Subpixel Text Encoding
msarnoff.org
msarnoff.org
I absolutely adore anything about taking advantages of fine details in visual technology to get out that last few percent of performance or to encode or discover things hidden in plain site, that's a major motivation of my crafting hobby.
I could almost understand this argument when Microsoft started abandoning ClearType, although somewhat later, with the Metro user interface, with the explanation that tablets could be rotated freely and the layout had to be continuously re-adjusted.
Apart from that, only once in my life I've encountered a non-RGB LCD monitor: it had a BGR arrangement. With the default ClearType settings, text looked blurry and edges exhibited horrible color aberration. I think no one else ever understood what was wrong with it, so it was mostly relegated to a closet. Shame on you, Philips: there was no reason at all to pick an inverted order for your subpixels.
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Now that I remember, Sharp also did something funky on its Aquos TVs: they had a fourth, yellow subpixel. ClearType only ever supported R, G and B, so it would have worked poorly on them. I don't think many people ever tried to use them as PC monitors with 4:4:4 chroma to notice, though.
Ended up writing a blog post about it: https://blog.jackgaino.dev/is-this-a-bgr-i-see-before-me
It breaks screenshots when viewed on another device. It breaks any kind of scaling.
So it was a lot of effort for something that broke a lot of assumptions, and mostly made irrelevant with the advent of hi-DPI screens.