Homebrew: A solution for the Post-NoDo 16 bit banding issue

1 min. read

Published on April 12, 2011

published on April 12, 2011

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We have written recently about an issue with the colour depth of many Windows Phones dropping after the NoDo update, leading to banding when viewing gradients (see the picture above provided by Robert Varga and ipda.cz )

It seems somewhat of a solution has been found on XDA-Developers, which does however require a developer-unlocked device.

It appears all that needed is a registry edit to 3 keys which will restore 32 but colour to most areas.

The keys and values involved are:

HKLM\Drivers\Display\Primary\PrimBPP dword 32
HKLM\Drivers\Display\Primary\bpp dword 32
HKLM\Drivers\Display\Primary\PanelBPP dword 24

It appears some values result in performance issues, like the reason why Microsoft reduced the colour depth in the first place.

Read more about the hack at XDA-Developers here.

Thanks Santi for the tip.

More about the topics: hack, nodo, windows phone 7

Surur Davids

Smartphone Expert

Surur Davids is the founder of WMPoweruser which later became MSPoweruser.com. He's a smartphone expert with over a decade of experience.