Does your HTC Desire/Nexus One have an AMOLED screen or a Super LCD screen? Here’s how to tell the difference.
After a few hours of pulling my hair out digging around in the system files in an attempt to find a way to determine if someone’s HTC Desire has an AMOLED screen or a Super LCD screen, I realized there was a much easier way to tell the difference.
An AMOLED screen doesn’t actually display the color black at all, it simply turns off any pixel that is supposed to be pure black.
An LCD screen, on the other hand, does actively render the color black.
As such, an AMOLED screen displaying a black pixel looks exactly the same as an AMOLED screen that’s “turned off”, while an LCD screen looks decidedly different.
So, if you open photoshop/paint/whatever, and make an image that’s totally black, (hex code #000000), or just use this one I’ve so helpfully provided, it will look a lot different on an AMOLED screen than it does on an LCD.
This is black.
This is that very same image displayed on a Nexus One, with an AMOLED screen (left) and a Dell Streak, with an LCD screen (right), in the dark.
And both off, in darkness.
Note the AMOLED Nexus One looks the same, where it’s obvious when the Streak’s screen is on.
Now in normal light. Both powered on. Nexus One on the left, Streak on the right.
And again powered off.
Again, you can clearly tell when the Streak’s LCD screen is powered on, but the Nexus One’s AMOLED screen looks the same. This should be a pretty easy indicator as to which screen you have.