2.2 inch LCD Display featuring VGA Resolution

i4u writes "Casio announces a LCD display with the world's highest resolution. The 2.2 inch LCD display features VGA resolution. The Casio innovation has 368ppi (pixels per inch). The power consumption and size is the same as with current QVGA (320x240) displays. Meaning current mobile phone models could directly be upgraded with a VGA display. So we could very soon see Mobile phones with VGA resolution on 2.2 inch displays. Samsung had the World's highest resolution with 300ppi in early August. Casio took now the lead. More details in Casio Press-Release (Japanese)."

Comments

first post

[Anonymous Coward]

so now we get resolution comparable to print

This just sounds a bit excessive

[PepsiProgrammer]

I just got one of the new zaurus Sl-6000 pda's that does 640x480 on a quite large (for a pda) screen and the pixels are already small enough to be indistinguisable from eachother. Putting that res in a screen that small seems pretty pointless.

Re:This just sounds a bit excessive

[GlassHeart]

Putting that res in a screen that small seems pretty pointless.

You have something against sharper text and graphics? We're talking about a 300 ppi display, which matches the resolution of first-generation laser printers. Text will be readable at as little as 6 points (nearly 25 pixels!), and a web page just might be displayed decently.

What's the downside?

Re:This just sounds a bit excessive

[Carnildo]

What's the downside?

You'll need a magnifying glass to read it?

Re:This just sounds a bit excessive

[yo303]

640 pixels ought to be enough for everybody.

Re:This just sounds a bit excessive

[Jeffrey Baker]

One last time you innumerate morons: resolution improved quality and does not affect size. Try printing the same page at 300, 600, and 1200dpi. Does it come out 4 times smaller on the 1200? Does it look better?

Re:This just sounds a bit excessive

[DAldredge]

Give up, it just ain't worth it. ;->

Re:This just sounds a bit excessive

[GlassHeart]

You'll need a magnifying glass to read it?

A point is generally defined as 1/72 of an inch, and does not vary with display resolution. Thus, on a 96 dpi screen, 6 pt text is defined by about 8 pixels. On a 300 dpi screen, the same text can use about 25 pixels to define the glyph. The text itself stays the same size.

As for icons and graphics, they can be redrawn to better suit the display size. Compared to the other expenses involved in building a cell phone, redrawing 100 icons is not really a very big one.

Re:This just sounds a bit excessive

[Jeffrey Baker]

I just grabbed a copy of the New York Times and there's plenty of 6pt type on it (photographers' credits and other places). At high resolution 6pt is readable.

Re:This just sounds a bit excessive

[jsoderba]

No, Mac OS X does not have scalable icons. The icons are bitmaps that are designed to look good when resampled. This comes up in every damn graphics thread.

Re:This just sounds a bit excessive

[GoRK]

BZZZT wrong.

Icon services in Mac OS/X up to 10.3 (Panther) support icons up to 128x128 pixels in size. The scaling algorithms are fast and dynamic, scaling between the large size icon and the smaller size icons as needed (this is why very small icon sizes still look good in OS X.

OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is supposed to include very robust support for DPI-independent rendering, greatly increasing the usability of high-resolution, high-ppi displays on the platform. As a result, the 128x128 icon limit seemed kind of small, so Tiger increases it to 256x256 pixels; however they are still raster images.

There are indeed advantages to using either approach for icons. Any robust vector format pretty much has to support embedded raster images anyway, thus a robust raster scaling algorithm in the renderer is necessary anyway. Leaving out all the vector stuff makes the code simpler, faster, and smaller with the only major disadvantage being that scaling icons beyond the 128x128 (256x256) is not going to result in really nice and crisp icons. The only time OS X overscales the icons is double clicking a launchable item, but the blurring effect is unnoticeable due to the alpha fade and quick animation.

Scalable UI

[TimmyDee]

I can see this being beneficial for pictures, video, and the like, but not UI elements. Phone OSes are going to need to build in scalable UIs and offer tools for their developers to do the same or we won't be able to use the things.

Re:Schweet!

[AKAImBatman]

Quick, someone say something funny!

Does it come with a magnifying glass?

my business card

[scaaven]

my new business card will have this, along with a super tight distro of linux mounted on a thin flash card. and it will have a 3d display and stuff and it will pwn all your paper business cards

Re:my business card

[Royoken]

so.... can i tie your business cards together and make a card house Beowulf cluster?

Re:my business card

[stratjakt]

Then, all you'll need is a job!

Application?

[jargoone]

Okay, the high pixel density is neat and all, but can anyone name an application that would need a small screen with such high resolution.

If they "slightly" expanded it, though, you'd have a ~22 inch LCD with 6400x4800. Finally, a use for those high-end video cards with tons of memory!

Re:Application?

[norkakn]

low cost compact LCD projectors?

Not sure if it would work, but it would rock if it could.

Re:Application?

[clevelandguru]

Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays.

Re:Application?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I had forgotten, but LCD projectors actually use smaller panels.

XGA panels can be had in the 0.7" to 1.3" range. I'd direct you to projectorcentral.com, but it seems to be down now.

The problem here is that with a projector, each color has its own monochrome panel and is marged using a prism.

Re:Application?

[VitaminB52]

Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays.

Dear Santa, I've been a really nice kid this year, so ..... :)

Re:Application?

[plastik55]

GPS + Mapping. You can never get too much detail on a map.

At what point is DPI irrelevant

[stratjakt]

That is, when does the average human eye stop distinguishing them as seperate points?

I can tell 300 DPI from 600 DPI on a printout, but above that it looks about the same to me.

Re:At what point is DPI irrelevant

[eander315]

This is a common mistake when considering the DPI of printers and monitors. They are not measured in the same way. I would try to explain it here, but the wikipedia entry does a better job than I could.

Re:At what point is DPI irrelevant

[maeka]

The DPI of a monochrome laser printer does indeed mean the same thing as the DPI/PPI (pixels per inch) of a monitor.
They can not be directly compared when it comes to color printers and their need to mix multiple ink dots to represent most colors.

Re:At what point is DPI irrelevant

[LoudMusic]

That is, when does the average human eye stop distinguishing them as seperate points?

In the advertising business we use 400 dpi as the standard. I can still see pixels but it takes a trained eye.

Re:At what point is DPI irrelevant

[WillAdams]

Actually, 300dpi is quite clunky for text, and a number of fonts _cannot_ be adequately represented by it (e.g., Optima or Eras --- Adobe even went to the effort of including two different outlines (one low-res, one high res) for early versions of these until hinting algorithms improved).

~360--400dpi is a watershed value and around there text, even with fairly subtle details starts to look right (Interestingly the NeXTLaserprinter could print in 300 or 400 dpi, and one can _really_ see the difference (says the guy who forgt to change the value once before running out resumes and had to reprint a set 'cause they looked bad).

600dpi is ``good enough'' for most things (and is approaching the ability of office paper to hold a dot faithfully)

At 1200 dpi, things are quite nice, but the human ability to create / render type actually approaches that of a 2540 dpi imagesetter --- see Fred Smeijers' book _Counterpunch_ for technical data and microphotography for details. F.W. Goudy often claimed to be able to distinguish by touch dimensions of ~one one-thousandth of an inch.

William

Re:At what point is DPI irrelevant

[VitaminB52]

That is, when does the average human eye stop distinguishing them as seperate points?

I can tell 300 DPI from 600 DPI on a printout, but above that it looks about the same to me.

Whether or not you can distinguishing between indiviudal dots isn't directly related to DPI, but to angular resolution. Read the Wikipedia article if you want to know more about angular reolution.
Basically, whether or not you can distinguishing between indiviudal dots is related to the combination of DPI plus the distance between image and your eye.

Re:At what point is DPI irrelevant

[Yokaze]

A person can theoretically discriminate two points in an angle of ~1'=1/60degree. At a distance of 25cm, it means a distance of two point 73E-6m, so roughly 350dpi, if I'm not mistaken. I'm not so sure about the conversion to dpi.

Re:At what point is DPI irrelevant

[El]

when does the average human eye stop distinguishing them as seperate points? It is not the size, it's the angle of view. 1 DPI is just fine if you are 100 yards away! My general rule of thumb is that point of diminishing returns far a display is around 4000x4000 pixels; at that point you cannot simultaneously see the whole screen and still make out individual pixels. Anything more than that only helps if you are only focusing on a small section of the screen. Needless to say, I'm still waiting for this to become economically feasible, but I think digital cameras and displays will eventually max out at 16 Megapixels for ordinary use.

Dons a jeweler's lupe.

[ARRRLovin]

AWESOME SCREEN!

Re:Dons a jeweler's lupe.

[utexaspunk]

a jeweler's lupe? is that like the mexican woman who works at the jeweler's store?

...oh, you mean a loupe... ...nevermind!

Yoda?

[barcodez]

Casio took now the lead.

Yoda? Sentance, only you mangle such.

Re:Yoda?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sentence, only you could spell it not.

VGA resolution and unreadable

[kbahey]

VGA resolution and unreadable to anyone above 40.

Is it just me getting old, or are young people designing things for their age group only without considering those who are older?

Re:VGA resolution and unreadable

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's you getting old. Remember how your grandpa was always complaining about something ? Now it's your turn.

Re:VGA resolution and unreadable

[MBCook]

Why? If you keep the font size the same, sure.

But you just crank that up. So instead of tiny little fonts that look nice, you get normal sized (or large sized) fonts that look FANTASTIC. As size goes up (and you use appropriate graphics, or vector graphics) everything looks smooth and nice. You can't see the aliasing on curves and such.

I mean, you don't think people who run 1600x1200 on 17" monitors use standard fonts do you? You'd never be able to see anything. My laptop has about 100 DPI (as opposed to a more normal 72 or so), so it has "larger" fonts than a normal computer. But the text on it looks VERY good. Even teeny-tiny text is ledgeable because there are enough pixles to render it well (even if you have to squit to read it ;).

Having a higher resolution is good. It means cleaner fonts and better looking icons and such which should improve usability. If used right, this is great.

But if you just try to put Windows 95 or something like that on default settings on that screen, usability would be a joke.

Re:VGA resolution and unreadable

[tktk]

Is it just me getting old, or are young people designing things for their age group only without considering those who are older?

You're getting old. When was the last time you saw any consumer electronics with specific features for the older generations?

There was a line in Dougals Adam's Salmon of Doubt that I'll have to paraphrase since I don't have the book with me. It was basically this...

Anything invented while you're under 18 is taken from granted.

Anything invented while you're between 18-30 is new and exciting.

Anything invented while you're over 30 is scary and unnatural.

I forgot my point...so I'll leave it to you to make the connection.

Re:Schweet!

[strictfoo]

If you consider 2.2in to be your "overlord" then you're really going to be in trouble with the ladies.

what i want...

[here4fun]

So we could very soon see 2.2 inch Mobile phones with VGA resolution. See the photo where a full Windows browser is shown on 2.2 inch.

While this is nice, what I really want is a better battery, better camera (can we get 2mp on a cell phone?), and more storage memory (how about a card slot?). I doubt anyone will run windows or play doom on their cell phone. But people might want to play mp3's, take pictures, or browse the web and check email.

Re:first post

[sTalking_Goat]

Finally I can watch porn on my wristwatch. Could make using the two hand stroke a bit tricky though...

So can we get something like this in a drive bay ?

[pangloss]

I would love a vga (or better!) capable screen that fits in a drive bay. If you've seen the lcd's for car stereos that slide out, you know what I mean. Or if you don't, imagine the rackmountable lcd displays that slide out and then go vertical but sized for a drive bay.

Would be great for the htpc that's normally only used with a projector. You don't always want to turn on the beamer if you're just playing music, but you do need to be able to use some sort of screen.

did you read the article at all?

[MarcoAtWork]

it says it has the same current draw as QVGA but this one is full VGA.

You can also find out for yourself by doing some simple math: if this is approximately 2.2 inches with a 4:3 ratio it means it's going to be approx. 1.76in wide and 1.32in tall, which means that it has an area of around 2.3 square inches, which means that (at 368ppi, 135424 pixels per square inch) it would have 311475 pixels, which confirms full-VGA resolution (640x480 = 307200) due to probable slight measurement differences (I don't think it's going to be *exactly* 368ppi).

Virtual Headsets?

[Dante]

I don't know about you, but the buga boo in the past with virtual headsets was
not being able to do true 640x480.

I'd love to see a head set doing true 640 x 480.

How about HMD's?

[mhackarbie]

Sounds like this would be perfect for making Head Mounted Displays, so we can finally get some decent low cost Virtual Reality and/or 3D display hardware. Any reason why that wouldn't work?

I know that the most sophisticated VR also requires complicated head position tracking hardware, which apparently is quite difficult to get right. Existing implementations often cause nausea and vertigo in some people.

However, a nice, crisp 3D display with mouse-driven movement of the scene should be a perfectly acceptable low-cost alternative. You would have to strap it on your head and you would look like some kind of wired-up bug freak, but what's wrong with that?

I sure as heck could use it in my molecular modelling work.

mhack

Re:How about HMD's?

[VitaminB52]

I know that the most sophisticated VR also requires complicated head position tracking hardware, which apparently is quite difficult to get right. Existing implementations often cause nausea and vertigo in some people.

However, a nice, crisp 3D display with mouse-driven movement of the scene should be a perfectly acceptable low-cost alternative.

IIRC, the nausea and vertigo were caused by the time lag between head movement and the corresponding changes in the displayed images, not by the image not being 'crisp'.

B.t.w., the LCD is one of the most expensive parts in modern cellular phones - I doubt if a headmounted gear with two LCD's would be 'cheap'.

Re:How about HMD's?

[fwitness]

No, not 'cheap' as in value menu, 'cheap' as getting a new car for $10k would be. Nice cellphones go for about $130 these days. If these prices remain similar with the new resolution, let's say a VGA phone is like $200. Even if the screen is the most expensive, it can be reliably said that you could do a dual LCD HMD w/o headtracking for around $600. This is 'cheap' for an HMD that would seem to you to be >50" screen.

I have been thinking this would be perfect for laptops. I would much rather have a nice set of glasses, however dorky, that I can use on a plane with my laptop. Complete privacy, and no loss (but a gain!) of screen real estate. How about a laptop that doesn't even have a screen? Extreme? Yes, but that would be fine for 90% of my on-the-go type of work.

I even met a dork wanna-be yesterday, so let's face it, with cellphones, pda's, gbas and the like becoming ever more popular, it's become chic to be dork. :)

Although there are some inexpensive HMDs available, it seems like driver support has been the hugest issue. I don't even *want* 3D stuff, like two independent displays, just make it so I can get rid of these LCDs.

Oh, and btw, can someone show me any HMDs on Linux? Any?

Head Mounted Displays

[adipocere]

So, can we use this to FINALLY get a quasi-reasonable head-mounted displays?

I've always thought that one of the two reasons that wearables haven't really hit the mainstream was that the HMD's seemed to come with some weirdass resolution like 312 x 214 or some such nonsense. Aside from the obvious input issues, wearables are stunted by the number of freaky custom parts. HMD's with 15pin cables, let's go!

Article by Yoda

[LoadWB]

"A camera, does this phone have? Yes! Movie messaging I can send to Jedi friends! Kick Dukoo's ass they can watch. Yes!"

At last...

[Aardpig]

...wanking will make you go blind. That is, if you do it while surfing for pr0n on one of these displays.

Re:LCD Display?

[neoshroom]

Actually, LCD is one of those weird acronyms. It can either stand for:

Liquid Crystal Display
-or-
Liquiod Crystal Diode

Because of this "LCD Display" can actually be a valid usage.

Wrong!

[exhilaration]

I doubt anyone will run windows or play doom on their cell phone...

Doom for Symbian Phones - runs on most recent Nokia phones.

Re:Practical use

[ultramk]

Make an eye patch out of it that has video of an eye, programmed to follow the motions of your other eye.

uh, yeah. cause that wouldn't be like, creepy or anything.

Yeah, i'm sure the one-eyed would get stared at a whole lot less if they had a CREEPY CYBER EYE PATCH looking around at things, moving just a bit slower than the other eye.

Good idea though.... (?!?)

m-

Yes, but...

[haggar]

when will those graphing calculators be upgraded with displays capable of more than 86x48 resolution (B&W, at that)? I have the impression that HP, Casio and TI are stuck in a time-gap with their graphing calcs.

Mirrorshades

[Doc Ruby]

VGA stereo sunglasses!

Post is the article?

[ShieldWolf]

WTF they are almost exactly the same:

From the (tiny) article (which is really just a post from the submitter to some lame site):"The power consumption and size is the same as with current QVGA (320x240) displays. Meaning current mobile phone models could directly be upgraded with a VGA display. So we could very soon see 2.2 inch Mobile phones with VGA resolution.

Why even have a link?

Legacy applications and application??

[tezza]

I wanted a C64 emulator for the Palm m505. However, the screen resolution was not enough to match that of the C64 [320*200 in MCI mode].

So there was no point in anyone trying, as to hack the screen drawing code is not viable, as so much depended on the syncing and timing in the C64 days.

So conceivably, that old DOS mode 'pokes and peeks the VGA buffer itself' type code could now hope to be ported to this sort of screen.

I'm struggling and struggling to think of one app that would not have been superceded by something superior. But should one exist, it could not without it's hardcoded minimum resolution.

Keep this going, I could run Lionheart under UAE on an NGage VII.

Is it just me. . .

[Bastian]

. . . or does anyone else get the feeling that the synopsis for this article was written by Mojo Jojo?

people who hate 368 ppi

[Anonymous Coward]

First, a story: i went to the store with a woman who hates high-res displays and was telling me that no one likes them. suddenly, she pulled off the road, complaining that the setting sun was in her eyes. i didn't say anything, but her windshield was so filthy that you could hardly see out of it anyway. the low-angle sun just made it slightly more opaque.

Next, my opinion: many of the posts in this thread seem to come from people like that---they apparently can't see shit, so they can't imagine why anyone else would. i would love to have a 2.2in vga display, not so much to run programs written for a desktop screen (doh) but more to make things look less blocky.

Finally, my prescription: try an experiment. hold a book up next to your computer screen, a book whose typefaces don't seem too small to you. Notice that when you compare them side by side, the book is likely to have smaller type than the computer screen. Since the characters are more sharply drawn (higher resolution) you can actually see them better even if they are smaller.

Brazil

[cmacb]

Every time I see a story like this I think of the movie "Brazil" and the guy siting in front of a big magnifying glass with a tiny display behind it.

Realtime overlay

[phorm]

To heck with the VR gear, how about something to interact with reality? One concept would be some form of vision enhancement, perhaps in the form of an eyepath with a realtime display. Hook up a camera or something similar and display an enhanced or altered visual - would be great for nightvision type devices.

Even better would be if the display is partially transparent, you could use it as an overlay, where you can see what's around you but with added visual elements (motion trackers, edge enhancers, heat-view, infrared... graphs, stats, you name it).

I could also see this being quite useful in cameras viewfinders, etc... although on my digital camera (Kodak DX6490) the viewfinder is electronic already and seems to be quite fine at whatever resolution it uses.

A display with 4x the resolution

[morcheeba]

Check out this display -- it's LCD, frag-friendly 360Hz refresh, 1/3 VGA, 24 bit color, and with a pixel size of 12 x 16.2um, it works out to 1500-2000 pixel/inch.

Of course, the trick is that this display is really small -- since it's built on a silicon wafer, expanding it to 2.2" would raise the price incredibly (defect rate isn't linear with size). So, it makes a wonderful camcorder/digital camera viewfinder, and its bigger cousins work in HD projectors, but not really practical for a phone display.

One of the coolest things about this is that it is a black and white display lit sequentially with red, gren, and blue leds. The display sets switches each pixel to the appropriate brightness of whatever color is lighting it. This means no "screen door" effect -- see an example here, so the display is much clearer.

Switching time is about 150 microseconds - good large-size monitors are still in the range of 20000 microseconds!

Must upgrade...

[Gilmoure]

EYES!

Re:details and a question

[lnxpilot]

The number for contrast has no dimension.
It is the light intensity ratio between the brightest white and the darkest black the display can reproduce.
It should have been be written as 450:1

Doesn't seem so new

[lnxpilot]

I used to do VR research at SEGA in 1995 and we had a head-mount display with a pair of 640x480 color LCDs about the same size.
It probably cost a fortune back then, but it was available.

my 1/4 inch 640x480 kopin lcd

[paronomasia5]

wtf are they talking about -- i have a 1/4" 640x480 kopin lcd in my eyeglasses -- they have them up to 1280x1024 if you have the cash. that puts it at a dpi of around 4000. check http://www.microopticalcorp.com/Products/ for deets

So...what your saying is it's a VGA display?

[Necromancyr]

...LCD display features VGA resolution...directly be upgraded with a VGA display....soon see Mobile phones with VGA resolution on 2.2 inch displays...

So, what your trying to say is it's a VGA display?

LCD Display is Redundant

[stuffman64]

Not to be too picky, but the phrase "LCD display" is redundant. As we are all aware of, the 'D' in LCD already means display, so there is no need to specify that it is a display. This is something which has bothered my for years, but I digress.

My Sharp Zaurus SL-C860 features a 3.7" VGA display. The text is amazingly sharp- though it might be hard to read because everything is so small (I believe the pixel density is around 216 pixel/inch). This new screen is nearly one-third the area of the Zaurus', yet features the same resolution. Just a few years back, we were all drooling over this IBM Roentgen display, with its 200ppi (in this article). Can't wait to see one in my next cell phone, complete with a fresnel lens so I can read the text!