I bought a Nexus One a few weeks ago. I'll probably put up a review type thing eventually, there's some stuff I love about it and some stuff that bugs me. But right now I just wanted to put up some information about DisplayMate.com's Nexus One OLED Shoot-Out that makes it sound like the Nexus One's screen is crappy.
The report does a lot of analysis that is probably accurate, but unfortunately most people just look at the screenshots on the page which are very misleading to the point that it seems intentional. The report shows an image of the mars sunset on both the iPhone and the Nexus One. The iPhone's looks accurate, although with washed out colors. The Nexus One looks abysmal. Instead of a nice smooth gradual change in colors, you get rough bands of color -- a problem with too few colors termed "banding".
It's pretty shocking stuff, and a very serious problem with the Nexus One's screen, except for, it isn't. As I'm sure all Nexus One owners who read the report did, I fired up my browser and went to the mars sunset i mage to find that it looked perfectly fine. I immediately got pissed off and yelled out "SHENANIGANS!" Later, and after a few skimmings of forums, I realized that the report didn't photoshop the images, but had opened them in Android's Gallery application. Because of a bug/limitation with Gallery, the images show up with the messy banded colors just like in the report. The problem is the report makes people believe it is a hardware limitation with the screen, and also explicitly says they used the web browser when in reality it is just a problem with Gallery or an underlying library that Gallery uses.
So, with that said, here's some shots I took. They're not perfectly focused but I think they do a decent job of showing that the Nexus One displays images just fine.
Also, I put together a little Youtube video demonstrating how the image looks fine until opened in Gallery. Make sure you watch it in high def otherwise you'll see a lot of banding in all images due to Youtube's compression.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmLJrrZ5Zt4




