the simulator. And then I didn't talk yet about the 8 color fr55 :) which interestingly is the most popular device (23%) amongst the users. Apparently it "pays off" to support devices that are hard to support, because there are less competing apps.