OnePlus 5T doesn't have the "jelly" scrolling issue of its predecessor

by Milen Yanachkov / Nov 17, 2017, 5:45 AM

The jelly effect in action

One of the main and most wide-spread complaints about the otherwise stellar OnePlus 5 was the so-called "jelly" scrolling effect that affected each and every unit of the model. It was a stretching effect of sorts, that could be easily noticed when items on the display were moving vertically—e.g.. when scrolling a webpage, for example—and was reportedly caused by the display panel of the OnePlus 5 being mounted upside down. Apparently, according to a number of reports, the display was mounted upside down in order to make room for the new dual-camera system, and as such was irreparable.

However, things seem to be different with the new OnePlus 5T. After the kernel source for the phone was released, the folks over at XDA were able to dig through it and determined that the display panel of the OnePlus 5T is not flipped. With the OP5, there were lines of code instructing the phone to display content upside down, so as to appear the right way on its flipped screen, while no such code is present in the OnePlus 5T kernel source. This gives us a good reason to believe that the display of the OP5T indeed has a regular orientation, which would also mean that it won't be exhibiting the "jelly" scrolling effect that plagued the OnePlus 5.

source: XDA

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7 Comments

1. Zack_2014

Posts: 677; Member since: Mar 25, 2014

Anyone has the technical knowledge here to explain why that jelly effect happens?

posted on Nov 17, 2017, 6:15 AM 2

2. Nathan_ingx

Posts: 4766; Member since: Mar 07, 2012

Maybe a panel has an up and down,right and left orientation by default. I mentioned right and left because, I don't know if this is only me, I noticed a slight rainbow/prism like effect when I hold my phone on landscape, the other side. Usually, people tilt the top part of the phone to the left and the bottom to the right, but when i switch that around, I noticed the effect, mostly while playing games. And this happened to both my Xperia SP with TFT LCD and with my current OP3, which is an AMOLED.

posted on Nov 17, 2017, 6:25 AM 0

3. Cat97

Posts: 1728; Member since: Mar 02, 2017

It's probably beacause the algorithms to reverse the image at all times (such that the panel would always function upside down) cause some computing/graphics/memory buffer overhead which results in this laggy behavior.

posted on Nov 17, 2017, 6:38 AM 0

4. Milen_Y

Posts: 111; Member since: Jun 09, 2016

If I'm not mistaken, it comes down to the fact that displays normally refresh from top to bottom, whereas on the OnePlus 5, since the panel is flipped, it is refreshing from the bottom up. This creates the illusion that the image is stretching when scrolling vertically. You can try reproducing it on a different phone by turning it upside down and scrolling a webpage, for example.

posted on Nov 17, 2017, 6:44 AM 2

7. KingSam

Posts: 1346; Member since: Mar 13, 2016

I just flipped my phone and upside down and it's jelly!!! LCD panel. Kinda cool.

posted on Nov 17, 2017, 5:07 PM 1

5. sachouba

Posts: 261; Member since: Jun 08, 2014

The reason why there is jelly effect is because an AMOLED (LCD too, maybe) display is updated line by line. It means that the top of the display is updated before the bottom of the display. It also means that all displays have jelly effect! When a display is mounted upside down (like on the OnePlus 5), the bottom of the panel is updated before the top. The issue is that your brain is used to seeing panels that are updated from top to bottom, so you usually can't see jelly effect. But when the display is upside down, your brain isn't used to it, so it exacerbates the problem. You can see the jelly effect by putting your smartphone upside down and scrolling alternatively from top to bottom and from bottom to top, very fast.