A Professional Perspective On Apple's Retina Display 346
Reader BWJones, who is a retinal scientist, sends in this detailed analysis of the iPhone 4's "retinal display," which includes photomicrographs of the display pixels of earlier generations of iPhone as well as the iPad. Well worth a read. "... as you can see from these images of the displays I captured under a microscope, the pixels are not square. Rather they are rectangular, and while the short axis is 78 microns, the long axis on the iPhone 4 pixel is somewhere in the neighborhood of 102 microns. ... While [an earlier analysis by] Dr. Soneira was partially correct with respect to the retina, Apple's Retina Display adequately represents the resolution at which images fall upon our retina. ... [I] find Apple's claims stand up to what the human eye can perceive."
Too literal (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently we should never ask a scientist, "How do you like *them* Apples?"
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems I saw this story last week here? Or was that a different guy? TFA is slashdottet so I can't tell. At any rate, "retinal display" is meaningless. Your retina can only resolve as good as what your cornea and lens can accurately focus on it. Someone in their 40s will be holding the thing at arm's length, while someone nearsighted might have it six inches from their face without their glasses. And like focusing, retinal density will vary at least slightly from person to person.
It's meaningless hype, go
Re:Too literal (Score:5, Insightful)
While I don't think Apple products are magical, people who don't understand why they sell (or why Nintendo products sell) are fixated by feature lists but kinda miss out on the whole dimension of actual usability of those features.
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Although I love myself some high-resolution displays and I think the whole discussion of whether or not a higher resolution is meaningless is itself rather meaningless...
No.. not really. You need to be able to see that detail - but that doesn't mean you have to see it as a 1:1 reproduction. There's no reason you can't take the high resolution image you have and simply zoom in on it; e
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Again.. zoom. You wouldn't say "Oh, I need a 50000PPI display to view these bacteria", would you? You use a display (or your eyes) on a microscope. Refute the zoom as being a proper viewing method and I'll gladly go along.
And as a sibling poster notes... if you're doing this -in the field-, consider a magnifying glass instead; it'll still be superior to trying to take a pretty low-resolution image and displaying that on a screen that's going
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In flight simulation they have talked about so-called 20/20 displays [gizmodo.com] for decades. (I think that terminology is a bit better than
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"You're working with screens with resolutions on the order of nanometers?"
Why, yes. Learn about our technology sometime, and quit focusing upon regular computer stuff. We're using QD phosphors on our screens. Yay 90+% gamut.
Re:Too literal (Score:5, Informative)
So....can I have your autograph, Kal-El?
Units of measurement (Score:2)
Heck, even with my glasses off, I can usually see human beings, and they're generally less than 2m in any direction.
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That was supposed to say 2m.
And it did. It said "2 meters". (or 2/3 of 3M, if for some reason you were referring to a majority fraction of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company [wikipedia.org]).
Greek letter. like, mu? as in micro? as in ?<--note the missing letter
Slashdot doesn't accept either the unicode or HTML entity for any of the Greek alphabet, as far as I can tell.
Makes many scientific discussions pretty difficult, really. That's the ol' Slashdot we know and love.
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No, it's just crap following of standards. Something we all scream about yet our favorite overlords can't seem to ever get right.
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It said "2 meters".
What is this "meter" you speak of .. I only know of the metre. Unless you were using some new fangled musical notation that I don't know of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meter [wikipedia.org]
The metre (or meter), symbol m, is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#-re.2C_-er [wikipedia.org]
In British usage, some words of French, Latin, or Greek origin end with a consonant followed by -re, with the -re unstressed and pronounced /r/. Most of these words have the ending -er in the United States. The difference is most common for words ending -bre or -tre: British spellings centre, goitre, kilometre, litre, lustre, mitre, nitre, reconnoitre, saltpetre, spectre, theatre, and titre all have -er in American spelling, as do calibre, fibre, sabre, and sombre.
Happy to clear that up for you.
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I'm in the UK and I've only seen the meter spelling.
http://www.metric-conversions.org/length/meters-to-feet.htm [metric-conversions.org]
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Then I can only conclude that you've never attended (or perhaps just not paid attention in) any science classes - a meter is something used to measure or detect something (e.g. a voltmeter), while a metre is the SI unit of distance.
Either that or standards have dropped drastically in the last 15 years or so, in which case I'll be having some rather forthright discussions with the teachers I know...
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Re:Units of measurement (Score:5, Interesting)
Bill
B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing company? (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple is a design company (Score:3, Informative)
People love to whine about all the Apple stories. I would defy any of them to submit their own stories about all the other computer companies that are breaking new ground with this type of research. Do you think Dell for example has a team of physics PHDs figuring out these technologies and pushing their vendors to tool up for them? No, THOSE are the guys just packaging off-the-shelf reference designs. Or waiting for the exclusivity on Apple's deal with [insert obscure pacific rim manufacturer here] to expire so they can make a similar looking phone a few years later.
Do you think Apple has a team of physics Ph Ds figuring this out? (Hint: no.)
Apple deserves credit for identifying this technology and bringing it to market. That's a worthwhile and necessary pursuit, no matter what the Slashdot detractors say. But Apple is not doing groundbreaking research into materials science or manufacturing here; it's merely bringing them to market in an attractive way.
Re:Apple is a design company (Score:5, Insightful)
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I dispute the claim that Apple doesn't have a team of PhDs working on technology. My former coworker, a PhD in particle physics, left our company to work for Apple. He now works on super secret stuff that he can't tell his wife about.
Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa (Score:5, Informative)
Why would dell? they don't make electronics. They build computers byu assembling other peoples electronics.
I have submitted stories about real ground breaking technologies from:
Intel
Giga-Byte
Nasa
Chevy
IBM
MS.
and many, many others. I stop submitting 2 years ago because I had not had a submission accepted since 99.
Now, I don't mind the apple stories. It's not like this is a limited space newspaper.
BTW that tech isn't as ground breaking as you seem to think. It's like there isn't much there in regard to new tech, so people are glomming onto and straws they can grasp to justify waiting hour to buy a product that they could walk in and buy in 2 weeks. Hell it might even be fixed by then.
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people are glomming onto and straws they can grasp to justify waiting hour to buy a product that they could walk in and buy in 2 weeks.
Yeah... there's a crazy mentality about being "the first" sometimes. Waiting for a movie, waiting for a product, etc. People just have this "first post" mentality in just about everything. (I am particularly not immune, myself.)
I have however gotten through a lot of the hype around Apple stuff. I still really like their products, but as with most people who have been with Apple for over 5 years, I'm always holding out for at least the second generation. I want an iPad, but I know the second generation
Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just buying into the hype. Apple came out with a new phone that happens to have the highest pixel density yet (325 ppi). The next closest is the Motorola Droid at 265 ppi. About 20% higher than the competition... Not really a groundbreaking move by Apple, just them taking another step toward higher density displays. It's what any company would have done. Where was the news story when the Droid came out, besting Apples then best display on the 3GS (of 163ppi) by 40%?
Disclaimer: I don't have an Iphone, or a Droid, but I do have a brain and I tend to use it when I smell hype.
Droid at 265 ppi was no big deal. (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't Droid come out 7 months ago? The only way it would have been a story is if it hadn't been able to top the resolution that the iPhone has had since what... 2007?
Note that Apple didn't market their device as having higher resolution than a competing device. They are marketing it as being so high that it no longer matters.
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Well, my old HTC Universal had a higher pixel resolution (VGA) and higher DPI than the iPhone - and the device was released two years before the first iPhone.
But, alas, that was not newsworthy even back then.
Way to selectively cut and paste. (Score:2)
Your reply: "Yes they are. That is why they called it "retina display" and said that it was a revolution. Rose tinted retina?"
What I REALLY said: "Note that Apple didn't market their device as having higher resolution than a competing device. They are marketing it as being so high that it no longer matters."
Now, either show me some proof that Apple has said, "The IPhone 4 has b
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This is just buying into the hype. Apple came out with a new phone that happens to have the highest pixel density yet (325 ppi). The next closest is the Motorola Droid at 265 ppi. About 20% higher than the competition... Not really a groundbreaking move by Apple, just them taking another step toward higher density displays. It's what any company would have done. Where was the news story when the Droid came out, besting Apples then best display on the 3GS (of 163ppi) by 40%?
Disclaimer: I don't have an Iphone, or a Droid, but I do have a brain and I tend to use it when I smell hype.
There probably wasn't a news story specifically on that feature, but there probably was a story that listed that as a feature. The reason the Retina Display (is | may be|) worth a story is that is surpasses an important threshold (they eye's ability to see distinct pixels). Similarly if when movies came out (this is totally made up, do not take this as a history lesson) they started at 10 FPS, an increase to 20 would be a 100% increase, but wouldn't be as interesting as the increase from 20 to 30 (which i
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There are few contenders between Droid's 25 and iPhone's 325: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_density [wikipedia.org]
There are entries about and over 300 dpi.
Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa (Score:4, Insightful)
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Because it's not "like looking at print on paper"... if you hold the thing a x inches your retina will not be able to distinguish the pixels. The same went for the Droid (albeit at a slightly farther distance) and the same has applied for any LCD at any point in history. It's not as good as print, for one because modern printers use 600 dpi; 300dpi is 80's technology. For two because even when you print at a given DPI, there is chemical dithering that takes place to make the edges indistinguishable. A L
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the iPhone is better than print. I can hit the center button and no one can tell I was looking at porn while at work/on the bus/etc. You do that with a copy of Juggs, Hustler or Nasty Asians
Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa (Score:5, Informative)
It's impressive, but it isn't super impressive. The Toshiba Portege G900 already had a screen at 313ppi, and Sony Erickson X1 is 312ppi.
What makes it newsworthy, is Jobs said (I paraphrase) "It's as good as the human eye can perceive." That's why he named it the "retina display".
A scientist with a Ph.D. came along and called bullshit, saying that the human retina can perceive pixels much higher.
The Ph.D. in this article respectfully disagreed, and said the previous scientist:
A.) Used the wrong figure for retinal resolution when he made his calculations (0.5 arcminutes instead of the 0.78 arcminutes established by a recent, authoritative study) and
B.) Failed to factor in losses in the optics of the human eye regarding how much light will actually hit the retina.
With A fixed and B factored in, the scientist concludes that the practical limit of the human retina (what it can distinguished given the amount of light that hits it) is 286ppi when held at 1 foot away from the eye (the ideal distance for viewing detail). The iPhone is well above this, at 326ppi, which means Jobs was right, and the name is apt.
It's worth noting that there are quite a few phones that beat the 286ppi limitation, but the iPhone has the highest.
Basically it looks like we don't need any higher resolution than what the iPhone and others have achieved, anything more would be pointless.
That, to me, is very impressive.
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So Apple's success really all just marketing and hype?
Thanks for clearing that up that for us.
It's not about the technology. It's about the salesmen.
This is a site for "nerds". We shouldn't let Apple's advertising agency lead us around by the nose.
Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa (Score:5, Insightful)
It is also about the implementation of the technology. Technology in and of itself is useless. Creating new, even useful technology is certainly praiseworthy. Taking technology and deploying it in a useful manner is also praiseworthy.
Feature lists are for short-sighted nerds. Apple is successful because they try to keep the feature list shorter and not longer.
There would be no Android phone, as we know it now, without Apple, there may have been a phone, it would have looked just like the Blackberry and Windows Mobile crap that came before it. People who try to discount Apple's contribution to the smartphone industry or call it "marketing fluff", only show how utterly technology ignorant they truly are.
Apple completely transformed the smart-phone industry. There is a day when the look, feel, and function of smart phones all changed. That day was the day Apple announced the iPhone. You don't have to love Apple, or even be a fan. Writing off their success as marketing just makes you look ignorant.
Apple is a marketing company (Score:5, Insightful)
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So things only count as technologies when they're hardware and not when they're software?
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only when created by apple
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I'd say most of that still applies to Apple's software division (OSX is an absolutely perfect example).
Re:Apple is a marketing company (Score:5, Interesting)
High pixel resolutions are not groundbreaking.
Apple did not invent any of the technology in the iPhone and does not have a team of PhDs working on designs
Apple is great at designing and marketing products that feature the inventions of other people
IBM, Intel, AMD, etc. all design new technologies
Have a nice day
Apple's an integrator. They assemble cool parts made by others, add some magic sauce, and generally come up with something interesting. Another company working with the same parts might come up with something less compelling. You know, you could compare Apple to a chef. It's not like he's got a proprietary lock on ingredients like meat and vegetables but a good chef can do things with those ingredients that lesser chefs can't touch and people are left guessing as to what he does with the spices to give the food his characteristic zing. You know, the chef comparison really works. Apple is the Soup Nazi. Everyone wants his soup because it's the best on the block but you are in no position to argue with him about anything. You accept what he gives you how he gives it to you with no debate. You complain, "no soup for you!"
The position Apple's in is that it has to maintain standards and be the best out there or else people will stop putting up with Soup Nazi tactics.
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The magic sauce is called software. That's where all the other vendors have failed BIG TIME, thinking that beating whatever phone on raw specs and CPU cycles would be enough. But if your software sucks, then your product sucks, no matter how fucking gorgeous your phone may be.
It's a wonder no one thought of that one before Apple. It really is.
Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa (Score:5, Funny)
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Where the hell did that come from?
Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa (Score:4, Interesting)
Hummm, I thought IPS was developed by Hitachi? And I assumed that Apple just brought this to market (and probably did some final work on it). So yes, I have exactly the attitude to Apple that you think I do.
Relative to other companies their size Apple has a massive marketing budget and a puny R&D budget. Recently we've been hearing about how Apple has grown bigger then MS, but their R&D budget was 10% of Microsoft's in 2009. Investors have became angry with other companies for spending so much on R&D and they point to the example of Apple that makes better much money by spending their money on marketing.
In the case of this display, Apple's problem was that they couldn't get Samsung's Super AMOLED display. If they had, I"m sure you would be telling us about Apple incredibly ground-breaking R&D on reducing the power consumption of a display. Apparently though, now that the iPhone 4 is using IPS, we've decided that 'retinal' resolution is the key and giving thanks to Apple for inventing that.
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So do Coke and Pepsi and other basic consumer brands.
Apple is not the next Lockheed Martin, its trying to be Coke; ubiquitous and popular, not particularly innovative.
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or so the apple haters would have you believe...
2009 apple advertising was 1.37% of revenue or $500 million
Microsoft the same year: 2.4% of revenue or 1.4 billion
Dell: 1.3% and 811 million.
RIM: 2.4% and 337 million
Sounds to me like they are less of a "Marketing" company and more of a hardware company putting out better selling products...
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First of all, marketing is not just advertising. There is a lot to marketing that is not advertising like focus groups, surveys, strategies, and measurement.
And although you claim that Microsoft spent more as a percentage of revenue on advertising, they also spent way more than Apple on R&D:
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Odd, there are no comments above yours whining that there are too many apple stories.
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These are simple factual claims.
You don't need to depend on the science equivalent of an Imam or a Bishop for your answer.
You can test the claims yourself.
Fantastic display (Score:5, Funny)
And since you can't actually HOLD the fucking phone to make calls, looking at it is all you're going to do with it.
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I've seen the bar go down one when i hold it funny, but it's not bad, and i'm a lefty.
I don't have one, but the report I read said it seemed to be worse when held in the left hand, as (usually) done by rightys. So you may be better off as a lefty.
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I've tried it (normal-handed person holding it left-handed), and dropped the signal from 4/5 to no connection at all, followed by the phone taking a couple of minutes to reconnect to the mobile network after I'd let go of it and handed it back to its owner.
It didn't happen for him, we think due to difference in skin conductivity.
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I have one, do you? Cause that antenna stuff sounds like FUD. I've seen the bar go down one when i hold it funny, but it's not bad, and i'm a lefty.
Considering your turtle-necked Lord has given advice on how to avoid the issue [arstechnica.com], I'd say it isn't FUD.
Taken directly from that link:
"Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone," Jobs wrote. "If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the met
okay, it's silly marketing, but (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm really happy to see screen resolution getting attention. My Vaio U101 had a pretty decent ppi, but it's long in the tooth and that that class of system -- always a niche -- has basically been displaced from the market by netbooks. And I'm sick of netbooks with low-res screens. Hopefully this will catch on as an important feature.
(I'm double-sick of people saying: "But if there's a higher-resolution screen, everything gets tiny and hard to see. So low-res is better for small screens." Ahhhh! You're doing it wrong!)
Re:okay, it's silly marketing, but (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree, imagine if we had computer screens with this pixel density! We could finally have smoothly scalable *and* sharp fonts. It would also stop the need to add hinting to fonts, which is apparently really tedious and difficult.
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Given the viewing distances necessary, we already do - the IBM T221. 3840x2400, at 22.2". Straight from 2001. (And discontinued in 2005 or 2006, depending on market.)
204 PPI, but again, the viewing distances make it such that the T221 would have similar effective density to the iPhone 4.
My main machine is a ThinkPad T60p with a 2048x1536 display retrofitted, that's "only" 171 PPI, but it gets the job done, and it's more flexible than a desktop.
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The T221 display had crap colour definition, low contrast especially off-axis, slow refresh and it required four video channels to drive it. Video and photo reproduction wasn't its forte though, what it was great at doing was putting a lot of numbers and graphs in front of someone's eyeballs. It mainly sold into scientific and engineering environments (CAD, PCB and chip layout etc.) and financial trading houses but it was never aimed at Joe Public.
You see them turn up on Ebay occasionally, still commandin
Gotta admit (Score:2, Offtopic)
Regardless of my thoughts on Apple as a business, the new iPhone is an attractive bit of hardware. If only Jobs wasn't being such a bastard [arstechnica.com] about the antenna problems...
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What about other non-apple devices? (Score:2)
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I own a Fuze, and the screen is very nice. The only problem is that the OS it runs was made for a stylus, and the input system is very difficult when you try to use it with a finger. IMHO, Apple has sacrificed usability for developer convenience on the iP4. By a simple doubling of the resolution (per axis, for the pedants out there), they can 2x the existing apps and nobody is any the wiser. I have a 3Gs, and there are certain things I prefer on the Fuze (God, I miss my keyboard) - but the user interface/i
Re:What about other non-apple devices? (Score:4, Interesting)
The LG CYON LU1400 is where it's at.
A dumbphone (granted, with a TV tuner) with 3 PPI more than the iPhone 4, in 2008. (800x480, 2.8")
http://www.displayblog.com/2008/12/25/lg-cyon-lu1400-28-dmb-tv-phone/ [displayblog.com]
We knew this years ago ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... which is why "laser quality" is 300 dpi. We knew fax looks like shit because it's 200 dpi. It's why chemical photo prints are almost 300 dpi. Why print artwork is done at 300 dpi. The "300 dpi pleases the retina" thing is like 25 or more years old. 300 is the most important point on the resolution scale.
But of course if Steve Jobs says it, then the Nerd Police have to say it's wrong. If it didn't happen in a video game or a Windows patch then they don't fucking know. As if Apple doesn't know about graphics and publishing!
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Good point: I never actually thought about that.
Also, I never bothered to do the math, but if I'm not grossly mistaken a full-HD screen with 300 dpi resolution would have to be 7"-7.5" big.
I'd hit that.
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...would have to be 7"-7.5" big. I'd hit that.
That's what she said.
Re:We knew this years ago ... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a huge difference between 300dpi in printing where your C,Y,M or K is either on or off, and 300dpi in systems where the C,Y and M or your R, G and B come in 256+ levels. (chemical photo printing and color displays respectively)
Print artwork is vastly inferior to a good photo print at the same resolution.
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There's a huge difference between 300dpi in printing where your C,Y,M or K is either on or off, and 300dpi in systems where the C,Y and M or your R, G and B come in 256+ levels.
That's not actually how halftoning [wikipedia.org] works in print. You have various levels of ink coverage at each "pixel" location, what they do is vary the dot size from large enough to cover all of the paper at that location to no ink at all. You easily achieve 256 levels of intensity at each location when halftoning.
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Your 300dpi color inkjet (or laserjet) doesn’t print halftoned images, and that’s what GP was talking about.
Re:We knew this years ago ... (Score:5, Informative)
As someone that used to work for an agency:
300 DPI represents an reasonable economics tradeoff between accuracy and cost. You can have 1270 DPI (professional photo typesetters run that high), but how much do you want to pay for it? Those machines are $500k+. And yes, your eye can tell the difference between 300 DPI and 1270 DPI.
Artwork developed by print agencies is done at 300 DPI and no higher because of limitations on file transfer size and professional printer RIP speed. Trust me, if an 8" x 10" photo could be squashed into 3-5MB and rasterized in a short amount of time at 1270 DPI, there would be printing equipment and printers offering that as a service overnight.
Finally, standard 35mm film is around 10,000 DPI, dude.
Re:We knew this years ago ... (Score:5, Insightful)
35mm film is a storage format, not a display format. Yes, blowing that up to an 8x10 still gives you something like 1,000 dpi. But the 10,000 dpi figure is meaningless unless you like looking at 35mm wide prints at 12 inches away.
Re:We knew this years ago ... (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm, I also used to and *currently* work in the print industry. I don't have time to explain the relationship between DPI and LPI when it comes to reproducing halftones in print, plus the effects of the only three different kinds of printing technology (ink based, toner based, and ink jet based) *and* the effect that has on different kinds of paper stock.
Essentially, the "sweet spot" for color halftones is 340 dpi when you have the option of a very high linescreen with very low dot gain. There's sort of a formula for dpi, which is 2.5 X the linescreen (LPI); but it cannot be followed exactly if you're worried about tracking and other quality issues. 300 dpi is a nice round number that makes for "easy" to email files as well as a good standard for target resampling in PDFs and the like. Anything higher than 300/340 dpi and you'll have to have an LPI so high in order to prevent banding you can't keep the dots on the page (again, depending on which printing technolgoy you use). If you're LPI is too low it looks like the old newspaper photos, and also runs the risk of rosetta morie patterns being visible if the angle of the 4 inks (if using only 4 inks) isn't adjusted properly.
For toner and ink jet based printing, it's easier to get away with as little as 150 dpi for color photos since the LPI is moot at a certain point where dot gain and near continuous tone transfer of pigment is possible.
For greyscale halftones, you usually want 600 dpi for SWOP printing; again, it's not forumulaic, since that high of resolution may or may not result in banding depending on the LPI and the distance-to-amount of gradiation.
For black and white, such as text, you want the dpi to be as high as your output dpi - so you don't see any of the jagged edges between the points of black and the white of the paper underneath.
Finally, standard 35mm film is around 3,200 dpi depending on the emulsion chemistry.
Re:We knew this years ago ... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's good that someone brought up laser printers because I distinctly remember when the 600dpi ones came out.
They were a distinct visible improvement over the previous generations of 300dpi ones. ...but all this really boils down to is the fact that you've got what amounts to a fairly
respectable desktop screen that's been shrunk down the the point that you can't see
anything on it because everything is so small. This whole "retina nonsense" is just a way
to spin the smallness of the iphone screen into something positive.
Re:We knew this years ago ... (Score:5, Insightful)
They were a distinct visible improvement over the previous generations of 300dpi ones. ...but all this really boils down to is the fact that you've got what amounts to a fairly
respectable desktop screen that's been shrunk down the the point that you can't see
anything on it because everything is so small.
There is such a thing as "scaling" - you can make an image bigger and pack more pixels in it. If it's a vector image, you keep the sharpness the small pixels provide while maintaining an easy to read screen.
Furthermore, if you're having trouble seeing all small devices, chances are it's your eyes that are the culprit. See, as we age, the lenses in our eyes harden and loose the ability to adjust the focal length. This means people tend to become a little far-sighted, and require reading glasses to see any detail within arm's length. Anybody in that situation needs reading glasses for small, detailed devices, period.
Young people with flexible eyes do not have a problem with it. My eyes are still young, and I was pleasantly surprised at how comfortable reading on my HTC Hero is. That's with a piddly 181ppi, barely more than half of the iPhone 4's.
In other words, if your OS isn't stupid then increasing the resolution only makes things clearer. People are used to higher resolution making everything tiny because Windows made some retarded moves early on, and has been stuck with them since. There is no real need for it.
Truly a magical device. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Truly a magical device. (Score:4, Funny)
Punch card: the most important part is the part that's not there.
So it's not retina resolution...big deal (Score:4, Informative)
So I played with one briefly yesterday. I thought, "oh, this is nice, it's about the same speed as my 3gs...this screen doesn't LOOK a whole lot better." Then I realized I really needed to clean my glasses. With my glasses off, and the screen 6 inches from my nose, it looks AWESOME. From any distance away, through my myopic eyes, dirty glasses, and the pollutants in the air, it's much better than it needs to be.
Look at pictures (Score:2)
Try looking at pictures using the phone (online or otherwise). Even just comparing that default "raindrop" ios4.0 screen is like night and day, from two feet away...
And text looks way better.
What's the unit? (Score:2)
Um, yeah... (Score:2)
So you have a screen where 1px matches the minimum line width that you can see, and pick a suitably small font so that the legs of an 'm' are 1px apart (should be the smallest readable font). And it looks like shit because one of the spaces is slightly wider than the other so one leg is halfway between two rows of pixels and looks blurry or colored, or because the distance between the legs of an 'n' or heads of a 'u' isn't an exact multiple and those end up at a half-pixel and get blurred/colored.
Can I get
Re: (Score:2)
No scalable font will look perfectly clear at a size where the lines and spaces within the characters are close to the width of the pixels. To get really sharp text that tiny, you need a font bitmap designed specifically for that size and resolution (and which will look crappy at any other size). This is actually how the original black-and-white screen Mac worked--each font had a set of bitmaps that were hand-optimized for that particular size and screen resolution. But the resolution of the new iPhone is s
Re: (Score:2)
You’re kidding, right? What you’re calling the “minimum should-be-readable size” would only be readable with a magnifying glass... that’s something like a 45 characters per inch, 2-point font.
point is what? (Score:2)
1. We had 310dpi mobile screens 2 years ago, so I'm not sure what's groundbreaking here. Hell, even some of the cheaper stuff went to 280dpi.
2. The argument was that you have to hold the 'phone pretty fucking far from your face for it to be impossible for your eyes to perceive pixelisation. This hasn't been disproven.
3. What's your point with the pixel shapes? If you're saying that we have better resolution left/right than up/down, then you do realise the phone is designed to rotate, yes?
4. Pixel size isn't
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not quite sure why the distance people hold printed reading material should equal the distance at which people use their iPhones. For example, it's clear that I (and others around me) hold a 'phone closer than a newspaper, probably because:
(1) I'm interacting with it;
(2) Light's reflecting off it in a different way;
(3) Everything's squeezed up together, so we want the screen to take up more of our field of vision.
That's one huge display! (Score:2)
"Rather they are rectangular and while the short axis is 78m, the long axis on the iPhone 4 pixel is somewhere in the neighborhood of 102m"
Wow, 78 meters but 102 meters? I guess Apple released this for gaming, so that the World Cup matches could be played on each pixel. That, or the quoted text is out by six orders of magnitude in each direction...
Re:That's one huge display! (Score:4, Informative)
78 um and 102 um. They used the Greek letter Mu, which Slashdot helpfully strips out.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
FaceTime feature is rather scary (Score:3, Interesting)
A minor aggravation is if you hold the phone normally you get a view of one's nostrils and chin. You have tilt your neck and/or lift the phone to get a good face view.
I think theres agood opportunity for a face-beautification app here. Maybe you could slightly de-focus the face like cameramen did for women in 1930s/1940s movies, to make them look better.
Re:FaceTime feature is rather scary (Score:4, Informative)
The face camera isn't high-res. I think it's something like 640x480, standard sort of webcam view. So, uh, I guess I'm saying you shouldn't blame the phone here, you'd look like that on regular old video.
(I tried to come up with a more polite way of putting that. Sorry!)
"Well worth a read" (Score:2)
That's all and pretty and works pretty well... (Score:3, Funny)
That's all and pretty and works pretty well... until you rotate the phone 90 degrees.
Oh, and totally sucks for developers to work with non-square pixels. Reminds me of 8-bit Atari, Graphics 11. 80×192 in landscape aspect ratio, pixels half a millimeter tall, half a centimeter wide.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The pixels ARE square - at least in the display sense. At 78um x 102um it comes close to a 4:3 display turned on its side. Now, 4:3 is what computer graphics have been using since CGA at least.
However, that measurement (FTA) doesn't take into account the pixel pitch. There's a gap of approximately 33um (eyeballing this) between each pixel horizontally, where there's maybe a 5um gap vertically. That makes each pixel take up approximately 111um x 107um which you might as well consider perfectly square, si
Wow, Really? (Score:2, Funny)
Leading scientists have proven that Sears Silvertone electrical appliances contain scant amounts of silver. Some contain no silver at all!!!
Of course Sears didn't have a former coke dealer go on stage and claim silver content.
Still, this used to be Slashdot. Why do we put up with all this macfag gibber?
Dithering... (Score:3, Interesting)
I cannot RTFA being it is dead, but my question about all of this "retina-level" stuff is: are they factoring that the eye uses dithering and jittering to increase the spatial resolution?
Last I'd heard, the current theory is that by using micro-saccades, the eye can increase the spatial resolution over what your would naively predict based upon the angular spacing of the cones.
Has this been beat to death enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pixels too tall even by his calculations (Score:3, Interesting)
The article uses a benchmark of 1 arc minute at 1 foot which is 88 micrometers, but the pixels are taller than that (102 micrometers) even if they are only 78 micrometers wide.
Note, the 1 arc minute number he uses is still bogus because that number actually represents the resolution at which doctors think your vision "good enough" to not need further correction. It also is only measuring the reliable recognition of letters. The width at which lines completely blur into each other or at which aliasing artifacts are not noticeable is much smaller. Cf. vernier acuity which is only 0.13 arc minutes.
(Fun fact: In Knuth's original work on digital type setting he says he stopped somewhere around 300-600 DPI not because that was "good enough" but because of the limits of the printing process. Beyond that resolution the ink/toner starts to "stick into clumps". Steve Job's might have been more accurate to say that the screen has (almost) printer quality resolution.)
Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
...I'm glad that's resolved.
Actually, it seems a bit odd, given the facts presented, that the conclusion indicates the claim holds up. If the conclusion were "it pretty much holds up, far more than you could expect for marketing", I'd be on board... but I think a true purist would withhold the claim of "retinal" resolution for another generation or two, for a couple reasons:
1) Perhaps nitpicky, but this measurement assumes a viewing distance of 12" on the basis that the ability to resolve detail may be best at 12". However, at 6" the arc spacing of the pixels would be twice as large; whereas my ability to resolve detail at 6" may not be optimal, but probably isn't only half what it would be at 12". Now you can justify that away, I suppose, by arguing that nobody would try to use a touchscreen at a viewing distance of 6", but...
2) The threshold spacing TFA calculated is greater than the spacing of pixels along the short axis, but not along the long axis.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, you know, the whole thing started with people using maths to try and prove it wasn't good.
Re: (Score:2)
> Yeah, I usually carry around a 70" plasma screen in my pocket in case I really want to surf the web. ...which severely limits the usefulness of this device.
Re:What a pack of lies (Score:4, Insightful)
On my droid I can run SecondLife, Pandora, another radio station from anywhere, surf the web, and watch videos - all at the same time. All of these programs can take input or provide information at the same time. Nice try Apple.
I think you've hit on something important here and a reason why the iPhone does so well despite its obvious limitations: Average people don't care whether or not their phone can do all that at the same time because they would never use it like that. On the other hand, battery life is a concern shared by just about everyone. In other words, just about everybody nowadays is very aware of what the iPhone is and what it can and can't do, yet they still swamp Apple's servers on pre-release day. Given the popularity of their prior models alone, I take this to mean that multitasking on a phone isn't as important to most people as it apparently is to you.