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Comment by frou_dh | Hacker News Reader

So what's the deal with the iPad? It deserves to have this great text fidelity (i.e. insane PPI) just as much as the iPhone.

Is the 2nd generation iPad going to have a significantly better screen?

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The larger sized your display and the denser your pixels, you're correspondingly fighting a sq cm pixel defect rate and drawing lower yields (^2) for each increase, with the obvious effect on price. This is why, at trade shows, you see huge screens with low resolution and tiny screens of stunning resolution.

Further, every time a new technology comes along (e.g. AMOLED), you throw out many of the manufacturing techniques you've developed to increase pixel yields.

The graphics hardware can't push enough pixels to render 60 FPS on a high dpi display of that size. Also, more RAM would be required. More RAM and faster graphics => more expensive with shorter battery life.

$500

Also, 10 hours of (promised) battery life. more pixels are not only mor expensive to switch, they are also more expensive to render the UI for.

I would happily pay more for an iPad HD (or whatever). I was (and still am) excited about it as an e-reader++, but print on the iPad looks merely adequate (ie, just like a laptop), not stunning, as I would have expected.

Probably because it's far easier to scale up production on a smaller, 4th generation screen than it would be to scale up production on a larger, less established device.

Obviously that will wait for the fourth generation...

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