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> C#, Mango, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7.5, WP7 > Death to banding: Windows Phone devs, please upgrade your apps to 32 BitsPerPixel
Death to banding: Windows Phone devs, please upgrade your apps to 32 BitsPerPixel
I’m sure that you’ve noticed this banding effect in your application as soon as you used gradient brush or image resources.
So here is a less known feature that Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” introduced to fix color bandings.
The magic attribute is BitsPerPixel="32" inside the App tag of WMAppManifest.xml.
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<Deployment xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/windowsphone/2009/deployment” AppPlatformVersion=”7.1″>
<App xmlns=”” BitsPerPixel=”32″ …
That’s it!
You may ask why runs WP7 in 16-bit color?
Reasons:
– Battery life
– Performance (half as much data to move around)
– Memory (back buffers are half the size)
– Widest compatibility (not all displays used by manufacturers can handle 24/32-bit)
– Very few apps need more than 16-bit
So Windows Phone defaults to 16-bit, and apps can opt-in to 32-bit (but they may not always get it due to hardware limits).
Categories: C#, Mango, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7.5, WP7
Windows Phone 7 developers 
Nice graphics, makes devs easily appreciate WHY they might want to do this change. And I also liked your reasons of why WP7 is doing it the “other” way. Thanks.
If your readers are looking for code they can run, I have a similar blog as well. Hope you don’t mind sharing with your readers.
http://www.pchenry.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/456/Battle-of-the-Bands-with-WP7-and-Image-Banding.aspx