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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."
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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.
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