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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

Isn't retina just another word for higher resolutions?

Why do they make it sound like it's all magical and needs you to be "retina ready"? I don't remember seeing that kind of stuff back when computer resolutions could be anything from 320x200 pixels to 1024x768 pixels...

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Technically it stands for high DPI, not necessary high Resolution, but one implies the other I guess. Anyway "Retina" is used, because it's established and everyone knows what it means. Don't see the point in fighting terminology.

Spot on. It's just easier to communicate than "devices with higher than 'usual' DPI" :)

The difference is that a 2048x1536 display would generally just offer 4x the screen space whereas Retina and other high density screens display the same page scaled up 2x. "Make Your Website Retina-Ready!" is like saying "Make Your Website Look Good When Scaled to 200%!" You can test this by using Ctrl-+ in your browser.

On a 13" CRT monitor, 1024x768 was also higher DPI than 320x200...

Yeah, and people custom designed screens for each resolution. It was a different world. You could never take a 640x480 VGA game and play it in 320x200.

Yes, you could -- and people often did if they got better performance out of 320x200. When SVGA cards became widely available, multiple resolution support became a hallmark of even some of the DOS games of the day. Especially 3D ones, but I remember being able to play Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (a 2D platformer, and a Windows DirectX game) at 320x200 or 640x480.

I don't recall any web browsers scaling images or other UI elements based on that, though. Everything assumed 72 or 96 DPI (depending on Mac or Windows), or just showed images at a 1:1 pixel ratio.

The widespread idea of actually serving different images to devices with different DPIs is fairly new.

we’re right in the transition period of switching to higher pixel density devices, until we completely switch over to infinite scalable graphics with small file sizes only it will still take some time, but maybe not too long :) and in the very near future we may focus on hi-res graphics only without the need to worry about standard-resolution images anymore.

for further infos there is also a quora answer regarding why apple called it retina-displays

http://www.quora.com/Retina-Display/Why-are-Retina-Displays-...

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