I seem to be alone in this opinion but the Tidbyt 2s look exactly how I thought it would with a pixel diffuser compared to my Tidbyt 1s. Maybe I had different expectations since I also own a LaMetric which uses the same style of diffuser-type display.
There is definitely a distance piece, the diffuser is suited for being a couple of feet away as the best viewing angle, which also happens to be my use case.
I donât know how else to say this but Gen2 is a failure.
I love my Gen1 and I just turned on my new Gen2 and the screen is an abomination.
I tried to remove a non existing screen protector even being OK with scratching a small part of it if there wasnât a screen protector. And there wasnât a screen protector.
I cannot use this Gen2 and hopefully it is possible to get a refund otherwise I think I threw $180 in the trash.
How could this happened? Did you guys have a beta test? Iâd love to talk to those beta testers what were they thinking?
I hear a lot of people with unrealistic expectations complaining about a perfectly acceptable display. The sharper and clearer is a reference to not seeing the individual pixels, this means each pixel is slightly diffused (aka slightly blurred) so theat each pixel merges with the ones next to it. This makes for an image that, at a distance, smoother and less pixelated.
Read your Kickstarter agreement, you made a contribution to support a company and they gave you a gift, meaning they do not need to give anyone a refund.
You are not alone, this is a very, very, small fraction of people compared with the numbers that contributed. Most people seem to be happy with it because they understand what the term diffused means.
Are you saying that âsharperâ and âdiffusedâ are the same thing? Ugh.
By sharp they are saying there is a straight edge to the graphic made possible by the diffusion instead of it being a point light source. The single point lights make for a wavier line. You can see in the image how one has a straight line and the other is chopped up and does not blend together. Sharper pixel vs sharper object.
Oh I do have the ability to figure things out.
And by the number of unhappy customers posting here and on Kickstarter how much they hate the new screen, my ability tells me this was a major screw up.
You can twist things as much as you want but it is not going to make the customers like the screen they donât like. This was a failure. I donât know how it happened but it sure did.
It seems like a lot but it really is not. Disgruntled people just scream more.
Theyâre not âdisgruntledâ. They have been misled into buying a device with a promised sharper screen and received a device with an ugly blurred screen.
No one bought a product, they invested in a project. There is a difference. It is the way Kickstarter works. You hope for the best and you get what you get with the developers doing what they can to try and deliver what the goal was. Maybe they will come up with a different diffuser that will be more satisfying but for now it is what it is. There is a limit to what you can get from individual LEDs. If people cannot handle this they should not use Kickstarter.
Agree I would never use Kickstarter for a company I didnât have any experience with. I have heard too many horror Kickstart stories.
However I really like the GEN1. Itâs awesome. Sometimes a bit hard to read. The Tidbyt company had been great so far. So when they promised a GEN2 with a sharper display I jumped on-board. Huge disappointment.
This goes along with the decision of launching the simulator app and charging a fee. Customers complained and they made it free.
Perhaps decisions are being made too fast? Not enough thinking before commiting to something?
My problem is with the people who donât know how Kickstarter works and are asking for refunds. At least you are not one of them. You just happen to be the one engaging.
We did not receive what was shown/promised and is not of good quality without damaging the unit to remove the top cover. Further, your claims that most people seem to be happy is a wild assumption because 1) not everyone reads these forums or posts in them and 2) these units are just now being sent out. I almost wonder if you are either an employee posing as a customer or just out here to troll-people did not receive what was promised and Kickstarter investments do not give creators/providers carte blanche immunity for shipping poor products.
Looks like removing the diffuser does indeed improve (or at least makes it feel like the Gen1) on this issue:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TIDBYT/comments/1fbk66d/defuser_removed_wow_i_love_the_v2_looks_amazing/
and some useful info on what a different diffuser could look like:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TIDBYT/comments/1fb835u/diffuser_example/
I have my grievances with Tidbyt as a whole but I feel lots of people were unaware about the nature of this new version (I did not buy nor do I intend to) The whole point of the display was that it was softer, in this case pixels blend instead of being space in between. I am honestly trying to apply the same technique to my Gen 1. There is a community post about folks trying that out. Surprisingly someone got a good very sharp effect just by using tracing paper Layout customization + Clear acrylic glass - Feature Requests - Tidbyt
The thing here is that it looks like, maybe in the Tidbyt 2 production, the diffusion wasnât applied that well. Poor quality control as I see, from photo examples on reddit, blurriness vary wildly from user to user. Like with diffusion layer you do and should expect some softness, its the whole point of it. However it does look too blurry. Specially next to example of projects done with Adafruit kits:
PS. Guys, please do read carefully the product descriptions of the things that catch your eye online before buying it. Especially when the thing you are buying is in the 3 digits realm. It is crazy to me that some people thought it was gonna be OLED 8bit level type stuff, when displays like this are soft by design. Or that even thought it was a peelable protector. Although those with clearly faulty units had all the rights to think so (I am not letting them off the hook for the poor Quality Control tho)
This is within the realms of what a typical led display with diffusion looks like:
This unacceptable in my opinion. It is crazy that all of these are the same product but came out of the same factory looking differently.
It will be interesting to see which âversionâ gets shipped to me, I hope itâs the first picture and not the last 2 ! The heat gun procedure looks scary to say the least from the post from the reddit thread.
Quality control really ? Oh noâŚ
Just received 2x of the gen2; unboxed and setup the first. The second was originally destined to be a birthday gift but the delay put that out of the window - not that Iâm blaming anyone for that, Iâd rather have a better final device. Unfortunately, I now have two pieced of blurry junk.
I keep looking back at the one in my office trying to decide if I can just mentally switch to expecting âretro CRTâ - but itâs just so bad!
I know kickstarter is to back a project not to buy a product (as another posy mentioned), but it really is horrible. Does anyone have a link that really describes the surgery required to change the diffuser before I just drop these in the bin?
Thanks!
https://www.reddit.com/r/TIDBYT/comments/1fbk66d/defuser_removed_wow_i_love_the_v2_looks_amazing/
Thanks to TNLNYC above for posting this link. This looks a scary process to say the least and the LED board looks more obvious if you take off the front as done here. As you see he took off an LED during the process. A better solution perhaps would have been to make a clip on / off diffuser ?
Oric can you post some photos would be interesting to compare with others.
The fact that this topic has the most action on this blog tells you that there is an issue. Iâm very disappointed and shocked this is what they decided the upgrade would be. You can get rid of the pixels and still have a clearer screen. Feels like Iâm watching through plastic!
