If you use light ambiances a lot, you might’ve noticed that the Jolla Phone display has a weird sharpening effect that adds a “halo” around certain elements and makes them look “crunchy”, like dark text on light backgrounds. It’s hard to show it in a photo, but if you noticed it you know what I’m talking about. Fortunately, there is an easy way to disable it. It’s going to make some text look softer, but in my opinion it’s still an improvement. If you don’t like it you can easily revert it.
Disable sharpening effect
- Make sure you have Developer Mode enabled
- Run this in the terminal
devel-su /system/bin/setprop persist.vendor.sys.pq.disp.tdshp.bypass 1 reboot - After the phone reboots the sharpening should be gone
Explanation
The phone chipset’s display engine has several image processing stages. One of them is called TDSHP, and it’s responsible for sharpness. It’s enabled by default, it’s configurable (/vendor/etc/cust_pq.xml) but the shipped configuration is just MediaTek’s defaults. persist.vendor.sys.pq.disp.tdshp.bypass allows bypassing the sharpening stage entirely, so that’s what we do.
Reverting the changes
devel-su
/system/bin/setprop persist.vendor.sys.pq.disp.tdshp.bypass 0
reboot
Tweaking
Completely bypassing sharpening works but there are also ways to configure sharpness. There are two other properties: persist.vendor.sys.pq.dshp.en and persist.vendor.sys.pq.shp.idx. The former is responsible for “dynamic sharpness”, it either can be enabled (which is the default) or disabled if you set the property to 0. The latter can be used to configure sharpness level directly, it accepts values from 0 to 9, where 9 is the strongest level.
You can try disabling dynamic sharpness and experimenting with sharpness level, for example by setting it to 1:
devel-su
/system/bin/setprop persist.vendor.sys.pq.disp.tdshp.bypass 0
/system/bin/setprop persist.vendor.sys.pq.dshp.en 0
/system/bin/setprop persist.vendor.sys.pq.shp.idx 1
reboot
I found that even at 1 the sharpening was too strong, so I just left it disabled completely. To reset everything back to default:
devel-su
/system/bin/setprop persist.vendor.sys.pq.disp.tdshp.bypass 0
/system/bin/setprop persist.vendor.sys.pq.dshp.en 1
/system/bin/setprop persist.vendor.sys.pq.shp.idx 2
reboot
You can also try editing /vendor/etc/cust_pq.xml if you’re bored, there might be a way to get perfect sharpness levels
