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iPhone 4's "Retina Display" Claims Challenged
adeelarshad82 writes "Of the many things that buyers might need to know about the new iPhone, Raymond Soneira — president of DisplayMate Technolgies — added one more to the list. Soneira challenged Apple's claims that Apple's new iPhone contains a so-called 'retina display.' According to Soneira, the resolution of the retina is in angular measure, 50 cycles per degree, where a cycle is a line pair, which is two pixels, so the angular resolution of the eye is 0.6 arc minutes per pixel. So, if you hold an iPhone at the typical 12 inches from your eyes, that works out to 477 pixels per inch. At 8 inches it's 716 ppi. You have to hold iPhone 4 out about 18 inches before it falls to 318 ppi. So the iPhone has significantly lower resolution than the retina."
According to Wikipedia:
For a human eye with excellent acuity, the maximum theoretical resolution is 50 CPD (Cycles Per Degree). A rat can resolve only about 1 to 2 CPD.
I guess "rat-ina display" didn't sound as good to Apple marketing :-)
But really, so it may be 18 inches for "true" retina display versus 12 inches. Ok... Big deal.
--
Join Guy Kawasaki and 250+ founders at the Founder Conference'2010
This sober, fact-based scientific argument will surely force Apple to adjust their bombastic, exaggerated marketing tactics.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It's very clear now.
If you're holding you're phone, or any display for that matter, 12 inches or closer to your face, you're going to notice a lot more than pixilation - you'll notice your vision fading fast.
It's recommended that you look at your display or phone from around an arms length away or risk damaging your vision in the long term.
It isn't meant to have the same resolution as the retina, it is meant to have sufficient resolution at reading distance, just that pixels are not detectable by the retina. Also remember, the colour resolution of the eye is far poorer than the b&w resolution of the eye, and the aim here is about colour. So I think the original statement by Steve is squishy enough to hold up to this scrutiny.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
The only thing to say is "Not for Apple users". Notice how the mouse sensitivity is set at 80-year-old-grandmother level on Mac's? Apple's customers are not that distinguishing. They aim for lowest common denominator. They've made a successful business out of, and that's all there is to say about it.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
Here's Apple's page about the new display: http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/retina-display.html
They say "the Retina display’s pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels." I suppose we can assume that they imply "at the typical distance at which you hold your iPhone" because otherwise the claim would be nonsense. Because surely you can hold it close enough to distinguish the pixels. (Unless you really can't, I haven't seen the screen).
But in any case, it's more of a marketing claim than a technical spec. They do not literally mean "this screen has the same 'resolution' as your retina". Your retina doesn't even have pixels! They just mean "it makes web pages looks great!".
So this "president of DisplayMate Technolgies" [sic] is tilting at windmills here.
Now holding iPhone in front of face at comfortable distance... Ruler tells me I'm holding it 18-20 inches away.
However, 12 inches is still comfortable, and I do see people holding their phones that close, just not me. And 24-30" seems to be where I hold it when I'm looking at it in the discreet from-the-waist manner.
This guys argument reminds me vaguely of the guy who asked about Itchy striking Scratchy's same rib twice and making two distinct notes.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Will the iPhone AND Apple ( The Company)
BLEND?
Yours In Anchorage,
K. Trout
Has anyone done actual studies on average distance of a smartphone from one's eyes, or is he making up the 12 inch stat?
I'd say I range between 12 and 18 depending on how I'm using the phone.
It's all just marketing speak anyway. It IS a higher-resolution display, but giving it a name like "retina" to a display is just the marketing guys trying to make you think that you won't notice any pixelation. That being said it is a better looking display than what's on the 3G/3GS. I think it's also likely that the average person won't notice much pixelation on the new display anyway.
This space for rent...
12 inches is the average??!? --- shame.....
Jesus, is this guy an Oompa-Loompa or something? I can't wait for the public relations backlash from the Union of Amputees and Thalidomide Children, complaining that Apple's marketing is biased towards people who can hold the Iphone 18 inches from their faces.
In other news, the iPad is not actually magical.
Android OS is not actually an operating system by or for Androids.
Windows 7 wasn't really the idea of some random people in cafes and showers.
Saturns - not actually made on Saturn. Surprising, I know.
The Emotion Engine has never shed a single tear.
Magic Markers have no magical properties.
No, the resolution of the iPhone display is only lower than the retina at distances closer to the eye than 18 inches. At further distances, the resolution of the iPhone is higher than the retina.
The guy also said the iPhone's resolution was comparable to the Motorola Droid, but the iPhone 4 actually has 50% more pixels than the Droid.
The PC mag article linked is confusing and poorly worded. I also think it's not quite correct. Basically, the human eye at 12 inches, according to their expert, can resolve 477 pixels per inch. Anything higher than that won't make the picture any clearer, but anything lower will look fuzzier (or pixellated). Since the iPhone 4 has a pixel density of 326 per inch, the expert says the claims of retinal resolution are false. However, he assumes the human eye has a resolution of 0.6 arcminutes (there are 60 arcminutes to a degree). I doubt most people have that good of eyesight; the number I always hear is about 1 arcminute for the eye. At 12 inches, that corresponds to a display of 286 pixels per inch to get retinal resolution, which the iPhone surpasses. So sure, if someone with extremely good vision uses this new iPhone, it'll be ever so slightly blurry. But c'mon, we're geeks here, and all wear glasses anyway, right? And either way, I don't think this means the claims by Jobs are *false*. At worst they're are very slightly misleading.
*** Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer http://www.badastronomy.com
So if Apple claims the "pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels" ... does that mean the iPhones v5, 6, 7, etc will continue to use the same resolution display since nothing higher will be noticeable by humans? Or is it obviously more likely that displays will continue to improve for the foreseeable future. Coming in 2011: iPhone featuring the revolutionary Retina Display HD!
According to Soneira the the resolution
I guess calling them "editors" does not imbue them with the ability to run a grammar check.
So, if you hold an iPhone at the typical 12 inches from your eyes that works out to 477 pixels per inch and at 8 inches it's 716 ppi. You have to hold iPhone 4 out about 18 inches before it falls to 318 ppi. So the iPhone has significantly lower resolution than the retina
No, no, no! Mr. Soneira has it all wrong! The math works out if you are inside a reality-distortion field, since all physical laws either change or do not apply inside said field!
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
The Nexus One is NOT in fact a real android!
You are NOT related to the Microsoft KIN!
The Blackberry is NOT edible! Neither is the LG Chocolate.
And you can NOT shave with a Moto Razr. Trust me, I have tried.
You insensitive clods! We over-45s need reading glasses to even see the screen, never mind the pixels!
First, he's can't be challenging that it has a "Retina Display", because that's an Apple Trademark. It obviously has a Retina Display. He can challenge Apple's assertion that the dpi of the display, when held at 12", is beyond the capabilities of the human eye. Absolutely he can challenge that.
Don't phrase it as challenging that the iPhone has a "Retina Display", though. (Especially when the so-called "attacker" actually PRAISES the display!)
Finally, I don't know about 12", anyway. I tend to hold my phone at about 18" by default. Maybe when I am not wearing my glasses I'll have it closer, (astigmatism, not near/far sighted, so my glasses don't make things look bigger or smaller,) but even then, if I close my astigmatized eye, 18" is about right.
So Jobs-o will just correct it to 18" instead of 12".
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
This guys argument reminds me vaguely of the guy who asked about Itchy striking Scratchy's same rib twice and making two distinct notes.
Apple is the top of the technology food chain now. I dislike Apple's marketing and pricing and corporate shenanigans - especially their views on "approving" software that I can run - and their success annoys me. So I get where this guy is coming from, though it's a pretty petty complaint.
I just hope the iPhone 4 inspires HTC to release an updated version of the Incredible with a front facing camera. Otherwise, the specs are either very close or better on the HTC.
Plus, it doesn't require a $30 accessory cable that will last three months, or force me to ask permission to run the apps that I want. Hell, it even gets reception in major cities! Which is good when you need to make phone calls.
I don't know resolution from revolution, but I'd bet that some class-action lawyer read this article and thought, "I can start a case based on this. I'll settle for a few hundred thousand for me and $5 coupons to the app store for the plaintiffs."
balderdash and poppycock, on so many levels:
(1) The human eye has very variable resolution. Down in the fovea it may be up at this guy's numbers, but much less everywhere else.
(2) The eye's color receptors are much farther apart, and therefore of poorer resolution, that the monochrome receptors. That's why the old NTSC standard had about 1/3 the color bandwidth than the Y bandwidth.
(3) The iPhone, and every other LCD screen, has three color elements per pixel, while the eye has like 1/3. That's a NINE TIMES difference that this guy is glossing over.
(4) It really doesn't matter. We don't spend our lives inspecting individual pixels-- we let our brain process the images into coherent high-level objects, such as "letters" and "faces".
Otherwise okay.
For a human eye with excellent acuity, the maximum theoretical resolution is 50 CPD[32] (1.2 arcminute per line pair, or a 0.35 mm line pair, at 1 m).
...A resolution of 2 arcminutes per line pair, equivalent to a 1 arcminute gap in an optotype, corresponds to 20/20 (normal vision) in humans
If my math is correct then this is 60% worse than the 'excellent' eye; so the figure of 477 ppi at 12 inches is 286.2ppi; so well within the retina display's capability.
" To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. "
You're all wrong. Everyone knows that Steve Jobs has a habit of slurring his "w"s into "r"s. Wetina is the actual name, and it's not for the screen. It means when a guy is walking down the street displaying his iPhone 4, it'll make all the girls wetina' you know where.
Claiming a "retina display" without specifying a viewing distant is blatant bullshit. Every display is a "retina display" at some distance... for an iPhone, the distance just a few inches closer than its current competitors.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
According to arstechnica's keynote LiveBlog, Steve said:
Retina display has 326 pixels per inch ... ...
It turns out there's a "magic number" right around 300 pixels per inch. When you hold something about 10-12 inches away from your eye, there's a limit in the human retina to differentiate the pixels
at 326 pixels, we are comfortably over that limit
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/wwdc-keynote-steve-jobs-liveblog.ars
Word game?
"Yeah, that's the thing: You can't really talk about this sort of issue with pixel density alone. You can only talk about it as a function of both pixel density and viewing distance."
No, actually it's possible to simply say that the human eye cannot discern individual pixels. Just like we can't discern individual molecules, no matter how close we hold the object to our eyes. There is an average minimum focal distance for the human eye, and if the object is held closer than that to try and discern more detail then it will become out of focus. If the DPI exceeds the human eye resolution at the typical minimum focal distance then the claim is valid.
Better known as 318230.
It's about publishing, not anatomy. This argument is like saying we should have celebrated the millenium in 2001.
Jobs said "300 dpi is a magic number" and indeed it is. He is referring to an ancient publishing standard. In print publishing, 300 dpi is "laser quality". It is very common for a graphic artist to create a "print" version of an artwork at 300 dpi and an "online" version at 72 dpi (effectively zero, or "resolution unknown", or 1:1 pixel ratio). We have looked forward to 300 dpi screens for many years because then you just make one 300 dpi version for both print and screen. The most important number on the dpi resolution ruler is 300. It is extremely significant to ship the first 300+ dpi screen.
A similar magic number in audio is 20kHz, the generally accepted upper limit of human hearing and the standard for "CD audio". The CD was significant because it passed the 20kHz magic number, and consumer audio still uses that frequency range today, 30 years later.
The key thing with these magic numbers is that below them you get dramatically lower quality but above them you get severely limited returns. 300 dpi and 20kHz are the points where it takes an expert to tell the difference between them and a higher quality. Most people can tell the difference between 200 and 300 dpi, but most people cannot tell te difference between 300 dpi and 600 dpi.
So the author of this article should have done some publishing industry research, some graphic arts research, instead of researching the eye. That is what Steve Jobs talks about when he says Apple is not just technology but also liberal arts, a broader knowledge of the world than just science.
This article is not just ignorant, it's also mean-spirited, small-minded. Like people who say "Think Different" is bad grammar. It's poetry you fuck. Broaden your horizons.
What cares what they call it, it's still better than OLED.
I just assumed that retina display was a marketing word that apple applied to the screen. Sort of like how FedEx's Overnight Mail is the name of the service and not a guarantee of receiving mail overnight.
You, sir, have just ruined my childhood. And i'm 27.
Are you telling me my iPhone display isn't going to be implanted into my retina? Goddammit.
Oh wait, is the display made of retinas? No? Fuckshitdammit! FML.
I don't fear computers, I fear the lack of them. -I. Asimov
As much as I value truth in advertising, it's still just advertising. They're selling a product, and of course we're going to assume some exaggeration of features. I'm sick of hearing from people suffering from "smartest guy in the room" syndrome who feel it necessary to pick apart the slightest technical inaccuracy in any claim. Please, I beg you, flame me, and in doing so, prove what a jerk you are.
A Gizmodo editor? ...just saying...
-- Terry
67,000 miles per hour, of course this number is also misconstrued because it includes the speed of the earth around the son.
but as long as we are making numbers up, hey why not..
... I thought 'Retina Display' meant 'This puppy'll burn your eyes out'
They said this guy did the math, but I don't see the math.
His email jumps from a benchmark metric in seconds of arc to data in dots per inch without giving either a conversion factor between dpi and arc, or a benchmark metric in dpi.
That's the opposite of doing the math.
I still don't know if he's right or wrong.
Next you'll be proving that, if you examine the facts carefeully, Pepsi isn't really the choice of a new generation.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
When even nerds are calling you pedantic, you may as well give up.
The important part is how consumers interpret and respond to the idea of a 'retinal display'. No doubt it will conjure all kinds of wild assumptions and capabilities in the mind of the buyer, compelling them to buy it. Furthermore, no amount of logic/reasoning will be convince them that their assumptions were wrong: "how can I be wrong - just look at that display!"
If fonts use sub-pixel anti-aliasing, they display at 318ppi in one direction and 954ppi in the other. That averages out to about 551ppi. And with an IPS display, anti-aliasing works better because the screen has a constant gamma across viewing angles.
For a 24 inch screen the resolution for 300 dpi would be approximately 5700x3600.
The pixels are huge on my current 24" monitor (1920x1200 or about 160 dpi).
With Rectal display. Certainly NOT going to the keynote for that presentation.
Task Mangler
A few things make a ~300 DPI LCD better than a 300 DPI laser printer:
1. Pixels are perfectly ordered, with a less error than a print head.
(though there is still some "error" due to the subpixel layout)
2. Because there are actually 3 subpixels, ClearType-style rendering has the potential to be that much better.
3. Even without ClearType-style rendering, pixel antialiasing is something most laser printers don't do.
Yeah, and if you holding it one mile from your eyes, then the resolution of iPhone screen falls down up to 0,1 pixel per inch. I mean, 20 inches (or half of meter) is way bigger distance than 99.999% of the Planet habitants usually holding a book from their eyes.
I think, now we will have a flood of such stupid "reviews": Apple fanboys will go bash Google devices, Google fanboys will attack Apple troops, and journalists from Microsoft will silently cry in the corner along with a journalists from Black Berry and Nokia.
I liked when Jobs said "iPhone 4 displays better than iPad" - well, that was big "Ooops!". :) At least he admits that. On the other hand, unlike Nokia with crappy Maemo or Microsoft, let's face it: Apple is doing great job by DELIVERING products that ARE great. Not perfect, but are great, hands down. I hope Google and others will compete with Apple here and they should.
The 1 arcminute represents the width of one arm of the "E" that is used in vision tests (the entire "E" is 5 arcminutes high). 20/20 vision is defined as being able to distinguish between characters of that size. However, many people have better than 20/20 vision. 20/20 is just the point at which someone's vision is "good enough" that doctors see no reason to improve your vision.
Also, depending on how you measure it, the human eye can detect features that are much smaller than 1 arcminute. Surprisingly the answer is a different higher resolution if distinguishing between parallel and off-of-parallel-by-one-pixel lines. Or consider what is the narrowest white line that can be detected against a black background. It is much narrower than the "retinal" resolution because past a certain point as the line gets narrower, the eye will detect the line as getting dimmer. The answer is also different if you are using a black line on a white background.
Now is the detectability of a white line against a black background meaningful for display resolutions? Probably not. But the 1 arcminute from the "E" vision test isn't exactly meaningful either because your eyes can detect subfeatures of the "E".
So what is the right measure? I would offer three possible measures. The first is the resolution at which a human eye cannot detect (in a double blind test) further improvement in the display of non-anti-aliased images. Note, even if the eye can't see the jaggies, one may "feel" sharper. The second is the resolution at which the human eye cannot detect the difference between an anti-aliased and a non-anti-aliased image. The third is the resolution at which rounding errors of one pixel are not detectable (e.g. in the rendering of a vector based fonts). I don't know what those numbers are but given my knowledge of the human optic system (I'm not a doctor, but I've studied this question before) they are likely higher than 1 arcminute.
I think it's great that Apple has moved to a high ppi screen and I hope that soon my desktop screen will have a similar ppi, but Apple is lying if they claim the resolution is beyond the limit of human vision. (Though truth be told I suspect Jobs chose his words carefully so he didn't technically say that, but so that everyone thought he said that.)
Hint: People make a big deal about 20/20 vision because it's a minimum standard for having "normal" vision. At the DMV, they test that you have at least 20/20 vision, but most people can see better than 20/20.
The Wikipedia article confirms that the normal range of human vision is from 20/20 (low end of normal) to 20/12 (high end of normal). The article doesn't say, but I'll assume it's a normal distribution, so 20/16 would be the median (yes, I'm ignoring the fact that a large percentage of the non-normal-vision population has their vision corrected to the bare minimum requirement).
20/12 is 0.6 minutes of arc; 1 / tan(0.6 / 60) = ~5729.6 dpi * inches away, so someone with 20/12 vision can see 320 dpi at 5729.6 / 320 = 17.9 inches.
20/16 is 0.8 minutes of arc; 1 / tan(0.8 / 60) = ~4297.2 dpi * inches away, so someone with "average" 20/16 vision can see 320 dpi at 4297.2 / 320 = 13.4 inches.
20/20 is 1.0 minutes of arc; 1 / tan(1.0 / 60) = ~3437.7 dpi * inches away, so someone with "only" 20/20 vision can see 320 dpi at 3437.7 / 320 = 10.7 inches.
Thus a typical consumer with normal (uncorrected) vision will need to hold the device 10.7 to 17.9 inches to have a "retinal" experience, and at least 50% of those will need to hold it more than 13.4 inches away. However, the typical consumer with exactly 20/20 corrective lenses (the minimum required by the DMV) can have a "retinal" display if they hold the device at 10.7 inches. Geeks have notoriously bad eyesight, so that probably shifts the average a lot closer to 12 inches (at least here on /.).
p.s. I have natural 20/14 vision, so I would have to hold the device about 15.3 inches away.
This is no more misleading than lens makers' claims of "macro" functionality. A true macro lens is able to reproduce an image of the object at actual 1:1 scale onto the film or image sensor, but some professional "macro" lenses can only reproduce at a scale of 1:2 or less, and the "macro" mode on compact cameras is so laughably far from macro (typically around 1:64) that I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been a lawsuit over it.
the yellow signal is calculated from the other signals. Sure it would be better to have video with a native yellow signal from a device that has four CCD's (or separate elements for 4 colours).
also yellow is perceived as negative blue (and vis versa), the underlying mechanism is cone cells that have a response which varies between blue and yellow, and another that varies between green and red, some women and many animals have another cone (or even up to 5 types of cones i believe for some birds or octopuses (not sure)) with a different response allowing even finer discrimination.
so there reasonably sound basis to support the addition of a yellow signal to oppose the existing blue.
So Apple came out with a ridiculously high-res LCD to put in the iPhone 4, and then they came up with a slick name for it in marketing to make it sound even better.
And the point of this nitpick article is what?
Newsflash: color E-6 film has better resolution than CCDs in digital cameras. That doesn't stop camera companies from comparing their sensors favorably to film, and people don't write articles that are Slashdot link-worthy about it. But it's the iPhone, so it's news.
Let's just put it like this: The new iPhone has a frickin' gorgeous screen. It's way higher-res than anything else for the moment. Apple even came up with a catchy name for it. We good with that?
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
This is the dumbest article I have ever seen on any subject ever. How much more can someone grasp at straws? It's a nice display, just stop. No one ever said "It has a resolution greater than or equivalent to the human retina," they just call it a "Retina" display because it *sounds* fancy. It's a fucking marketing name...
I've argued about some pretty stupid stuff in my day (but capacitive means you can't use a stylus! How are you supposed to get to all those tiny menus!), but this is ridiculous.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
In other news, Snow Leopard does not actually have any features of a large cat.
HOLY SHIT! I had no clue they ever claimed _that_ -- I guess that ridiculous assertion is why they kept the iPhone and iPad so low-res, until they *had* to pull out the stops to beat all the WVGA Android, WinMo, and Maemo phones. The farther you let statements like that slip into the mists of time, the better hope nobody will bring them up. Unfortunately, the intarwebs nevah forget!
If you only need 300 then why are printer manufacturers bothering to make printers that go to 1200 and higher? The answer seems to be because most people can tell the difference between somthing printed at 300dpi and somthing printed at 1200 dpi. therefore the average person can see more then 300dpi Heck I have a book which was printed using default latex setting (yes its a Prolog book and it really was published using latex) and it is extremely hard to look at. The effect is somewhat like looking at a CRT monitor with too low a refresh rate seriously it gives me the same kind of headache.
read my mind at http://the-willows.blogspot.com/
God, what an arguement about nothing.
Even the article post admits that at 18", the dpi is retina resolution.
Getting out my yardstick and holding my cell phone at a comfortable distance to touch the screen with my other hand, I get 16 to 18" distances. I'm 6'5" tall so perhaps this is a little less for others.
How do you *use* the ipod.
Hell, if we put the ipod over your eye, you can't even see the entire display and probably can't focus on it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The screen doesn't even have a hole in it!
And who wants to look at a rectum all day anyway.
And I shudder at the thought of prodding the screen with my finger-- at least if I'm not wearing a vinyl glove!
They'll never sell any product with a display like that on it.
Those people at Apples are real sickos!
Oh.. Retina?
never mind...
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Because dpi and ppi are different.
The human eye can resolve much finer than 300 dpi --- 400 dpi is where fonts start to look nice on a laserprinter and imagesetters are easily differentiated by their output at 1,270 ppi vice 2,540 ppi (and there are models which go higher) --- see the book _Counterpunch: Making Type in the 16th Century, Designing Typefaces Now_ by Fred Smeijers for electron micrographs and a discussion of this.
Granted, the iPhone screen is 326 _pixels_ per inch, so one gets anti-aliasing, yielding a higher effective dpi, and possibly sub-pixel rendering, but screens need to get better yet.
Image resolution is measured in several ways:
ppi (pixels per inch) --- input / file resolution
dpi (dots per inch) --- output resolution for a single ink colour
lpi - (lines per inch) --- output resolution for ``halftones'' which allows the simulation of multiple levels when one can only do on/off --- newspapers use ~85 lpi, uncoated stock in books ~133lpi, magazines 150 lpi or higher, art books 200 lpi --- different printing processes/tecniques are used for better quality or fewer generations
A pixel is a ``picture element'' a unit of a raster grid which can be more finely differentiated than just black or white --- the coarsest pixel I can think of would be the monochrome NeXT Cube (and later Slabs) which had black, white and two shades of grey.
Try putting a 326 ppi greyscale image of a Gustav Doré engraving on the iPhone and compare that to the actual engraving in a book --- the difference between them will be obvious to anyone w/ good vision.
Different printing and halftoning techniques make lpi rather complex --- stochastic screening does away w/ it for example and exhibits improvement to the limits of output resolution --- 3600 dpi on some imagesetters.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
So is it 12 inches with perfect vision you can still detect pixels.
How representative of typical vision is the eye he is using for this example? Perfect?
What portion of the population can even focus comfortably at 12". That is pretty damn close. I doubt anyone over 40 can accommodate that focus point without reading glasses.
I am over 40, and 16-18 inches is in the comfortable close focus range. I played with a friends iPhone and I don't remember noticing pixels on the old one. But I wasn't looking for them.
IMO other than in Pedantic arguments, 326 dpi is likely overkill, especially on a phone.
So it's possible to distinguish the pixels if you hold it close enough. There is no fixed distance to base a judgement on, however. Inches? Centimeters? Since most of the world is metric, 12 inches is no good, anyway.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Only an Apple user would label making phone calls on a phone "politics."
Is it really surprising that Apple "stretches" the truth? After all, one of their board members invented the internet and published an "inconveniently untrue" hockey stick diagram... Birds of a feather and all.
will this app be allowed at the Store?
They mislead on various items in the keynote. The comparison shots they used for "non-retina display vs Retina display" are way off accurate. There was a good blog post about it here:
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/06/apple-using-fake-489-to-815-ppi-on-iphone-4-ads/
Moreover, they say that the aluminosilicate glass-ceramic on the front and back is "comparable to sapphire" in hardness -- but by all indications, even the toughest Aluminosilicate glass ceramics (Gorilla Glass) rate at a 7 on the Mohs Scale. Sapphire is a 9 and is *4x* harder than a 7. This makes a big difference becuase at a 7, it's comparable to quartz and therefore most types of sand in hardness. This means a few loose grains of sand in your pocket can result in a scratched up device. If it were truely comparable to sapphire in hardness, this would not be the case. These sort of distinctions matter. I don't see how being 1/4th as hard as sapphire is "comparable to sapphire" in hardness. I wonder if Apple would accept a "comparable" payment to the iPhone's retail price . . .
It's one thing when Apple just loosely throws around superlatives like "revolutionary" and "magical" to try to generate a Reality Distortion Field, but it's another thing entirely when they exaggerate and mislead in their claims about their device.
burn in hell!
Correct; without specifying the distance from your eye to the screen, the resolution 'claim' doesn't mean anything (and is b.s.)
You could claim that a mound of 3 inch rocks has a higher resolution than the human retina - because if you stand a mile away, you can't discriminate one rock from another.
Obviously Slashdot submitters and users are foolish enough to fall into the simplest of marketing traps. All Apple has to do is define a new meaningless term like "retina displays", and the self-styled experts come out and give them free airtime as if it mattered.
provided by google:
"So, if you hold an iPhone at the typical 30 cm from your eyes, that works out to 477 pixels per inch. At 20 cm inches it's 716 ppi. You have to hold iPhone 4 out about 45 cm before it falls to 318 ppi."
metric system ftw.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK, an Iphone costs A$790 for the 8GB 3G model (cheapest model in AU) which is now been superseded twice. Lets assume you, no matter how fat and ugly you are, you will get laid once before the device is superseded or rendered non functional. A flight to the Philippines with Tiger Airways from Perth costs A$550, a hotel room as little as A$30 and a sexy Pinay lady is about 1500 PHP (A$40).
Iphone A$790,
PI: A$620,
With the difference, you could get an additional 4.25 lays in the Philippines for the same money.
In addition to this, in the Philippines you'll be getting laid by a girl.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
0.6 arcmin is a very high figure which I suspect of being a theoretical maximum. The astronomer's rule of thumb for visual resolution is 1 arcmin, and that's optimistic.
First off, I'm pretty sure TFA is talking about the ideal case of human vision. So, for those of us with merely average eyesight, the DPI required to exceed the angular resolution of your retina is a bit lower than quoted in the article. Secondly, who holds their phone 8 inches from their face? I just tried it, and it's uncomfortably close. I tend to hold mine about 12-18 inches away in common usage.
Finally, this is one of (if not the) highest DPI full color displays ever brought to market. Apple is counting pixels based on RGB triplets, not RG/BG pairs like many OLED displays such as the one found in the Nexus One (see this article for more info on the strange way OLED displays count pixels, and the problems this causes)
They also claim a few other enhancements in the display, such as reducing the space between the display and the front glass, and reducing the distance between individual subpixels, but I'll reserve judgement on those until I get a chance to see the display on an iPhone 4 in person.
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
.. since a bunch of Apple haters claims that "It is unnessecary waste to have a display with à resolution the eye can not match!"
The standard definition of normal visual acuity (20/20 vision) is the ability to resolve a spatial pattern separated by a visual angle of one minute of arc. Since one degree contains sixty minutes, a visual angle of one minute of arc is 1/60 of a degree.
[...]
When visually inspecting an object for a defect such as a crack, the distance (d) might be around 12 inches. This would be a comfortable viewing distance. At 12 inches, the normal visual acuity of the human eye is 0.00349 inch. What this means is that if you had alternating black and white lines that were all 0.00349 inch wide, it would appear to most people as a mass of solid gray.
In case you wondered: a pixel 0.00349 inch wide gives you 286.5 pixel per inch
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
We've just made a major discovery in tech news reporting over at metafilter.org :
All Apple product release posts should focus primarily upon the latest tween toy trends like bedazzling.
For example, the iPad release article should clearly have focussed upon vajazzling.
We have found this merger of topics undeniably keeps discussions organized and focussed upon what matters most, and therefore recommend that slashdot users submit all future articles about Apple product releases accordingly.
Also, we're fairly confident that youtube videos pertaining to apply products should also focus upon the latest tween trends.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Missed the point of the article. Steve says that the magic number is 300DPI and the distance a foot.
However, the magic number is NOT 300DPI at a foot, but about 700DPI at a foot.
So when someone says "Steve Jobs is talking BS" in what way is it a strawman argument given he was actually talking BS?
So why did they call it retina display? Why did they say it was at retinal resolution at 12" when it wasn't? If it isn't but doesn't matter, why did they say? It mattered enough to give it a catchy buzzword, but doesn't matter when the fan hears it isn't actually true...
It's not that the display resolution is too low, it's that Apple's marketing department is near-sighted.
Regarding the RGBY LCD, that's like saying that a printer with a CMYK cartridge is a fraud, because no image file format specifies a black channel. And how about printers that print with 7 colors of ink? Shouldn't Epson's executive be thrown in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for releasing the Stylus 2200, when all you really need, theoretically, is CMY inks?
Here's the thing. The video standard by which video is sent to your TV set (BT.709, sRGB, xvYCC, whatever) specifies a color gamut, which includes yellow. Your TV set, knowing the characteristics of its LCD panel, will perform an appropriately weighted colorspace conversion to translate from the incoming video standard to a set of drive signals which match the LCD, preserving as much of the incoming color gamut as possible. RGBY LCDs are capable of displaying a wider gamut - specifically they're capable of producing a more pure, less "washed out" yellow color, so they'll more accurately render the input. How much yellow to display is calculated using the same method that your CMYK inkjet knows how much black to print given a RGB source.
Go to your local big box electronics store, find the 4-color TV set and jam your face up to it. You'll see yellow pixels.
Your post reminded me of a stupid product I saw. It is real. Crazy, but real.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.23065
I was momentarily excited when I heard that the iPhone 4 would have a retinal display and then not exactly surprised when it was just hype about the screen resolution. To me, a retinal display implies a device using either LED or Lasers to paint an image on the back of the retina bypassing the lens of your eyes. I have heard that companies are developing the technology for use in cell phones but this... not so impressive.
Soneira makes no sense in claiming that a display looks worse as you move it away from the eyes. In fact, Apple overshot the PPI and not under.
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/06/do-you-really-need-300-ppi-on-a-3-5-inch-phone
“So, if you hold an iPhone at the typical 12 inches from your eyes that works out to 477 pixels per inch,” Soneira added. “At 8 inches it’s 716 ppi. You have to hold it out 18 inches before it falls to 318 ppi.”
These comments makes absolutely no sense. If he wasn’t misquoted (and I have to give Mark Hachman of PC Magazine the benefit of the doubt that Soneira was quoted correctly), then Soneira’s statement is completely opposite of what is true. PPI or Pixels Per Inch stays the same regardless of distance held to the eyes but what does change is that angular resolution increases as you move the display away from the eyes so you don’t need as much PPI for a larger and more distant display. This is why a 42 1080P HDTV only has 52 PPI and you can’t see any pixels on it because you’re sitting so far away. Soneira is suggesting that the iPhone 4 looks worse and worse as you move it further away which is a baffling. The correct conclusion is that the iPhone 4 overshot the PPI and not undershot.
As far as I'm concerned (posting with my fifty year old eyes) holding my measly iPhone 3Gs as close as twelve inches away from my face is far too close! Typically over 2 feet, sometimes on my lap (reading from the Kindle app), etc. So, as with most user-mitigated responses (and Slashdot threads), the reality is all over the map, and your mileage may vary. Many post closer to the actual, pointing out this is much the same as arguing over how much "new and improved" is actually better.
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning" - Catherine Aird
White image. 1024x768. One black pixel in the center. If you can see the black pixel up to 24 inches away, the claim is pure bullshit.
This should be the test. If the pixel should not be noticable to the human eye, then plain and simple the simulation of a 'dead' pixel should the the test to the claim. If it is truly that good of a display, the 'dead' pixel shouldn't be noticable at all.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The reason a hi-res display works on the iPhone and iPad is that the OS is resolution-independent. When you zoom in, text is re-rendered at a higher resolution. The bigger you make text, the sharper it looks, because more pixels are used to render the same letters.
In 2005, and in fact even today, most desktop operating systems are NOT resolution independent. The size of the text is locked to a certain number of pixels. When you zoom in on a Macbook Pro (Control-scroll) for instance, the pixels in the text are simply enlarged. The larger you make text, the fuzzier it looks.
If you put a resolution-dependent OS on a 300 DPI display, the letters will be so tiny as to be unreadable. 100 PPI is a great physical resolution for a resolution-dependent OS like OS X or Windows..it offers ok resolution for images without making text too small to read. That is why even today a 15.4 inch Macbook Pro only has 1440 pixels across 14.35 inches of width.
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs.html
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
In a statement by Steve Jobs: "Who the fuck is this guy?! Theoretical physics? How about I put my theoretical foot up his ass! Can you differentiate the pixels of that, motherfucker?"
Please note that I am not advocating any violence, theoretical or otherwise against physicists, theoretical or otherwise.
I mean, it seems to be so common. I had just assumed there is enough gray area for companies to claim whatever they want. Lawyers and people in marketing get paid plenty to make this stuff up.
So faster is better? Lower mouse sensitivity is for people who aren't distinguishing? click this: http://watchesgoogle.com/ http://watchescase.com/