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Comment by lyime | Hacker News Reader

here is a quick screenshot comparison http://grab.by/4UDZ

The improvement in the sharpness of the NYTimes logo is astounding. Call me a fanboy, but this kind of improvement in resolution is exciting.

Also, imagine a 30inch panel at this ppi... one positively quivers.

As a 30 inch Cinema Display owner, I did the math on it the other day, I think it's about 8000x5200 pixels at 326 ppi. I would pay whatever the cost for that.

And after you paid that you'd pay half as much again for the four graphics cards you'd need to display information on it at a decent framerate. :P

I figure by the time they can pack so many pixels into a single 30 inch display, a single graphics card will be able to drive it. Hopefully :)

Actually, I think the screen tech is already there and it's really the terrible scaling support in OSes that is holding things back. Nobody buys high DPI displays because the experience of using one with Windows sucks. If it's true that iOS 4 automatically scales apps while improving text sharpness that will make it far more advanced than both Windows and Mac OS.

>If it's true that iOS 4 automatically scales apps while improving text sharpness that will make it far more advanced than both Windows and Mac OS.

I usually just ignore these topics, but honestly: The ignorance is incredible. Absolutely incredible.

If you have nothing useful to add to the conversation, please continue to ignore these topics. I can only assume you believe that the DPI controls in OS X and Windows are actually useful, and to that I would say: have you ever actually tried to use them?

Do you think what you added was useful?

The iOS DPI controls are some of the most shockingly rudimentary and backwards of virtually any contemporary system, which is exactly why they simply doubled each axis' pixel count (then inventing some asinine "retina display" nonsense to try to make lemonade out of the teeny screen size in the face of better equipped competitors). To see someone calling it a model to strive to is simply shocking, especially on a generally more knowledgeable site like HN.

Windows has been dealing with resolution variance to much greater success since the early 90s. Seriously, by your claim, Windows XP would have been a revolution had it come with the new ability to target both QVGA and the exclusive new VGA functionality.

The iOS DPI controls are the simplest and most straightforward of any contemporary system, which is why they will likely actually work, in contrast to the OS X and Windows DPI controls which have never worked and likely will never work. I call that more advanced.

You are confusing resolution and DPI. Windows has been dealing with DPI variance by completely ignoring it since the early 90s, with the result that the physical size of interface elements varies with your screen's DPI, and high DPI displays are impractical. iOS doesn't have the option of ignoring DPI because in a touch interface the physical size of interface elements actually matters.

>The iOS DPI controls are the simplest and most straightforward of any contemporary system

But they're simple because it was a startling realization that the original design was shortsighted. The iOS platform has had a mere 3 screen attributes thus far, and each has been an essentially hard-coded hack specific for it.

It is not a laudable goal. They certainly didn't spearhead density-independent layout (and are more accurately one of the last to the party).

>and high DPI displays are impractical

In the workstation world people generally essentially placed their display based upon its DPI. A large, lower DPI display was wall mounted or placed at a greater distance (but serving more people), while a higher DPI display came closer to the user.

The iOS platform is not the best example of density-independent layout. It is one of the worst among the modern era.

Would you mind to name a few "better equipped competitors" with a) resolution higher than iPhone 4 b) IPS matrix?

For me, the real killer app of that sort of resolution would be resolution independence: current flat screens look crappy when you switch them to a non-native resolution, whereas with that sort of PPI you could get away with it - and you wouldn't even need a powerful graphics card, because the screen could appear as a lower resolution device to the system.

The cost is measured in number of dead pixels. On a 4" screen, it's easy to avoid dead pixels. On a 30" screen... not so much.

How bad are dead pixels, though, at >300 dpi?

Black dead pixels cost nothing, but dead subpixels, or pixels stuck to displaying colour are very bad.

Even if adding more resolution makes you unable to resolve the pixels, you can still always see light, in the same way you have no hope to resolve stars, but you can clearly see their light.

Luckily once we get oled, it no longer matters, because there is no backlight and you can always set misbehaving pixels to black.

you can always set misbehaving pixels to black

Are there no "stuck pixels" that can't be turned off on OLED?

Despite your desires, at some point, those pixels will become too small for you to see at normal viewing range. They'd be a waste, you have 20-10 vision, or you'll be sitting far too close

That's 41,600,000 pixels.

My 24" display, at 1920x1200 (~86 PPI) is 2,304,000 pixels, and even with a moderately high end graphics card, it struggles under load. You're talking about a display with 18x as many pixels to paint (or, to put it in a metric more easily graspable, it'd be like running ~18 displays at 1920x1200 @ 86 DPI, across which a single frame would be painted.

Needless to say, I don't think that technology is going to be showing up in stores near us in the next year or two. :)

IBM used to make a 22inch 3840×2400 which was 204 DPI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

Any idea where I can get an actual (home+power) screenshot from the device?

Here's a shot from the 3GS:

http://images.apple.com/iphone/features/images/retina-resolu... (pixel-doubled)

http://i.imgur.com/j2yAN.jpg (normal size for the curious)

And the same from the 4, with actual size pixels:

http://images.apple.com/iphone/features/images/retina-resolu...

And here's another screenshot, of Mail this time:

http://images.apple.com/iphone/features/images/retina-galler...

Thank you for this.

Photographing screens is pretty meaningless. If you look at the palm holding the phone in the original post, it is much better visible on the 4 picture than on 3GS, with papillary lines and everything. How can someone claim these pictures allow you to compare the quality of displays is beyond me.

Like simonsquiff pointed out, it's not the resolution per se, but things you can resolve on one screen you can't on the other.

I guess I would have to hold it very close to my face to be able to read most of the NYT home, but there must be people who can read it at a distance.

That's genuinely very very impressive.

I think all the web commentary about whether the pixels are visible or not are missing the point. The point is that thinks that were not readable (or resolvable) now are. For instance on the NYT page, on the 3gs screenshot only the main headlines are readable. On the 4 phone, everything is. That's a huge usability improvement. Additionally a number of the stylist elements on the iphone don't look that great at lower resolution but amazing at the higher one. The obvious one is the inset text effect used for the browser header (i.e. the white inset on text),it almost looks like ghosting on the 3gs whilst on the 4 it looks like a crisp inset. The same goes for the inset icons at the bottom. I have to look hard to see pixels on my 3gs; things looking less pixely isn't the news, things being more resolvable is.

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