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

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

[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. ;->

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.

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

[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

[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.

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:Application?

[clevelandguru]

Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays.

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).

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

At last...

[Aardpig]

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

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.

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.

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!