Apple Retina Display: Under the microscope comparisons with 1G and 3G (prometheus.med.utah.edu) |
Apple Retina Display: Under the microscope comparisons with 1G and 3G (prometheus.med.utah.edu) |
All natively rendered text in controls, etc., looks like it was printed in a magazine.
This display is going to be huge news once it hits the iPad and MacBook Pros.
Which is probably never. Those don't even reach the pixel density of the 2G/3G/3GS. 326ppi? That's already going to be pretty tall order on a 10" screen (the iPad currently stands at 132 ppi, assuming the form factor doesn't change we're talking about increasing the resolution by a factor of 2.5, pumping the resolution to an insane 2560x1920. We're talking about a resolution usually found on 30" computer screens here, and those things are still pretty much all between $1000 and $2000...).
The 13.3" macbook pro would have a 3712x2320 screen, the 15.4" would move up to 4200x2625 and the 17" would be sporting a 4000x3000 screen.
In 1995, the little point and shoot camera I owned could fit 36 pictures on a roll of film. My new little Sony point and shoot has an 8gb memory card. It can fit 1,500 pictures on a "roll of film," and the memory card is so small I could balance it on the tip of a finger. It also takes better quality pictures than any 35mm camera I have ever owned, has an internal GPS, and an an impressive amount of computing power, at least when it comes to image processing.
We are living in truly amazing times. Never say never :)
Both handhelds and desktops have been increasing in resolution, and decreasing in cost, for years. There's no reason for that trend to stop until all displays reach 'retinal indifference' at their usual viewing distance. I would not be surprised to see 4000x3000 LCDs in laptops in the next decade.
Never is a very long time. Is it really impossible that large high-DPI screens will exist in 5-10 years?
The verdict: slightly better crispness, comparable brightness, comparable color.
The industrial design of the iPhone 4G is superb compared to any other phone (or electronic device) I've seen. It's more comparable to what you'd expect to find in a watch.
I wonder what the effects of that are. It probably just makes the display a bit dimmer (if one were to use the same backlight).
Larger gaps alone implies dimmer, but this can be accounted for by having the pixels put out more light. Having larger gaps on a display doesn't mean it's dimmer, as the pixels have likely changed characteristics in the process of shrinking them.
I'm not quite saying that.
I'm saying the birth of those screens is so far away the current brands will very likely have been replaced a long time ago. Those densities on > 10"displays are pie in the sky dreams right now.
(Subpixel antialiasing seems unnecessary with resolutions like that. Heck, even any other kind of antialiasing is beginning to become unnecessary with resolutions like that.)
How would one calculate clarity? It seems it would be a subjective measurement... maybe they're looking at the phones from 10 feet away?
That's not entirely correct. 24" at 1920x1200 and 30" at 2560x1600 is something that's been there for years, and these days laptops are regressing rather than progressing: in 2005 I had colleagues with 15" laptops in 1920x1200, these days the majority seems to be 16/9 screens in stupid resolutions (1366x768 seems really common these days in entry-level laptops)
> Never is a mighty long time!
My never stands for the Macbooks, and probably the iPad as well. By the time we reach the ability to create such densities with acceptable yields on panes bigger than 10 inches, the current names will long have been retired.
(1976 68hp ) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/1977-1982...
(2010 177-hp to 271-hp on a v6) http://automobiles.honda.com/accord-sedan/exterior.aspx
Oh, and some other smartphones crossed into retinal indifference at their typical use distance sometime late last year.
http://www.mprove.de/diplom/text/3.1.8_lisa.html http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html
Contrast that with iOS. I only have a handful of non-built-in apps, but they all work perfectly on my iPhone 4, none look worse, and all but the graphics-intensive games look better. I haven't seen any reports yet of software that doesn't scale properly on the iPhone 4.
Apple's tight control of the iOS software marketplace may be a key factor in this success. They may have privately checked a large amount of the software submitted to the app store, and rejected apps which failed to scale properly.
I'm under the impression this isn't a problem. Scaling is a problem when you have bitmap images and try to scale from - say - an iPhone to an iPad. But on desktops, monitors aren't growing in size by a factor of ~2.77.
If you leave the screen size the same but increase the DPI, bitmaps will look exactly the same. They might seem visually out-of-place next to crisper UI elements. Is that what you mean?
Going full circle, though, the iPhone 4 has 2.3 times as many pixels as the Apple Lisa, has a full color screen, you can fit it in a pocket, and you don't have to hunt for a wall outlet when you want to use it.
Furthermore, AT&T's DSL speed has only exhibited a .15 Mbps CAGR over the past 5 years to its current peak of 6 Mbps. Comcast's average cable internet speeds were 6 Mbps from 2005 to 2007, until they jumped to 12 Mbps in 2008.
Can't wait for the future...
Sources: "IEEE 802.11a-1999." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11a-1999>.\n "AT&T Residential Broadband Internet." <http://www.att.com/gen/general?pid=6431>.\n "Evolution of Broadband speed and prices over time." <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/18/31/41551958.xls>.
http://www.oled-display.net/new-55-gen-oled-line-from-samsun...
Apple couldn't use SuperAMOLED because of supply issues more than anything.
According to digitimes (paywall) http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100526VL200.html
According to our sources, Apple had spoken with Samsung Mobile Display about the possibility for AMOLED panels since the development of the iPhone 3GS, but production capacity remains a big issue. SMD only has the capability to fulfill 50-60% of iPhone orders at the moment even it dedicated all AMOLED capacity to Apple.
Of course, cost is always a concern. AMOLED panels cost US$34-38. TN panels cost less than US$10 and IPS panels around US$20.
AMOLED also has display weaknesses. SMD uses PenTile technology developed by Clairvoyante to produce AMOLED, which is less suitable for displaying text. With Apple quite keen on pushing e-reading businesses, AMOLED may not be the best solution at the moment.
AMOLED has inferior color performance, daytime viewing performance, and angle viewing performance to IPS.
For example, every app that used a standard Mac toolbar draws it incorrectly. Address Book's split views do not resize correctly. iCal's colored checkboxes are incorrect, and the popout from double-clicking a calendar item is very broken. In Safari, the busy icon on tabs isn't drawn correctly, the Top Sites search box is clipped, and the Bookmarks bottom toolbar is drawn incorrectly. The Dock puts right-click menus in the wrong place and draws them wrong, and handles drag and drop incorrectly. Finder doesn't scale the desktop icons. Preview's notion of "Actual Size" doesn't honor the UI Resolution scale factor.
Outside of Apple apps, I find that Photoshop ignores clicks on the menu bar entirely. OmniGraffle's toolbar is extra-broken, the disclosure triangles in its palettes don't work, and it draws the contents of documents incorrectly.
World of Warcraft scales up more than 2x. I can't even get to the username/password boxes. (This could be a feature.) Sketchup draws my document in the lower-left quarter of the window and random junk from the WoW login screen on the other three quarters.
Contrast this to the iPhone 4 experience. Every app I've tried looks at least as good on iPhone 4 as on iPhone 3GS, and none has had any drawing or behavior defects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance
Looks to me like they were just establishing the brand in advance of the first chip.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_management#Functions_of_b...
