A Professional Perspective On Apple's Retina Display

Reader BWJones, who is a retinal scientist, sends in this detailed analysis of the iPhone 4's "retinal display," which includes photomicrographs of the display pixels of earlier generations of iPhone as well as the iPad. Well worth a read. "... as you can see from these images of the displays I captured under a microscope, the pixels are not square. Rather they are rectangular, and while the short axis is 78 microns, the long axis on the iPhone 4 pixel is somewhere in the neighborhood of 102 microns. ... While [an earlier analysis by] Dr. Soneira was partially correct with respect to the retina, Apple's Retina Display adequately represents the resolution at which images fall upon our retina. ... [I] find Apple's claims stand up to what the human eye can perceive."

Comments

Too literal

[DoofusOfDeath]

Apparently we should never ask a scientist, "How do you like *them* Apples?"

Re:Too literal

[mcgrew]

It seems I saw this story last week here? Or was that a different guy? TFA is slashdottet so I can't tell. At any rate, "retinal display" is meaningless. Your retina can only resolve as good as what your cornea and lens can accurately focus on it. Someone in their 40s will be holding the thing at arm's length, while someone nearsighted might have it six inches from their face without their glasses. And like focusing, retinal density will vary at least slightly from person to person.

It's meaningless hype, good for marketing.

Re:Too literal

[Anonymous Coward]

Never ask a Dr. he gets to park anywhere, use personalized number plates and fucking around on their iMacs.

Re:Too literal

[uprise78]

"A Professional Perspective On Apple's Retina Display" I thought everyone who puts words on the Internets was a professional....seems redundant

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

Retinal display is not meaningless. Especially for those of us that require ABSOLUTE DETAIL to diagnose a problem (very common in the horticultural industry where one symptom can be any number of problems, so a picture is needed to see what is up,) a very high-detail display is required.

Now, I don't know if this is just me, but I can still pick up sound higher than 32KHz and even using a 32" 1080p LCD (with a native resolution 3x that) and sitting more than 6 feet away, I can still see the pixels. Maybe I'm just a better-bred human, but I doubt it, as I sem to encounter people with FAR better hearing and vision than myself daily (one guy I know can hear up to 38KHz pitches and turning on my LCDTV hurts his ears when the inverter for the backlight kicks on, he hasn't used a monitor in his life until the most recent OLED screens... poor guy.)

Re:Too literal

[rolfwind]

"It's meaningless hype, good for marketing."

That pretty much describes every single one of apple's products.

While I don't think Apple products are magical, people who don't understand why they sell (or why Nintendo products sell) are fixated by feature lists but kinda miss out on the whole dimension of actual usability of those features.

Re:Too literal

[Animaether]

Although I love myself some high-resolution displays and I think the whole discussion of whether or not a higher resolution is meaningless is itself rather meaningless...

Especially for those of us that require ABSOLUTE DETAIL to diagnose a problem [...] a very high-detail display is required.

No.. not really. You need to be able to see that detail - but that doesn't mean you have to see it as a 1:1 reproduction. There's no reason you can't take the high resolution image you have and simply zoom in on it; even a 320x240 screen is going to be adequate for those purposes.

Of course, again, it is much -nicer- to have a higher resolution display.. but not a requirement.

Re:Too literal

[mcgrew]

using a 32" 1080p LCD (with a native resolution 3x that) and sitting more than 6 feet away, I can still see the pixels.

That's exactly what I was talking about. Screen resolution of course matters, but the idea of "retinal display" is a meaningless metric, because no two eyes are alike. As I said, someone severely nearsighted not wearing his glasses holding a high density display a few inches from his face will see the pixels clearly, while a fortysomething who really needs reading glasses will be holding it at arm's length, and the resolution wouldn't be so important; He'll never see the pixels.

The idea that "this is as high a resolution as you need because nobody can see any batter" is hogwash.

Re:Too literal

[socz]

Hmm, that gives me an idea for a new product: "iHype; not just apple anymore"

Re:Too literal

[joeyblades]

That's a little bit like saying that gas milage quotes on new cars are meaningless hype because everyone drives differently... We have to have metrics in order to compare things. These metrics must be based on standards. In the world of optics, retinal resolution and retinal acuity, based on perfect 20/20 vision are two common metric standards... but yes, your milage may vary.

Re:Too literal

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now, I don't know if this is just me, but I can still pick up sound higher than 32KHz"

Nah...I'm pretty sure it is just you. Because that is twice what the average person over 18 can hear. And 12Khz above what 'perfect' hearing is around birth.

Pretty much, it means you are full of shit, a nerd on the internet that likes to exaggerate, or you just don't know what you are talking about. Works out to be about the same.

There might be things that are biting away at the 32Khz range, but you aren't hearing that...you may be hearing distortion much lower levels. An accurate sound meter would be able to isolate the frequencies to tell you what you are hearing.

I've worked in audio for a while and on occasion, I'd have artists or nerds claim that our specs weren't high enough. They'd pull out numbers pretty much like you did...and we had equipment that was calibrated to much higher than that (mainly to avoid the brickwall much lower...not because we needed anything much past 20khz)...considering my four graduate years were spent human research, I'd occasionally set up an experiment to prove a point.

Funny thing is (and with my background, actually, it isn't)...even when their claims were dispelled, we'd still be told we were wrong and hear the artists repeat these claims in magazines or make boasts about competitors products that didn't tell them they were an idiot. We sold more because we were truthful than we would have with a celebrity endorsement...

tl;dr: You're full of shit.

Re:Too literal

[Mark Hanson]

Apple never called it a "retinal display". They call it the Retina Display. It's a marketing name. They said exactly how many ppi it has, so I have a hard time seeing how anyone feels misled by their claims.

Apple also has a line of monitors called Cinema Display. Perhaps the scientists should waste their time trying to determine if these monitors could actually be used in movie theaters.

Re:Too literal

[ChaosDiscord]

Especially for those of us that require ABSOLUTE DETAIL to diagnose a problem

Have you heard of this cutting edge technology called "zooming in"? It allows use mortals to even see things smaller than even your apparently superhuman eyes can.

If the horticultural industry to so behind the times that they're reduced to squinting at their screens trying to see details, I fear for our future food supply.

Re:Too literal

[severoon]

1. We don't need someone to discuss something we already know. Is anyone here under the impression that this needs to be studied for the first time in human history because Apple created a phone? c = 2 × d × tan( theta ÷ 2 )
2. Who cares if the iPhone 4 strictly meets the resolution of the human retina? Different people have different eyesight. Certainly the Guiness record holder for best eyesight would not agree, but most of us need glasses, so what difference does it make to Apple's target market? It's better, that's what matters. In a couple of years, if every device has > 300ppi because Apple did this, I will be very, very happy. (I'm into photography, I'd love to be able to show images on a device that give some notion of sharpness.)
3. Apple fumbled this marketing claim. They should have said, Hey all, it's better! By making a scientific claim, they invited people to challenge it. The conversation has become about whether they have met some arbitrary goal rather than: it's better. Whee.

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

"but that doesn't mean you have to see it as a 1:1 reproduction."

This is not true when you're dealing with cellular-level issues. You need high resolution, and high-quality optics to capture that issue, then you need an equally high-res display. Otherwise you will misdiagnose a Nitrogen issue as a pH or magnesium issue and you just screwed your whole crop.

Just because *YOU* don't need it doesn't mean we don't need it in another profession.

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

"Pretty much, it means you are full of shit, a nerd on the internet that likes to exaggerate, or you just don't know what you are talking about. Works out to be about the same."

Except I still hold the medical records of those tests when I was 5 years old, preparing to enter Elementary school.

So you can talk all the nonsense that you wish, but there are those of us with far above-average capabilities.

Hey, I wouldn't be R&D head of a multinational company, considering I only have a GED, if I couldn't back up what I say with proof and results.

Why're you posting anonymously? Too scared someone else like me will show up in the thread and smack you with proof?

Re:Too literal

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps if you're using a phone display for this kind of work, you're doing it wrong.

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

"Have you heard of this cutting edge technology called "zooming in"

Too bad you're totally ignorant of the requirements of the horticultural industry - far more stringent than your typical computer industry stuff.

Zooming in isn't going to do shit on a tiny pad when you need a large screen displaying near-SEM resolutions to diagnose a plant issue.

But you're a computer geek, not someone trying to put mankind into space, so you're probably acutely unaware of the realities of what other industries need.

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

"Who cares if the iPhone 4 strictly meets the resolution of the human retina? Different people have different eyesight."

How is this even possible if every human retina is different? There's no strict definition of human eye resolution if every human is different.

Kinda skipped that step in logic, eh?

Re:Too literal

[Animaether]

This is not true when you're dealing with cellular-level issues.

Again.. zoom. You wouldn't say "Oh, I need a 50000PPI display to view these bacteria", would you? You use a display (or your eyes) on a microscope. Refute the zoom as being a proper viewing method and I'll gladly go along.

And as a sibling poster notes... if you're doing this -in the field-, consider a magnifying glass instead; it'll still be superior to trying to take a pretty low-resolution image and displaying that on a screen that's going to be crap to view in the sun anyway.

Re:Too literal

[Timothy Brownawell]

Except I still hold the medical records of those tests when I was 5 years old, preparing to enter Elementary school.

So you can talk all the nonsense that you wish, but there are those of us with far above-average capabilities.

Flickr and imgur are over that way --> , and I assume you have a camera or scanner?

Hey, I wouldn't be R&D head of a multinational company, considering I only have a GED, if I couldn't back up what I say with proof

...such as a link to your company bio?

Too scared someone else like me will show up in the thread and smack you with proof?

I see no "proof", just bare assertions.

Re:Too literal

[root_42]

You say you can 32 KHz sounds? That would make you incredibly sensitive. The best hearing in humans goes up to approx. 20 KHz. You would be well into Ultrasound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound). I guess you meant that you can hear signals sampled with 32 KHz, which would limit sounds to a frequency of 16 KHz.

Re:Too literal

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just you.

I haven't heard of ANYONE consciously "hearing" sounds above 22 kHz.

Research has shown that higher frequencies up to 40 kHz will produce higher brain activity in human test subjects (Boyk et al.); however, subjects are not able to *consciously* discern the presence of these high frequencies.

How did you measure these frequencies?

Did you subject yourself to auditory tests on research equipment? Because if you did informal tests on anything less, you're only hearing aliasing or subharmonic distortion (which, at 32kHz, has a lovely peak at 16 kHz, which is the "normal" limit, and pretty good for an adult human.

But you're very likely not hearing the original signal.

Re:Too literal

[jp102235]

This applies to VLSI cad as well, you need wide screens and lots of resolution - of course you could get by with a 320x200 display - zooming in and out, but your productivity and quailty would suffer.
Tufte talks about this:

It is reasonable to suggest that there are other issues in presenting evidence than high resolution. Any other view would be astonishing. But the overwhelming truth is that much of the history of progress in science and in communication can be written in terms of improvements in resolution. That is the big idea here, and it should not be compromised away by shortrun situational considerations. -- Edward Tufte, July 29, 2001

see: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index

Re:Too literal

[Kijori]

These claims that people can see the flicker in low-energy lightbulbs, the pixels on the display and the noise of a power supply in the next town over seem to crop up fairly reliably on Slashdot. I normally just raise an eyebrow and wonder if it's possible, but this time I thought I'd check to see just how good your senses are compared to mine.

using a 32" 1080p LCD (with a native resolution 3x that) and sitting more than 6 feet away, I can still see the pixels

Ignoring the higher native resolution for the moment, a 32" 1080p LCD, assuming it's widescreen format and using Wikipedia's translation of 1080p to 1920*1080, will have pixels approximately 0.37mm square. From six feet away these pixels would have an angular separation of about 0.0056 degrees, or 0.35 arcminutes. According to the article, someone with 20/20 vision can resolve detail down to about 1 arcminute - making your eyesight about three times better than normal, or approximately 20/7 (1). Now, although, unfortunately, there isn't a Guinness world record for it, Wikipedia claims that the best measured eyesight is 20/8. Taking the most modest of your claims - since you said "more than 6 feet away" and that your LCD had a native resolution 3x 1080p - it would still appear that you have the best eyesight in the world

Regarding your incredible hearing, I don't have the expertise to comment on just how good that range is (can anyone comment on whether that range is exceptional?). I will ask, though, how you came to find out? I can't find anyone offering a hearing test that goes that high, so I doubt you got it done professionally, and most speakers won't emit sounds that high pitched.

If you really do encounter people with better hearing and vision daily as you say, I'd be interested to know where you live (some sort of superhero's lair, perhaps?)

(1) Other sources, for example Wikipedia, list 20/20 vision as giving a maximum visual accuity of 50 "cycles per degree", or 1.2 arcminutes, which would make you almost four times better than average.

Re:Too literal

[timeOday]

Computer geeks have always lusted after big high-res displays just like everybody else. I think he's just being contrary because "retinal-displays" is linked to a current Apple offering and thus tainted with hype. But obviously identifying the point of diminishing returns for display resolution is of interest (though especially when size is constrained by device form factor).

In flight simulation they have talked about so-called 20/20 displays for decades. (I think that terminology is a bit better than "retinal display" since it accounts for people's varying visual acuity.) Medical imaging has also long been a driver of big high-resolution display tech.

Re:Too literal

[mcgrew]

Gas milage quotes on new cars are meaningless hype because everyone drives differently. If they would give mileage estimates based on the best you could possibly get, rather than an average, then that would be a meaningful metric. And actually that's how they used to do it; my 2002 car's EPA estimates, compiled the old way, says it gets 35 mpg highway. Well, I normally get 27-32 with the cruise control set at 67 mph, but one time I drove home from St Louis after a tire blew out, travelling on its "donut" spare doing 50, and the mileage computer said 36; of course, the donut has less friction, so that would account for the extra 2 mpg (and perhaps a tailwind).

Re:Too literal

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much, it means you are full of shit, a nerd WITH AN EXAGGERATED SENSE OF SELF WORTH on the internet that likes to exaggerate, or you just don't know what you are talking about.

FTFY. HTH. HAND.

Re:Too literal

[khellendros1984]

No one hears frequencies that high. People that claim to do so are generally hearing much lower frequency harmonics of the sound that they claim to hear. The commonly quoted maximum human-audible frequency is around 24kHz. Secondly, 3840 X 2400 is the largest display resolution I could find any mention of (aside from multi-display arrangements). You could find a display with over 3x the pixel count of a 1080p display, but not with 3x the resoution. That's a 22-inch display by Toshiba, which means it's about 2/3 the dpi of the iPhone screen. Essentially, you shouldn't be able to see the pixels from over 2 feet away, 3 feet if you have excellent eyesight.

So....can I have your autograph, Kal-El?

Re:Too literal

[ChaosDiscord]

"...large screen displaying near-SEM resolutions..."? You're working with screens with resolutions on the order of nanometers? On a "large" display, you'd be looking at a resolution like 2,813,538 by 1,524,000, about 127,000 DPI. It's as impressive as it is implausible! Of course, humans can't see such small details. Do you use a microscope to look at your screen?

I've worked in and remain in touch with the medical imaging field, and radiologists manage to do just fine with relatively stock consumer displays. They make use of zooming and level adjustments to compensate for the limitations of the monitor, but also to see details that would be invisible to the naked eye on a traditional slide. Sure, they love getting larger, higher resolution, and more color accurate monitors, it speeds things up for a variety of reasons, but they do pretty well without.

I have no idea what the "tiny pad" comment has to do with anything, since the article was about resolution on a tiny pad.

I also missed this gem:

...even using a 32" 1080p LCD (with a native resolution 3x that) and sitting more than 6 feet away, I can still see the pixels....

So, you're talking about a 33.75 DPI display at 6 feet. 300 DPI at about 1 foot is a reasonable estimate for where most people no longer observe jaggies in printout. That's about 0.000138888888 radians per pixel. 33.75 at 6 feet is about 0.000205761314 radians per pixel, which is a larger apparent pixel. To roughly match the apparent resolution of that 300 DPI printout held a foot from your face, you'll need to be a bit less than 9 feet away from that monitor. Congrats, you have perfectly normal vision. 1080p isn't actually all that high of a resolution, and it's decidedly mediocre for a modern computer display.

Re:Too literal

[crenshawsgc]

" 32" 1080p LCD (with a native resolution 3x that) and sitting more than 6 feet away, I can still see the pixels." In the sense you mean it, no. No you can't. "Hey, I wouldn't be R&D head of a multinational company, considering I only have a GED, if I couldn't back up what I say with proof and results" lol, no you're not, you might work in their IT dept What's that company again?

Re:Too literal

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for posting so I didn't have to... except to thank you. I'm going to mod you up now. Nice work.

Re:Too literal

[Animaether]

But then you're talking about a completely different field ( the 'field' I was referring to was -literally- a field.. with crops ) of use.

Similarly a photographer is going to want a display with a high resolution because although zooming is all good and well, it's going to be printed at a certain size - and it's at that size that the details are going to matter.. not that somebody can see a speck of dust when zoomed in 20x on the original digital back output.

There's certainly fields where it is *highly desirable*, just as it is -generally- desirable. But for the purpose stated, a higher density display is far from the suggested 'required', and a 320x240 display -is- sufficient for remote diagnosis if the picture you're sent is high enough in resolution (and taken in proper focus) to determine the best course of action. But if you're on-site, then (currently) nothing beats your eyes and being able to look at the plants directly / through a magnifying glass, and the pixel density of whatever phone you're carrying becomes moot.

Re:Too literal

[tgibbs]

So hypothesis 1: You are a freak of nature, able to hear frequencies about 10 kHz higher than has been documented for human beings.

Or hypothesis 2: The med tech's equipment was operating improperly, producing lower frequency distortion, or he made an error in reporting the results.

Hmmm...hard one.

Re:Too literal

[julesh]

While I don't think Apple products are magical, people who don't understand why they sell (or why Nintendo products sell) are fixated by feature lists but kinda miss out on the whole dimension of actual usability of those features.

Bizarrely, I've often found Apple products to be less usable than competitors. The last one I bought was an iPod Shuffle, which suffered from a number of catastrophic usability failures (e.g. buttons that can do multiple different things in different situations, which I often find confusing despite my degree in computer science and specialisation in UI design, so I imagine it must be really tricky for some people; lack of integration with Windows drag and drop so I can't just drop music files on its icon in My Computer as I can with my current device; bizarre behaviour that involves deleting the device's current contents if I plug it in to somebody else's machine to transfer files from there) not to mention other design flaws (IIRC the device could not be used and charged at the same time, which I am perfectly able to do with my current (much cheaper) MP3 player; it also needed a nonstandard and rather flimsy adaptor to connect it to a PC whereas my current device connects via a standard USB cable; I won't even mention the battery issues as this has been done to death).

What Apple *actually* makes are products that *look nice*, usually by looking simple. Looking simple is not the same thing as being usable.

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

What you refer to, you have no absolute idea of what you are talking about. We're talking THOUSANDS of pictures of a potential crop. For one, the iPhone or iPad camera isn't going to be worth a FUCKING THING with the limited resolution it has. With such limited resolution, ZOOM DOES JACK SHIT in a field where you need near-cell level photography.

Or did you forget the basics of interpolating an image to fit on a screen larger than the native resolution when you use zoom features? Bear in mind most camera capture in JPEG and not RAW.

Try again when you're more familiar with the actual problems of such technology and the bullshit marketing behind it.

Re:Too literal

[Anonymous Coward]

who the fuck holds their phone at 2~3 feet away aka arm length?

both sides should be burned in a fire

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

For one, I value my medical privacy, so asides from what I say (which if you've got half a brain, my name is publicly listed so you can check,) you won't get my medical records. I'm not going to post them either, because you will know where I get hurt the most in the sonic ranges.

Link to my bio is in my sig, browse my whole site - just bear in mind my page only has maybe 8 ACID flaws so don't hold that against me when Slashdot has far more than that.

"I see no "proof", just bare assertions."

When you have legal authority to usurp my medical privacy, then I'll welcome you to expose me for a liar, if you can.

But those not aware of my litigious record would not know about me, so I can't blame you for knowing nothing at all, like the typical American.

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

"No one hears frequencies that high. People that claim to do so are generally hearing much lower frequency harmonics of the sound that they claim to hear."

Except you forget tat the harmonics *CAN* be picked up by the human ear. Harmonics are just like any other sound, a vibration. The eardrum can pick up that vibration, whether or not your limited brain can interpret it is a diferent story.

Try again when you've been though all the relevant tests, yea?

You fail, sorry.

Re:Too literal

[Pieroxy]

despite my degree in computer science and specialisation in UI design

You are so far from their target, no wonder you don't get it. I wasn't made for people like you.

And do not mod me funny, I am being serious.

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

And you failed for modding up someone without PROOF.

You're a moron. There have been many documented cases of people able to hear things most humans cannot.

Too bad you guys fail at google searches or basic research using university sources.

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

"You're working with screens with resolutions on the order of nanometers?"

Why, yes. Learn about our technology sometime, and quit focusing upon regular computer stuff. We're using QD phosphors on our screens. Yay 90+% gamut.

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

If you can't read my signature, you're far too stupid to even be talking.

Come back when NASA wants to talk to you, okay?

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

Yep, it's a hard one considering I see nothing concerning your medical background.

Try again when you've got actual authority to speak?
I've been working on HP medical imaging equipment for years. If you think it is like a typical computer display, you really need to go back to school.

Re:Too literal

[Timothy Brownawell]

Too bad you guys fail at google searches or basic research using university sources.

You're the one filling the thread with extraordinary claims, you go find some proof (and I mean real proof, not some "I have proof but I won't show it to anyone" bullshit).

Re:Too literal

[MrHanky]

Ah, the usability of having slightly more pixels on a screen that still sucks in direct sunlight? The "retina display" is actually just an item on a feature list.

Re:Too literal

[dangitman]

Maybe I'm just a better-bred human,

No, I'd say you're just a self-obsessed wanker.

Re:Too literal

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, which means you're hearing a lower harmonic, not the 32khz signal itself. which also means that a recording of that sound with a 20khz cutoff would maintain that harmonic you were hearing, meaning that no, you don't need anything above cd-audio.

38khz? do you have any idea what the human ear is *physically* capable of? unless your ears are grossly misshapen, they can't physically relay those signals to the brain.

if you actually believe yourself, you could make quite a bit of money in the audiophile world. problem is, the first person who tested your claims would see that you're full of shit.

32khz my ass. why would i give a shit about a test some doctor screwed up when you were *5* - do a signal sweep with a 96khz setup today and see how retarded you're being.

Re:Too literal

[mattack2]

buttons that can do multiple different things in different situations

Like how on a DVD player the play button will play if you're stopped, or pause if you're already playing? (At least some DVD players...)

or how on a CD player hitting and releasing >> will go to the next song, or if you hold it down it will scan through the current song?

I'm not saying I disagree with you, but there are PLENTY of other devices that have buttons that do different things in different situations.

Re:Too literal

[vlad30]

which I often find confusing despite my degree in computer science and specialisation in UI design

So did you apply to work at Apple? a company known for its UI design! How quickly did they reject your application. Reading your post I would have. I agree to the post below that it wasn't meant for you but if UI design is your specialty you should still "Get It" as you should be able to design for others not for yourself

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

Learn about NDAs sometime. Then maybe you'll understand why I can't say anything, at least for two more years.

Sadly, you seem to be blithely unaware of these things.

Re:Too literal

[Khyber]

I guess you've never heard of artificial harmonics, which can get higher than a typical human can hear from an instrument or electronic device.

Go back to school and take a music class. Learn something, for once, instead of being a coward and talking shit without a name behind your comment.

Re:Too literal

[Anonymous Coward]

instruments and electronic devices can create high-frequency sounds? who would have thought?

you can't hear anything above 22khz, it's simple as that. if you think you can, you're hearing lower harmonics and (in the case of your test audio files) distortion from your own crappy sound setup.

you're as deluded as the people we get to participate in audio compression trials - they're all convinced they can pick out 320kbps mp3 files from lossless, but usually fail around ~110 kbps come testing time. it's significantly less for newer more advanced codecs.

there's always something to blame too. some part of the test, they weren't used to the headphones, our equipment wasn't good enough, etc. etc.

you're a blowhard claiming something that's physically impossible (no human has EVER been able to discern a 30khz sound, and you can't find any research paper that says otherwise because THERE ARE NONE), and you're wondering why people are getting in your face? i know exactly your smug self-confident type from hanging around way too many conference rooms in phone companies.

Re:Too literal

[jcr]

Except you forget tat the harmonics *CAN* be picked up by the human ear.

He didn't dispute that. He was pointing out that what you're hearing is the harmonics, not the high frequency that you claim to be hearing. He's right, you're wrong.

-jcr

Re:Too literal

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I wouldn't be R&D head of a multinational company

Sheesh, hyperbole much? You sell LEDs to pot growers.

Re:Too literal

[node 3]

the idea of "retinal display" is a meaningless metric, because no two eyes are alike

That doesn't make it meaningless. No two eyes are alike, but the color "red" still is meaningful, and HDTV is still meaningful, etc. Something doesn't have to be absolutely, unwaveringly universal to be meaningful.

The idea that "this is as high a resolution as you need because nobody can see any batter" is hogwash.

And no one ever say "nobody can see any better". What was claimed is that at about 300 dpi at about 12 inches, you start to have pixels smaller than most people can see. That's true, and the iPhone 4 display exceeds this metric. Just because some people may hold the iPhone close enough to see the pixels doesn't negate this, just like the fact that some people can't see movies in 3D doesn't negate the awesomeness of a movie like Avatar in 3D.

And even in absolutist terms, your point is flawed, since there is absolutely some DPI amount beyond which no human can discern the pixels at any distance.

Re:Too literal

[shiftless]

Gas milage quotes on new cars are meaningless hype because everyone drives differently

No they're not. If you have two cars and one is rated at 15 mpg, and the other 30, what does that tell you?

Re:Too literal

[davester666]

The maker of one car paid twice as much bribing officials at the EPA than the other one?

Re:Too literal

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple never called it a "retinal display". They call it the Retina Display. It's a marketing name. They said exactly how many ppi it has, so I have a hard time seeing how anyone feels misled by their claims.

Jobs made some claims:

Really, really sharp text. 960x640 display: 326 pixels per inch. There has never been a display like this on a phone. There's a magic number around 300DPI where, about a foot away, you can no longer see pixels; limit of the human retina. Everything looks like continuous curves to the eye.

Sounds to me he's claiming you can't see the pixels because the resolution exceeds your retina.

Re:Too literal

[severoon]

How is this even possible if every human retina is different? There's no strict definition of human eye resolution if every human is different.

Kinda skipped that step in logic, eh?

Um, I think my point was that there is no canonical definition of "resolution of the human retina."

So let's summarize. You read what I had to say. You said it back in a different form, as though it was your own idea. Then you accused me of not understanding my own point, the point that you quoted in your post.

Nice!

Re:Too literal

[soppsa]

It is so awesome how often you mention "R&D head of a multinational company" in posts -- either its a new job and congrats, but even still its pretty meaningless: your email address and general slashdot discourse lead me to believe you are just some fur fag kid. Khyber Kitsune-chan ^_^ -- fag

Re:Too literal

[soppsa]

lol horticultural industry? thats the industry you are a multinational R&D head for? :D epic...

Re:Too literal

[shiftless]

Sure, if both are V8s. But if you can't look at the MPG ratings of various vehicles and draw SOME kind of meaningful conclusion about their relative fuel economies, then you're just plain stupid.

Re:Too literal

[julesh]

I'm not saying I disagree with you, but there are PLENTY of other devices that have buttons that do different things in different situations.

Yes. It's very common. And I regularly see people getting pissed off by it because they wanted to do one thing but ended up with the other (e.g. my DVD player has a button that pressed once pauses, but pressed again stops playback... my housemate regularly presses it twice by mistake and then has to seek back to where he was). It's almost always a mistake, unless there's a good reason you can't have any more buttons (e.g. the device would then need to be too large for some external constraint).

Re:Too literal

[mattack2]

Well, that's definitely broken. The de-facto standard is "stop" means stop, then pressing stop again loses the playback position. I don't know what the key your housemate is pressing is labelled.

I sort of agree with you, but also understand the idea of limiting buttons and overloading buttons in specific reasons. (One remote I have has some commonly-used-by-me buttons under a flap -- and the button that's pressed to tell the remote that the flap is closed gets flaky... so I have to hold down the flap carefully sometimes.. So this is one case of overloading being bad.)

Then again, Sony receiver remotes have a million tiny little rectangular buttons, however *I* think they're actually laid out very well.

Units of measurement

[david_thornley]

Heck, even with my glasses off, I can usually see human beings, and they're generally less than 2m in any direction.

Re:Units of measurement

[seanadams.com]

For some stupid reason Slashdot filters out greek letters such as , , , , and . That was supposed to say 2m.

Re:Units of measurement

[idontgno]

That was supposed to say 2m.

And it did. It said "2 meters". (or 2/3 of 3M, if for some reason you were referring to a majority fraction of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company).

Greek letter. like, mu? as in micro? as in ?<--note the missing letter

Slashdot doesn't accept either the unicode or HTML entity for any of the Greek alphabet, as far as I can tell.

Makes many scientific discussions pretty difficult, really. That's the ol' Slashdot we know and love.

Re:Units of measurement

[Nethemas the Great]

you mean 2m...

Re:Units of measurement

[strayant]

More importantly, much to our dismay, /. also filters

Re:Units of measurement

[betterunixthanunix]

What are these meters you speak of? I only know of the yard.

Re:Units of measurement

[atrain728]

It said "2 meters".

What is this "meter" you speak of .. I only know of the metre. Unless you were using some new fangled musical notation that I don't know of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meter

The metre (or meter), symbol m, is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#-re.2C_-er

In British usage, some words of French, Latin, or Greek origin end with a consonant followed by -re, with the -re unstressed and pronounced /r/. Most of these words have the ending -er in the United States. The difference is most common for words ending -bre or -tre: British spellings centre, goitre, kilometre, litre, lustre, mitre, nitre, reconnoitre, saltpetre, spectre, theatre, and titre all have -er in American spelling, as do calibre, fibre, sabre, and sombre.

Happy to clear that up for you.

Re:Units of measurement

[clickclickdrone]

>What is this "meter" you speak of .. I only know of the metre
I'm in the UK and I've only seen the meter spelling.
http://www.metric-conversions.org/length/meters-to-feet.htm

Re:Units of measurement

[Tim C]

Then I can only conclude that you've never attended (or perhaps just not paid attention in) any science classes - a meter is something used to measure or detect something (e.g. a voltmeter), while a metre is the SI unit of distance.

Either that or standards have dropped drastically in the last 15 years or so, in which case I'll be having some rather forthright discussions with the teachers I know...

Re:Units of measurement

[hedwards]

It's oddly ironic that /. doesn't allow such nerdy things as Greek letters and proper SI units.

Re:Units of measurement

[wjsteele]

Some say it's impossible to see a target that small, but I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters.

Bill

Re:Units of measurement

[Khyber]

No, it's just crap following of standards. Something we all scream about yet our favorite overlords can't seem to ever get right.

Re:Units of measurement

[danieltdp]

There are ways to hack slashcode using non acii characters. So, the reason its blocked is not stupid at all...

Re:Units of measurement

[Culture20]

In British usage, some words of French, Latin, or Greek origin end with a consonant followed by -re, with the -re unstressed and pronounced /r/. Most of these words have the ending -er in the United States. The difference is most common for words ending -bre or -tre: British spellings centre, goitre, kilometre, litre, lustre, mitre, nitre, reconnoitre, saltpetre, spectre, theatre, and titre all have -er in American spelling, as do calibre, fibre, sabre, and sombre.

Happy to cleare that up for you.

FTFY

Re:Units of measurement

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to bullseye humans in my T-16 back home. they're generally less than 2m in any direction.

slashdotted

[IWannaBeAnAC]

First? And its slashdotted already! Anyone got a rehosted copy?

Re:slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

The images aren't here, but here's a Google cache of the site, so you can at least read the article. I'm working with Bryan to get the box statically caching and back up, be patient. :)

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/06/apple-retina-display/&hl=en&strip=1

Re:slashdotted

[danbert8]

Yes it's slashdotted before the first post... Don't you know on Slashdot, those who RTFA don't post, and those who post don't RTFA?

Re:slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

Site's back up with WP-SuperCache holding steady. Thanks for the patience, guys!

-Sawyer

B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing company?

[seanadams.com]

People love to whine about all the Apple stories. I would defy any of them to submit their own stories about all the other computer companies that are breaking new ground with this type of research. Do you think Dell for example has a team of physics PHDs figuring out these technologies and pushing their vendors to tool up for them? No, THOSE are the guys just packaging off-the-shelf reference designs. Or waiting for the exclusivity on Apple's deal with [insert obscure pacific rim manufacturer here] to expire so they can make a similar looking phone a few years later.

Fantastic display

[Anonymous Coward]

And since you can't actually HOLD the fucking phone to make calls, looking at it is all you're going to do with it.

Re:Fantastic display

[b0bby]

I've seen the bar go down one when i hold it funny, but it's not bad, and i'm a lefty.

I don't have one, but the report I read said it seemed to be worse when held in the left hand, as (usually) done by rightys. So you may be better off as a lefty.

Re:Fantastic display

[TheThiefMaster]

I've tried it (normal-handed person holding it left-handed), and dropped the signal from 4/5 to no connection at all, followed by the phone taking a couple of minutes to reconnect to the mobile network after I'd let go of it and handed it back to its owner.

It didn't happen for him, we think due to difference in skin conductivity.

Re:Fantastic display

[Anonymous Coward]

FUD? More like RDF.

Your phone drops to one bar if you don't hold it in an Apple approved fashion, and you don't see a problem?

Come on. We have a smartphone that you can't rest in the palm of your hand, and the official "don't hold it like that" makes it clear this isn't an isolated manufacturing defect.

I like my iPhone 3G, even though it's getting a little long in the tooth (actually posting with it right now). Many features of the iPhone 4 look impressive enough to tempt me to upgrade. I'm neither a hater nor a fanboy.

But if everyone treated Apple like they shit rainbows even when they fuck up, there will be no incentive to innovate. I'm not going to get one until they fix this major issue, and if they continue with the "buy our $40 case to fix it" and "rather than designing it properly, we'll tell you how to hold it" nonsense, they can get stuffed while I find a 'droid.

Fucking fanboys.

Re:Fantastic display

[Pojut]

I have one, do you? Cause that antenna stuff sounds like FUD. I've seen the bar go down one when i hold it funny, but it's not bad, and i'm a lefty.

Considering your turtle-necked Lord has given advice on how to avoid the issue, I'd say it isn't FUD.

Taken directly from that link:

"Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone," Jobs wrote. "If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases."

I'd say Apple's response is where the FUD is.

Re:Fantastic display

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, this isn't the first problem the iPhone 4 has had with going down to one bar.

Re:Fantastic display

[Anonymous Coward]

And since you can't actually HOLD the fucking phone to make calls, looking at it is all you're going to do with it.

Have you ever heard of a phone case? (Maybe that was apple's plan all along...)

Re:Fantastic display

[Culture20]

"or simply use one of many available cases"

i.e. "Buy more product"

Re:Fantastic display

[mbourgon]

Put a strip of scotch tape over the junction on the bottom left.

okay, it's silly marketing, but

[mattdm]

I'm really happy to see screen resolution getting attention. My Vaio U101 had a pretty decent ppi, but it's long in the tooth and that that class of system -- always a niche -- has basically been displaced from the market by netbooks. And I'm sick of netbooks with low-res screens. Hopefully this will catch on as an important feature.

(I'm double-sick of people saying: "But if there's a higher-resolution screen, everything gets tiny and hard to see. So low-res is better for small screens." Ahhhh! You're doing it wrong!)

Re:okay, it's silly marketing, but

[Timmmm]

I agree, imagine if we had computer screens with this pixel density! We could finally have smoothly scalable *and* sharp fonts. It would also stop the need to add hinting to fonts, which is apparently really tedious and difficult.

Re:okay, it's silly marketing, but

[bhtooefr]

Given the viewing distances necessary, we already do - the IBM T221. 3840x2400, at 22.2". Straight from 2001. (And discontinued in 2005 or 2006, depending on market.)

204 PPI, but again, the viewing distances make it such that the T221 would have similar effective density to the iPhone 4.

My main machine is a ThinkPad T60p with a 2048x1536 display retrofitted, that's "only" 171 PPI, but it gets the job done, and it's more flexible than a desktop.

Re:okay, it's silly marketing, but

[nojayuk]

The T221 display had crap colour definition, low contrast especially off-axis, slow refresh and it required four video channels to drive it. Video and photo reproduction wasn't its forte though, what it was great at doing was putting a lot of numbers and graphs in front of someone's eyeballs. It mainly sold into scientific and engineering environments (CAD, PCB and chip layout etc.) and financial trading houses but it was never aimed at Joe Public.

You see them turn up on Ebay occasionally, still commanding decent resale prices. If you do buy one make sure you get all the bits like the special cable harnesses etc.

Re:okay, it's silly marketing, but

[smtrembl]

It would if the UI scaled gracefully.

Re:okay, it's silly marketing, but

[Anonymous Coward]

thinpad x201s comes with a 1440x900 12.1" screen

Re:okay, it's silly marketing, but

[nine-times]

Well it probably will happen. The thing is, newer/better screens are usually expensive, and so it makes sense to put them into smaller screens first. Smaller = cheaper, and these things often don't scale well.

When they've been making these screens for phones for a while, they'll get the tech down and then the price will come down. Then we'll see it on normal monitors.

Re:okay, it's silly marketing, but

[aliquis]

Ahhhh! You're doing it wrong!

They are doing it Windows-style, and it's horrible in scaling the interface, or was atleast.

And I remember reading for each and every new OS X version rumors about how it would be able to scale the user interface for various DPI screens .. (which it supposedly can, just not enabled, and maybe not working perfectly, don't know about slow leopard.)

Re:okay, it's silly marketing, but

[mattdm]

I've got one, actually (well, x200s). It's a fine computer, but it's huge compared to something like my older Vaio or even-older Toshiba Libretto.

And if you do the math, that works out to about 140dpi. That's better than 72, but it's not in the "retina display" ballpark, as is obvious if you just look. Worse, the display is very over-contrasty and terrible at color reproduction, making it fine for text and line art but awful for other uses.

Re:okay, it's silly marketing, but

[bhtooefr]

The contrast isn't terrible, although it's not great.

Colors, IMO, are fine on my T221, although admittedly mine is a DGM (variant of the DG5, the last version.)

I have one set of cables, and run mine at 33 Hz when I use it, off of a FireGL V3400. The low framerate doesn't matter because the card can't get data quick enough to even update that way, it's strapped to a PCIe x1 bus (that's all that's on my ThinkPad's docking station, and I don't have a desktop with PCIe.)

Gotta admit

[Pojut]

Regardless of my thoughts on Apple as a business, the new iPhone is an attractive bit of hardware. If only Jobs wasn't being such a bastard about the antenna problems...

Re:Gotta admit

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get it. How do you hold your stick is very important when you're casting spells! Remember: this is a magical device!

Re:Gotta admit

[danmart1]

I totally agree. A gyroscope? Amazing idea. A ridiculous resolution? Fabulous. Unfortunately, they (apple) have done too much that I consider unethical to ever buy/use their products. And their QC solution to their recent antenna problem is not something most consumers would accept, except anyone who used Vista.

Re:Gotta admit

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, the gyroscope isn't an actual spinning gyroscope. It's a tuning fork that senses angles. Old technology.

Re:Gotta admit

[Haffner]

Now there's a race to see which smartphone will be the first to do a "You're holding it wrong." (person changes grip) "You're holding it wrong" x5 followed by "Droid: You're holding it right"

What about other non-apple devices?

[Idbar]

I remember the HTC Fuze, when it came out it had a full VGA (480-by-640-pixel) resolution 2.8-inch LCD. Wouldn't be not only fair, but also interesting to compare to other brands in the market? I mean from the scientific perspective?

Re:What about other non-apple devices?

[Anonymous Coward]

The HTC Touch Diamond 2 came out over a year ago with a 480 * 800 resolution. Apple's pixel density is a Magical 10% higher, which Changes Everything. Again.

Re:What about other non-apple devices?

[Overzeetop]

I own a Fuze, and the screen is very nice. The only problem is that the OS it runs was made for a stylus, and the input system is very difficult when you try to use it with a finger. IMHO, Apple has sacrificed usability for developer convenience on the iP4. By a simple doubling of the resolution (per axis, for the pedants out there), they can 2x the existing apps and nobody is any the wiser. I have a 3Gs, and there are certain things I prefer on the Fuze (God, I miss my keyboard) - but the user interface/input is so far superior I'm willing to live witht he shortcomings of the iPhone

If Apple were really interested in maximizing the interface, they could have reworked it just a bit to get a 16:9 screen, which would have been much nicer for landscape media. They also could have shifted the speaker up a bit to eliminate some of that annoying, wasted bezel space.

Me? I'd have been happy with 480x854 - I think 640 is overkill and will require more graphics processing (i.e. power consumption) than is actually necessary). But I suppose Jobs decided to give iP4 users at least one metric where you would win in a measuring contest.

Re:What about other non-apple devices?

[bhtooefr]

The LG CYON LU1400 is where it's at.

A dumbphone (granted, with a TV tuner) with 3 PPI more than the iPhone 4, in 2008. (800x480, 2.8")

http://www.displayblog.com/2008/12/25/lg-cyon-lu1400-28-dmb-tv-phone/

Re:What about other non-apple devices?

[SakuraDreams]

What about the Sharp (SoftBank) 941SH with a 4inch screen (ASV = 16.7mil colours) boasting 1024x480 last year?
Or the Sharp WX-T930 with a 3.0-inch 854 x 480 pixels (full widescreen VGA LCD), also ASV 16.7 mil colours?

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one to think thats these articles are ridiculous ?

Either your screen is great and people see it by themselves, or it suck and they see it too. Going around with a "scientific paper that prove its greatness" makes it sound like a scam.

TL;DR if you need mathematical proof that it's beautiful, you're doing it wrong

Re:Meh

[DWMorse]

I'd give your criticisms more merit, if the article were available for you and I to even read it and label it thusly!

Personally, I'm glad that when someone labels something with a scientific term, for marketing purposes or otherwise, scientists show up with their Domes of Understanding.

Re:Meh

[Goaway]

Well, you know, the whole thing started with people using maths to try and prove it wasn't good.

Scientists confirm

[geekoid]

that people can in fact see the iPhone.

I know what he is getting at, and it's good. I just couldn't pass up that joke.

Apple is a design company

[Anonymous Coward]

People love to whine about all the Apple stories. I would defy any of them to submit their own stories about all the other computer companies that are breaking new ground with this type of research. Do you think Dell for example has a team of physics PHDs figuring out these technologies and pushing their vendors to tool up for them? No, THOSE are the guys just packaging off-the-shelf reference designs. Or waiting for the exclusivity on Apple's deal with [insert obscure pacific rim manufacturer here] to expire so they can make a similar looking phone a few years later.

Do you think Apple has a team of physics Ph Ds figuring this out? (Hint: no.)

Apple deserves credit for identifying this technology and bringing it to market. That's a worthwhile and necessary pursuit, no matter what the Slashdot detractors say. But Apple is not doing groundbreaking research into materials science or manufacturing here; it's merely bringing them to market in an attractive way.

Re:Apple is a design company

[seanadams.com]

I'm guessing you have never actually worked with Asian manufacturers. New stuff doesn't just fall out of the sky for whoever is lucky enough to "identify" it. For a customer the size of Apple it is a very close partnership and seldom does the manufacturer fully own the resulting technologies. So either you help them develop the next big thing and you get some degree of exclusivity, or you wait for someone else to pioneer it and then you get it a few years later.

Re:Apple is a design company

[Khashishi]

I dispute the claim that Apple doesn't have a team of PhDs working on technology. My former coworker, a PhD in particle physics, left our company to work for Apple. He now works on super secret stuff that he can't tell his wife about.

Re:Apple is a design company

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a physics PhD in imaging, and I work at Apple.

Re:Apple is a design company

[verelse]

Apple almost always get controlling rights to its developments. Why would they share rights with the manufacturer except in the case of joint development? The manufacturer gains rights to the process, however. Good luck to anyone trying to enforce any kind of intellectual property agreement in Asia outside of HK--most Asian countries never developed the Roman concept of binding contracts. Their word is as good as--nothing.

Re:Apple is a design company

[ceoyoyo]

Not physics (what would you use a physics PhD for in this area?) but Apple has employs an awful lot of engineers. Quite a few of them have expertise in things like silicon technology design and manufacturing.

Did Apple invent high res displays? Of course not. Did they look through a catalog and pick this one out? Nope. You can bet someone at Apple decided they wanted this and some Apple engineers worked with their suppliers to get the thing made.

We knew this years ago ...

[gig]

... which is why "laser quality" is 300 dpi. We knew fax looks like shit because it's 200 dpi. It's why chemical photo prints are almost 300 dpi. Why print artwork is done at 300 dpi. The "300 dpi pleases the retina" thing is like 25 or more years old. 300 is the most important point on the resolution scale.

But of course if Steve Jobs says it, then the Nerd Police have to say it's wrong. If it didn't happen in a video game or a Windows patch then they don't fucking know. As if Apple doesn't know about graphics and publishing!

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Anonymous Coward]

i wouldnt say apple knows about graphics or publishing. i think it's more likely artists and publishers historically didnt know squat about computers... so they bought macs

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[dtassinari]

Good point: I never actually thought about that.

Also, I never bothered to do the math, but if I'm not grossly mistaken a full-HD screen with 300 dpi resolution would have to be 7"-7.5" big.

I'd hit that.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Anonymous Coward]

But Steve Jobs didn't say "300 dpi looks good". He didn't say "300 dpi is the most important point on the resolution scale". He said "300 dpi is the limit of what the human eye can resolve".

And that is WRONG.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[lxs]

There's a huge difference between 300dpi in printing where your C,Y,M or K is either on or off, and 300dpi in systems where the C,Y and M or your R, G and B come in 256+ levels. (chemical photo printing and color displays respectively)

Print artwork is vastly inferior to a good photo print at the same resolution.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Anonymous Coward]

.. which is why "laser quality" is 300 dpi. We knew fax looks like shit because it's 200 dpi. It's why chemical photo prints are almost 300 dpi. Why print artwork is done at 300 dpi. The "300 dpi pleases the retina" thing is like 25 or more years old. 300 is the most important point on the resolution scale.

As someone that used to work for an agency:

300 DPI represents an reasonable economics tradeoff between accuracy and cost. You can have 1270 DPI (professional photo typesetters run that high), but how much do you want to pay for it? Those machines are $500k+. And yes, your eye can tell the difference between 300 DPI and 1270 DPI.

Artwork developed by print agencies is done at 300 DPI and no higher because of limitations on file transfer size and professional printer RIP speed. Trust me, if an 8" x 10" photo could be squashed into 3-5MB and rasterized in a short amount of time at 1270 DPI, there would be printing equipment and printers offering that as a service overnight.

Finally, standard 35mm film is around 10,000 DPI, dude.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[omnichad]

Finally, standard 35mm film is around 10,000 DPI, dude.

 
35mm film is a storage format, not a display format. Yes, blowing that up to an 8x10 still gives you something like 1,000 dpi. But the 10,000 dpi figure is meaningless unless you like looking at 35mm wide prints at 12 inches away.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Graff]

There's a huge difference between 300dpi in printing where your C,Y,M or K is either on or off, and 300dpi in systems where the C,Y and M or your R, G and B come in 256+ levels.

That's not actually how halftoning works in print. You have various levels of ink coverage at each "pixel" location, what they do is vary the dot size from large enough to cover all of the paper at that location to no ink at all. You easily achieve 256 levels of intensity at each location when halftoning.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[jedidiah]

It's good that someone brought up laser printers because I distinctly remember when the 600dpi ones came out.

They were a distinct visible improvement over the previous generations of 300dpi ones. ...but all this really boils down to is the fact that you've got what amounts to a fairly
respectable desktop screen that's been shrunk down the the point that you can't see
anything on it because everything is so small. This whole "retina nonsense" is just a way
to spin the smallness of the iphone screen into something positive.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[clone53421]

Your 300dpi color inkjet (or laserjet) doesn’t print halftoned images, and that’s what GP was talking about.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Pandrake]

Hmmm, I also used to and *currently* work in the print industry. I don't have time to explain the relationship between DPI and LPI when it comes to reproducing halftones in print, plus the effects of the only three different kinds of printing technology (ink based, toner based, and ink jet based) *and* the effect that has on different kinds of paper stock.

Essentially, the "sweet spot" for color halftones is 340 dpi when you have the option of a very high linescreen with very low dot gain. There's sort of a formula for dpi, which is 2.5 X the linescreen (LPI); but it cannot be followed exactly if you're worried about tracking and other quality issues. 300 dpi is a nice round number that makes for "easy" to email files as well as a good standard for target resampling in PDFs and the like. Anything higher than 300/340 dpi and you'll have to have an LPI so high in order to prevent banding you can't keep the dots on the page (again, depending on which printing technolgoy you use). If you're LPI is too low it looks like the old newspaper photos, and also runs the risk of rosetta morie patterns being visible if the angle of the 4 inks (if using only 4 inks) isn't adjusted properly.

For toner and ink jet based printing, it's easier to get away with as little as 150 dpi for color photos since the LPI is moot at a certain point where dot gain and near continuous tone transfer of pigment is possible.

For greyscale halftones, you usually want 600 dpi for SWOP printing; again, it's not forumulaic, since that high of resolution may or may not result in banding depending on the LPI and the distance-to-amount of gradiation.

For black and white, such as text, you want the dpi to be as high as your output dpi - so you don't see any of the jagged edges between the points of black and the white of the paper underneath.

Finally, standard 35mm film is around 3,200 dpi depending on the emulsion chemistry.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[noidentity]

Finally, standard 35mm film is around 10,000 DPI, dude.

He said prints, not negatives, d00d.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Arthur Grumbine]

...would have to be 7"-7.5" big. I'd hit that.

That's what she said.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you knew this years ago.

Back then, Apple thought that 100dpi was in fact the best possible screen resolution ;-)

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[thoromyr]

so, what you are saying is that 35mm film is about 4400x2400 -- a reasonably good resolution. In comparison a typical wide screen monitor is 1920x2400 so the horizontal resolution is better on film, but the vertical is close to the same. A current wide screen TV has 1920x1080 and thus lags a bit, but is getting close to film.

Even if GPs exaggerated claim of 10,000 dpi was correct, it is misleading given that it is talking about a rather smaller surface than what people are accustomed to viewing images on.

thoromyr

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Bigjeff5]

They were a distinct visible improvement over the previous generations of 300dpi ones. ...but all this really boils down to is the fact that you've got what amounts to a fairly
respectable desktop screen that's been shrunk down the the point that you can't see
anything on it because everything is so small.

There is such a thing as "scaling" - you can make an image bigger and pack more pixels in it. If it's a vector image, you keep the sharpness the small pixels provide while maintaining an easy to read screen.

Furthermore, if you're having trouble seeing all small devices, chances are it's your eyes that are the culprit. See, as we age, the lenses in our eyes harden and loose the ability to adjust the focal length. This means people tend to become a little far-sighted, and require reading glasses to see any detail within arm's length. Anybody in that situation needs reading glasses for small, detailed devices, period.

Young people with flexible eyes do not have a problem with it. My eyes are still young, and I was pleasantly surprised at how comfortable reading on my HTC Hero is. That's with a piddly 181ppi, barely more than half of the iPhone 4's.

In other words, if your OS isn't stupid then increasing the resolution only makes things clearer. People are used to higher resolution making everything tiny because Windows made some retarded moves early on, and has been stuck with them since. There is no real need for it.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Pandrake]

Vertical and horizontal resolution is kind of a way to understand the relationship between DPI and LPI, but is disingenuous to use a monitor's vertical and horizontal resolution as a comparison since photographs (on camera film or paper prints) are reflective color which relies on at least four colors to achieve the "persistence of vision" illusion of continuous tone, while images on a screen are projected color that use only three colors.

It's why I don't understand the big deal with having ultra-high dpi on screen, and sometimes in print, since most eyes cannot distinguish between any more than 256 levels of grey; which is X4 in color print and X3 in RGB (256 levels of red, not millions of colors and many types of red, for example). Much the way most people cannot hear tones higher than 42KHz.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Anonymous Coward]

a fairly
respectable desktop screen that's been shrunk down the the point that you can't see
anything on it because everything is so small

Increase the size of your fonts!

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Animaether]

Finally, standard 35mm film is around 10,000 DPI, dude.

35mm film is a storage format, not a display format.

Slow down there, cowboy. 35mm film is not even a storage format - it's short for a specification of the physical dimensions of a roll of film (ISO 1007); which have a 36mm (along the length of the roll) x 24mm (across the width) intended active area, or 1.41732283" by 0.94488189".

The 'resolution' is going to depend on just what the film is actually made out of, which determines grain size, which can't really be correlated to a horizontal/vertical 'pixel count' as the grains aren't nice and square.
At best you can take the manufacturer's rated lines per mm and work from there. If you do -that-.. then for some pretty expensive film, you do get to about 11,500 x 7,700 pixels.

Plug those into the numbers above...
11,500 / 1.41732283 ~= 8114
7,700 / 0.94488189 ~= 8149
So let's go with about 8100 'DPI' or 'PPI'.

10,000 dpi figure is meaningless unless you like looking at 35mm wide prints at 12 inches away.

As per the above - completely unrelated to the medium. If you meant the -apparent- DPI or PPI; taking into account that surfaces further away appear to be physically smaller... that's where things might get interesting (and Apple's 'Retina Display' kicks in).

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that there is a difference between color vison resolution and B&W vison resolution, not to mention that they differ at different points on the retina. I was wondering when we would reach this point (when manufacturing would produce resolutions beyond the capacity of the eye to resolve). Can't wait 'til these screens get put on regular displays!

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[omnichad]

Yeah, and SD isn't a storage format either. It's just an interface to flash memory. I get that you know a lot about film, but you're addressing things here that nobody is talking about. My claim that the dpi figure was meaningless was referring to the fact that people don't often use 35mm as a viewing size.
 
I think you're in the running to win the 2010 Pointless Pedant Award

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Graff]

Your 300dpi color inkjet (or laserjet) doesn't print halftoned images, and that's what GP was talking about.

True enough, I didn't look back far enough to see that an earlier post mentioned laser printers. Inkjet printers are another matter because there are many different types of technology and some of them do use different size pixels.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Ecuador]

Whoa there!
Fax looks like shit because it is about 100dpi (the usual non-hi rez, otherwise 200) with ONE BIT COLOR.
I am not very familiar with printer technology so they might be able to vary the dot size and thus not be exactly like the 1 bit fax, but in any case 300 dpi is certainly not enough and not comparable to a 300 ppi screen as the 600 dpi prints appear to be much better than the 300dpi.

If the post wasn't clear, the dpi of the printers is to the ppi of the screens what apples are to avocados.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[mcgrew]

This is the third slashdot story about the Apple "retina display", and in one of them (you'll have to find it yourself) there's a very good explanation of the differences between ink jet, laser jet, photolithography, digital photography, analog photography, and screen resolutions. The slashdot stories are For Normals, Jobs' "Retina Display" Claim May Be Fair After All and iPhone 4's "Retina Display" Claims Challenged (by, it seems, a different guy than is challenging them this time).

I urge you to peruse the comments on these two stories, some of them are quite insightful and informative. You'll learn something, judgong from your comment I'm responding to.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong wrong wrong.

Ink and toner printed colour pictures use a halftone screen that typically maxes out at 150 lines per inch. You get much above that, and printing presses start to have a hard time holding the dot. So, photographs are produced for print at a maxium of 300 dpi. This means every printing dot in the half-tone screen has 4 pixels from the image influencing it's size.

Each dot in a halftone screen is either on, or off. You only get the impression of "shade" from the size of the dots. It takes resolutions higher than 300 dpi to represent a good range of halftone dots at 150 lines per inch - typically 1270 or 2540 dpi on an imagesetter does the trick. Too low of a resolution and you start to lose tones. You can see this for yourself by choosing too high of a line screen on your typical 300 dpi laser printer - continuous tone images become banded because there aren't enough pixels to represent more than 16 different sizes of halftone dot.

An image display uses no halftone at all - each pixel is composed of 3 sub-pixels - RG, and B. (4 in the case of displays that use yellow as a fourth colour). But those are not included in the stated resolution of the display. So yeah, this is a really nice display, and 300 continuous tone pixels per inch is greater than 300 pixels per inch that are either on, or off.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which makes the HTC hero display 'retinal' when held no more than 7.59 inches away. Most young people can focus at that distance, so you probably already have the 'retinal display' experience.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[TheNumberless]

Not according to the article you're commenting on.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Animaether]

I'll go straight for the 2010 Pointless Reply Award instead and say that just because people don't often use a 35mm slide (let's presume a positive here, for projection purposes) as something to view directly, it does directly relate to the PPI at -any- size you decide to project it to.

t the 10,000 dpi figure is meaningless unless you like looking at 35mm wide prints at 12 inches away

No - but I might enjoy looking at it on a screen in a theater at its typical size and a typical viewing distance. Is it still meaningless that the film has a '10,000 PPI resolution', or does it tell me that the picture I'm going to be seeing is a heck of a lot better than the 1080p you're barely going to get out of a consumer digital projector. If it were meaningless then you'd be blissfully happy with 75PPI projected from across a street onto the side of a building 5km away because hey.. it's not like your eyes are going to resolve more detail anyway.

As for "nobody here is talking about that" - odd.. I thought the poster you originally replied to was -specifically- referring to this. I should have replied to him instead, I suppose.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[omnichad]

Recent films are edited on at best a 4K digital editing system. That's more than 1080p, but it's not as high as the 10,000 ppi source. The point in my original reply was that the person posting on 10,000 ppi was making a silly claim against photographic prints being at 300dpi. When you blow something up, dpi goes down. Not as low as 300 dpi, but nothing that makes the 10,000 dpi figure very relevant.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[rAiNsT0rm]

We've understood antenna's for more than 100 years, yet they managed to completely drop the ball on that aspect. It was the very first thing I said when I saw the unveiling, I love how people are surprised by it now. I don't even hate Apple, it's just dumb no matter who would have done it.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Wrong.

72 DPI is way more important.

Mostly because that's the DPI I use to make my graphics designer friends cry when I need something printed.

I mean, sure, if your goal is to have crisp, beautiful graphics, 300DPI is great; but if you're out to make an art major cry, 72 DPI is where it's at.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[julesh]

Your 300dpi color inkjet (or laserjet) doesn't print halftoned images, and that's what GP was talking about.

It's a very long time since I saw a 300dpi colour inkjet marketed. My current one is 5760x1440, and was a cheapish almost-entry-level model. It also is capable of producing variable sized droplets, and has two different intensities of each coloured ink, so is definitely not an "on or off CMYK pixel" printer. I don't think anybody sells those any more.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[ceoyoyo]

Printers only really print effectively at about half their advertised resolution. So yes, 600 dpi as a big thing. 1200, not so much. 2400? Nobody cares.

Re:We knew this years ago ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Think that should be no closer than about 19 inches, meaning the Hero display subtends less than half the steradian angle and appears less than half as large at the same resolution.

Truly a magical device.

[know1]

This innovation sure beats that whole punch card technology.

Re:Truly a magical device.

[geekoid]

Punch card: the most important part is the part that's not there.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[geekoid]

Why would dell? they don't make electronics. They build computers byu assembling other peoples electronics.

I have submitted stories about real ground breaking technologies from:
Intel
Giga-Byte
Nasa
Chevy
IBM
MS.
and many, many others. I stop submitting 2 years ago because I had not had a submission accepted since 99.

Now, I don't mind the apple stories. It's not like this is a limited space newspaper.

BTW that tech isn't as ground breaking as you seem to think. It's like there isn't much there in regard to new tech, so people are glomming onto and straws they can grasp to justify waiting hour to buy a product that they could walk in and buy in 2 weeks. Hell it might even be fixed by then.

So it's not retina resolution...big deal

[Matey-O]

So I played with one briefly yesterday. I thought, "oh, this is nice, it's about the same speed as my 3gs...this screen doesn't LOOK a whole lot better." Then I realized I really needed to clean my glasses. With my glasses off, and the screen 6 inches from my nose, it looks AWESOME. From any distance away, through my myopic eyes, dirty glasses, and the pollutants in the air, it's much better than it needs to be.

Look at pictures

[SuperKendall]

Try looking at pictures using the phone (online or otherwise). Even just comparing that default "raindrop" ios4.0 screen is like night and day, from two feet away...

And text looks way better.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[jeffmeden]

This is just buying into the hype. Apple came out with a new phone that happens to have the highest pixel density yet (325 ppi). The next closest is the Motorola Droid at 265 ppi. About 20% higher than the competition... Not really a groundbreaking move by Apple, just them taking another step toward higher density displays. It's what any company would have done. Where was the news story when the Droid came out, besting Apples then best display on the 3GS (of 163ppi) by 40%?

Disclaimer: I don't have an Iphone, or a Droid, but I do have a brain and I tend to use it when I smell hype.

What's the unit?

[ari_j]

102m x 78m = 7956 m^2, which is just under 2 acres. That seems like hyperbole to me. Also, STFU. This topic was beaten to death within an hour of Jobs first using the word 'retinal.' At least put it on Idle where it belongs, if it belongs anywhere.

Um, yeah...

[Timothy Brownawell]

So you have a screen where 1px matches the minimum line width that you can see, and pick a suitably small font so that the legs of an 'm' are 1px apart (should be the smallest readable font). And it looks like shit because one of the spaces is slightly wider than the other so one leg is halfway between two rows of pixels and looks blurry or colored, or because the distance between the legs of an 'n' or heads of a 'u' isn't an exact multiple and those end up at a half-pixel and get blurred/colored.

Can I get something where the minimum distinguishable line width is 2px or 3px, so non-bitmap fonts can actually look decent at minimum should-be-readable size?

Re:Um, yeah...

[tgibbs]

No scalable font will look perfectly clear at a size where the lines and spaces within the characters are close to the width of the pixels. To get really sharp text that tiny, you need a font bitmap designed specifically for that size and resolution (and which will look crappy at any other size). This is actually how the original black-and-white screen Mac worked--each font had a set of bitmaps that were hand-optimized for that particular size and screen resolution. But the resolution of the new iPhone is so high that such a tiny font would be too small to read, anyway, so why bother?

Re:Um, yeah...

[clone53421]

You’re kidding, right? What you’re calling the “minimum should-be-readable size” would only be readable with a magnifying glass... that’s something like a 45 characters per inch, 2-point font.

point is what?

[FuckingNickName]

1. We had 310dpi mobile screens 2 years ago, so I'm not sure what's groundbreaking here. Hell, even some of the cheaper stuff went to 280dpi.

2. The argument was that you have to hold the 'phone pretty fucking far from your face for it to be impossible for your eyes to perceive pixelisation. This hasn't been disproven.

3. What's your point with the pixel shapes? If you're saying that we have better resolution left/right than up/down, then you do realise the phone is designed to rotate, yes?

4. Pixel size isn't everything. It needs to not bleed and not distort. And even Macrumors is posting bitches about the yellowing (what is it with Apple and yellowing?). Until then, it's not "retina" quality (if it even were) in anything but single issue marketing sense.

Re:point is what?

[FuckingNickName]

I'm not quite sure why the distance people hold printed reading material should equal the distance at which people use their iPhones. For example, it's clear that I (and others around me) hold a 'phone closer than a newspaper, probably because:

(1) I'm interacting with it;
(2) Light's reflecting off it in a different way;
(3) Everything's squeezed up together, so we want the screen to take up more of our field of vision.

Apple is a marketing company

[betterunixthanunix]

1. High pixel resolutions are not groundbreaking.
2. Apple did not invent any of the technology in the iPhone and does not have a team of PhDs working on designs
3. Apple is great at designing and marketing products that feature the inventions of other people
4. IBM, Intel, AMD, etc. all design new technologies
5. Have a nice day

Re:Apple is a marketing company

[BarryJacobsen]

1. High pixel resolutions are not groundbreaking.
2. Apple did not invent any of the technology in the iPhone and does not have a team of PhDs working on designs
3. Apple is great at designing and marketing products that feature the inventions of other people
4. IBM, Intel, AMD, etc. all design new technologies
5. Have a nice day

So things only count as technologies when they're hardware and not when they're software?

Re:Apple is a marketing company

[Altus]

only when created by apple

Re:Apple is a marketing company

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they're more of a holding company now, especially with all the money they have. They'll end up like Microsoft probably. At some point they'll stop innovating
and just regurgitating existing products and buying out their competitors. Actually, that's all Microsoft ever did. I thik the xbox 360 wii-like game tool - the camera thingy - is their only genuine innovation of note, ever!

Re:Apple is a marketing company

[Bigjeff5]

I'd say most of that still applies to Apple's software division (OSX is an absolutely perfect example).

Re:Apple is a marketing company

[jollyreaper]

High pixel resolutions are not groundbreaking.
Apple did not invent any of the technology in the iPhone and does not have a team of PhDs working on designs
Apple is great at designing and marketing products that feature the inventions of other people
IBM, Intel, AMD, etc. all design new technologies
Have a nice day

Apple's an integrator. They assemble cool parts made by others, add some magic sauce, and generally come up with something interesting. Another company working with the same parts might come up with something less compelling. You know, you could compare Apple to a chef. It's not like he's got a proprietary lock on ingredients like meat and vegetables but a good chef can do things with those ingredients that lesser chefs can't touch and people are left guessing as to what he does with the spices to give the food his characteristic zing. You know, the chef comparison really works. Apple is the Soup Nazi. Everyone wants his soup because it's the best on the block but you are in no position to argue with him about anything. You accept what he gives you how he gives it to you with no debate. You complain, "no soup for you!"

The position Apple's in is that it has to maintain standards and be the best out there or else people will stop putting up with Soup Nazi tactics.

Re:Apple is a marketing company

[aliquis]

2. Exactly, Nokia did! ;) ... ;D

Re:Apple is a marketing company

[dogmatixpsych]

There are two types of creativity - divergent and convergent. Divergent creativity is what some of these other companies do (Apple does it too) when they come up with the cool new tech. Convergent creativity is what happens when someone (e.g., Apple) comes along and put it together in a novel and/or meaningful manner. So while other companies might come up with the ideas (although, that is short-changing Apple a bit), Apple makes them useful and introduces them to the masses. That is a skill that is just as important (if not more so) than actually inventing the technology.

Re:Apple is a marketing company

[Pieroxy]

The magic sauce is called software. That's where all the other vendors have failed BIG TIME, thinking that beating whatever phone on raw specs and CPU cycles would be enough. But if your software sucks, then your product sucks, no matter how fucking gorgeous your phone may be.

It's a wonder no one thought of that one before Apple. It really is.

Re:Apple is a marketing company

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple does more than just integrating. Examples:
- their latest A4 chip is their own modified and optimized version of an ARM Cortex core, modifications include an integrated memory controller.
- what about all those patents on manufacturing processes? Are they not a result of work being done by a team PhDs?
- they have been co-developing a lot of stuff - from firewire to now called nvidia optimus. Intel worked with Apple to create a custom core die for the macbook air.
- not to mention they have their own software engineering for their entire range of products
I think that the difference between Apple and many other companies(lots of mobile phone manufacturers) is that Apple isn't just integrating.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Low Ranked Craig]

I like Apple, but let me be the first to say they they do need a team of physics PHDs to work on antenna design...

That's one huge display!

[nickovs]

"Rather they are rectangular and while the short axis is 78m, the long axis on the iPhone 4 pixel is somewhere in the neighborhood of 102m"

Wow, 78 meters but 102 meters? I guess Apple released this for gaming, so that the World Cup matches could be played on each pixel. That, or the quoted text is out by six orders of magnitude in each direction...

Re:That's one huge display!

[clone53421]

78 um and 102 um. They used the Greek letter Mu, which Slashdot helpfully strips out.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Trufagus]

Hummm, I thought IPS was developed by Hitachi? And I assumed that Apple just brought this to market (and probably did some final work on it). So yes, I have exactly the attitude to Apple that you think I do.

Relative to other companies their size Apple has a massive marketing budget and a puny R&D budget. Recently we've been hearing about how Apple has grown bigger then MS, but their R&D budget was 10% of Microsoft's in 2009. Investors have became angry with other companies for spending so much on R&D and they point to the example of Apple that makes better much money by spending their money on marketing.

In the case of this display, Apple's problem was that they couldn't get Samsung's Super AMOLED display. If they had, I"m sure you would be telling us about Apple incredibly ground-breaking R&D on reducing the power consumption of a display. Apparently though, now that the iPhone 4 is using IPS, we've decided that 'retinal' resolution is the key and giving thanks to Apple for inventing that.

DPI is irrelevant, it's just TOO SMALL

[petes_PoV]

It's only a 4 inch display at 800x400. That wasn't big enough for even the lowliest laptops 25 years ago and it isn't enough now. It doesn't matter how you try to spin it, market it or come up with some magical new terms to flummox the gullible. It just isn't large enough.

With displays big is good, bigger is better and huge is best. There is no alternative.

Re:DPI is irrelevant, it's just TOO SMALL

[jedidiah]

> Yeah, I usually carry around a 70" plasma screen in my pocket in case I really want to surf the web. ...which severely limits the usefulness of this device.

Re:DPI is irrelevant, it's just TOO SMALL

[Anonymous Coward]

And here I thought you were just happy to see me.

Re:DPI is irrelevant, it's just TOO SMALL

[Bigjeff5]

That's one big pocket!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

FaceTime feature is rather scary

[peter303]

With both a hi-res camera and display, you show more of your face than perhaps you want. Every line, pimple and stray hair shows up, when I playing with FaceTime yesterday.

A minor aggravation is if you hold the phone normally you get a view of one's nostrils and chin. You have tilt your neck and/or lift the phone to get a good face view.

I think theres agood opportunity for a face-beautification app here. Maybe you could slightly de-focus the face like cameramen did for women in 1930s/1940s movies, to make them look better.

Re:FaceTime feature is rather scary

[Anonymous Coward]

Just smear vaseline on the lens like cameramen did for women in 1930s/1940s movies, to make them look better.

FTFY.

Re:FaceTime feature is rather scary

[Sockatume]

The face camera isn't high-res. I think it's something like 640x480, standard sort of webcam view. So, uh, I guess I'm saying you shouldn't blame the phone here, you'd look like that on regular old video.

(I tried to come up with a more polite way of putting that. Sorry!)

Re:FaceTime feature is rather scary

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, you DO have to tilt / lift your phone if your face is to look good. Apple must be incredibly short-sided if they did not include a live feed of own face somewhere on the front scree -- oh, what? They did? ..well I guess you better stfu then

Re:FaceTime feature is rather scary

[snowgirl]

Maybe you could slightly de-focus the face like cameramen did for women in 1930s/1940s movies, to make them look better.

Ah... soft focus. That odd effect on the screen between Barbra Walters and the person she's interviewing. Every time she came on the screen, it's like "shit, I need to clean my TV... oh wait, it's fine.... oh, it's back... wtf?"

Re:FaceTime feature is rather scary

[Bigjeff5]

You're holding it close, though. 640x480 20 inches from your face is going to show more detail than 1080x1920 at 15 feet. There is also a lot more to the clarity of the video than just the resolution - color quality and contrast have a big impact on how detailed the image is as well, and these two features are much better today than they were a few years ago.

In other words, the camera is going to pick up everything if you hold it in your hand. You'd also better hold it up, or they'll be staring into your nose.

Re:FaceTime feature is rather scary

[ceoyoyo]

I didn't think Apple would ever put a front facing camera in an iPhone for just that reason. It will be even worse in an iPad. And yet everyone is clamouring for one.

Re:FaceTime feature is rather scary

[khchung]

With both a hi-res camera and display, you show more of your face than perhaps you want. Every line, pimple and stray hair shows up, when I playing with FaceTime yesterday.

Umm.. well, if you talk to someone else face-to-face at ~2-4 ft* away, every line, pimple or stray hair will be seen by the other guy too.

I suppose you won't be using FaceTime with someone you are not willing to talk face-to-face, right?

* - assuming both party hold the phone 1-2 ft away from face for comparison.

Slashdot?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot?! WTF?! Why'd you go and kill the link? I can't even RTFA, now. You're the worst kind of people.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I forgot, slashdot has completely ignored the release of the Android.

20% here, 40%, that's all great. What's interesting about this (to a "nerd") is that apple is saying that's there's no reason to go any further. People are verifying the claim. You ignore this part of it in your post. That makes you stupid.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

"Well worth a read"

[ubrgeek]

I think that's debatable. Besides, I just can't see myself doing so. Get it? Get it? Thank you, I'm here all week. Remember to tip your waitress.

Slashdotted - Coral Cache Link

[shekel]

Short coral cache link: http://bit.ly/cQHH2y

Re:Slashdotted - Coral Cache Link

[shekel]

Looks like the images aren't relative. Here are links for those too:

http://bit.ly/9vmhjk
http://bit.ly/97NJeM
http://bit.ly/9WrHZ0
http://bit.ly/9WrHZ0
http://bit.ly/bqjikv

Re:Slashdotted - Coral Cache Link

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all back up now, backed by WP-SuperCache, so all should be good. :)

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Anonymous Coward]

Where was the news story when the Droid came out, besting Apples then best display on the 3GS (of 163ppi) by 40%?

The difference is that Motorola did nothing to tout their higher-density display. Shock and surprise! -- when you loudly proclaim your new achievements (even if they're not particularly revolutionary), people pay attention.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[mcgrew]

Odd, there are no comments above yours whining that there are too many apple stories.

Droid at 265 ppi was no big deal.

[Petersko]

"Where was the news story when the Droid came out, besting Apples then best display on the 3GS (of 163ppi) by 40%

Didn't Droid come out 7 months ago? The only way it would have been a story is if it hadn't been able to top the resolution that the iPhone has had since what... 2007?

Note that Apple didn't market their device as having higher resolution than a competing device. They are marketing it as being so high that it no longer matters.

Re:Droid at 265 ppi was no big deal.

[dunkelfalke]

Well, my old HTC Universal had a higher pixel resolution (VGA) and higher DPI than the iPhone - and the device was released two years before the first iPhone.
But, alas, that was not newsworthy even back then.

Re:Droid at 265 ppi was no big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, my old HTC Universal had a higher pixel resolution (VGA) and higher DPI than the iPhone - and the device was released two years before the first iPhone. But, alas, that was not newsworthy even back then.

So, you consider 216ppi to be higher than 325ppi? Interesting...

Re:Droid at 265 ppi was no big deal.

[dunkelfalke]

Than the old iPhone, of course. You should expect better than 320x480 in 2007, and when a device of 2005 (the HTC Universal in question) has got a higher resolution than a device from 2009 (iPhone 3GS), it should be quite embarassing for Apple.

Re:Droid at 265 ppi was no big deal.

[Ecuador]

Uh, I had a Toshiba e805 in 2003 at 200ppi (640x480, 4")...
It was replaced by a Dell X50v in 2004 at 210ppi (640x480, 3.8")...
I got a Nokia 770 in 2005 which was at 225ppi (800x480, 4.1")...
When I first tried to browse on the iphone my company provided me (for development), I was appalled by the horrid (by my standards) resolution which made the device useless for me.
I currently have a Nokia N900, which at 267 ppi I think does not need any more resolution (for example the default font on freeciv is very hard to read at the native resolution).
So now after all these years of lagging horribly, Apple decides to provide a display with good resolution (actually higher than I like for the screen size) and the idiot fans are running amok...

P.S. It is not clear for the above, but for me the optimal resolution/size for a mobile device would be around 4" running at 800x480 - the Nokia 770 was the closest I had at that.

That's all and pretty and works pretty well...

[SharpFang]

That's all and pretty and works pretty well... until you rotate the phone 90 degrees.

Oh, and totally sucks for developers to work with non-square pixels. Reminds me of 8-bit Atari, Graphics 11. 80×192 in landscape aspect ratio, pixels half a millimeter tall, half a centimeter wide.

Re:That's all and pretty and works pretty well...

[omnichad]

The pixels ARE square - at least in the display sense. At 78um x 102um it comes close to a 4:3 display turned on its side. Now, 4:3 is what computer graphics have been using since CGA at least.

However, that measurement (FTA) doesn't take into account the pixel pitch. There's a gap of approximately 33um (eyeballing this) between each pixel horizontally, where there's maybe a 5um gap vertically. That makes each pixel take up approximately 111um x 107um which you might as well consider perfectly square, since I am not measuring this.

Re:That's all and pretty and works pretty well...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the images in the article there's more black space horizontally next to each pixel than vertically which makes the groups of pixels square.

What you said reminds me of talking to a friend of mine 25 years ago about why his Mac Plus had better graphics than my Apple //e. He felt that the Mac Plus had squarer pixels and was therefor more pleasing to the eye. I would say that it's strange that I remember him saying that but there was some sever techno envy going on.

Re:That's all and pretty and works pretty well...

[Bigjeff5]

Oh, and totally sucks for developers to work with non-square pixels. Reminds me of 8-bit Atari, Graphics 11. 80×192 in landscape aspect ratio, pixels half a millimeter tall, half a centimeter wide.

I don't see what the problem is, the iPhone's pixel's are not shaped much different than previous iPhones, and the overall pixel+black space is the same, so I don't see how this would make a developer's job any harder.

It depends on what you're doing, of course, but if you're messing with individual pixels you're probably doing it wrong anyway.

Re:That's all and pretty and works pretty well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and totally sucks for developers to work with non-square pixels.

The addressable pixel units are 'square'.
The empty space between each pixel causes the aspect ratio to be 1:1.

A circle drawn on the screen will be a circle, not an oval. This is what really matters; not whether each lit pixel looks like a square or a rectangle.

Re:That's all and pretty and works pretty well...

[Prof.Phreak]

non-square pixels remind me of mode 13h :-/

Re:That's all and pretty and works pretty well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, graphics mode 11. That takes me back!

Re:That's all and pretty and works pretty well...

[julesh]

Oh, and totally sucks for developers to work with non-square pixels.

Square or not, what's interesting is that it appears to be using a vertical rather than horizontal orientation for the subpixel units... that's going to really screw up anyone doing subpixel rendering...

Wow, Really?

[Bing Tsher E]

Leading scientists have proven that Sears Silvertone electrical appliances contain scant amounts of silver. Some contain no silver at all!!!

Of course Sears didn't have a former coke dealer go on stage and claim silver content.

Still, this used to be Slashdot. Why do we put up with all this macfag gibber?

Re:Wow, Really?

[Bigjeff5]

Be fair now, I'm never going to buy another Apple product (and I've only ever bought a couple ipod nano's), but I still find this impressive.

I'm not as impressed as some people, because the iPhone 4 display simply edges out a couple other phones in the resolution arena, but it's still the highest resolution display on the market.

What I find pretty cool is it seems we've reached (or are at least pretty close to) the physical limits of what the eye can truly distinguish in a display. I think it's cool.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Anonymous Coward]

They build computers byu assembling other peoples electronics.

A lot of people would have you believe that's all Apple does, too. But there is some real invention in the products they make, just like there is real invention in products from Dell, Intel, Gigabyte, IBM... etc.

Re:Professional Perspective?

[jedidiah]

These are simple factual claims.

You don't need to depend on the science equivalent of an Imam or a Bishop for your answer.

You can test the claims yourself.

What a pack of lies

[MacGyver2210]

Using the term 'Retina Display' to describe a high-resolution screen might just be the most misleading thing I've heard come from Apple's PR department yet. A 'Retina Display' in the proper sense, actually projects an image onto the retina of the eye with no need for an actual display screen. This is not a Retina Display, and is clearly designed to stir up hype where none is deserved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_retinal_display

At this point, I don't think anything Apple can do will bring me to appreciate their products, especially if they continue to ride other companies' coattails into their next generation products

Yes, congratulations, you have a front-facing camera now. That's not going to make the iPads without one sell any better, and I'm sure having two cameras and a massively complex display is going to just trash your battery time, even if you did put in a slightly bigger battery.

Their 'multitasking' is hardly that. You can SWITCH between running programs, but that doesn't mean that you can actively use more than one at a time. The one in the background appears to be completely halted while using something else. If they're using the iPad processor it seems like it wouldn't have any more multitasking than that architecture allows, which is little to none. On my droid I can run SecondLife, Pandora, another radio station from anywhere, surf the web, and watch videos - all at the same time. All of these programs can take input or provide information at the same time. Nice try Apple.

In summary, get a Droid Incredible if you want a fun, open experience. Buy an iPhone 4G if you want the same old shit with a new name and box.

Re:What a pack of lies

[Bing Tsher E]

From my firsthand experience running 4.0 on my 32G 3G iPod touch, the multitasking means that radio apps that previously would quit if I switched to another app now continue to play in the background . I haven't tried Pandora. Maybe their app doesn't multitask properly. The Talk Radio app I am speaking of does, and I didn't upgrade it for 4.0.

Re:What a pack of lies

[onefriedrice]

On my droid I can run SecondLife, Pandora, another radio station from anywhere, surf the web, and watch videos - all at the same time. All of these programs can take input or provide information at the same time. Nice try Apple.

I think you've hit on something important here and a reason why the iPhone does so well despite its obvious limitations: Average people don't care whether or not their phone can do all that at the same time because they would never use it like that. On the other hand, battery life is a concern shared by just about everyone. In other words, just about everybody nowadays is very aware of what the iPhone is and what it can and can't do, yet they still swamp Apple's servers on pre-release day. Given the popularity of their prior models alone, I take this to mean that multitasking on a phone isn't as important to most people as it apparently is to you.

Re:What a pack of lies

[kthreadd]

Sure. Some audio, navigation and VoIP applications will benefit from the "multitasking" capability in iOS 4. I don't think that anyone have anything at all against it. It is a good thing for many users.

However, calling it multitasking is VERY misleading since it gives the impression that several applications is actually running as normal at the same time. That is what people mean when they say multitasking. That is what we are used to from regular computers as well as some other modern mobile operating systems.

I have already met several people who have upgraded to iOS 4 and expected that "multitasking" would actually mean the same thing that it usually does. I think that Apple would have gained much more from this if they would have said no, we are not going to have multitasking (yet), what we have is something we call fast app switching and it will also be a good thing.

Re:What a pack of lies

[jeffmeden]

So before the iPhone came out, and there were full touchscreen phones on the market that weren't selling well compared to the number of dumbphones out there, did you waste any breath to proclaim "You know, this full touchscreen thing, it's just not as important to most people"... No? That's what I thought. And when high-dpi phones and other handhelds came out, for some reason when they didnt fly off the shelves where were you with "you know this whole high-dpi on a phone just isn't as important to most people"?

You can take *this* to mean that multitasking on a phone isn't important to Apple, and therefore not important to their followers. There are a ton of people who see through their noise, though, and that's why Apple is still a niche player when it comes to smartphones. You can pry my properly multitasking phone from my cold, dead hand.

Re:What a pack of lies

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a friend who's aware of all the limitations of her phone, curses them, but will still buy because it looks pretty / shiney. I wish I was making this stuff up, but I'm not...

Back to business, so... how long does the 4 last under heavy use? We've heard all about "improved battery life" rhetoric (well, duh, it's got 200mAH more than the previous model(s), but about the same as, say, any other 1GHz processor smartphone). I haven't heard of any solid numbers, just "improved battery life". Checking the "Battery Info" app on my N1 phone reveals that 95% of the time, the display is the thing that sucks the most power, usually by a 2-4x margin -- and this is on lowest brightness! (even on 2.1 where the processor has to interpret the Dalvik VM bytecode) Factor in that Apple's now made it a SoC for even better battery performace for the CPU, I certainly hope that the 4 has a huge margin any other large-display smart-phone (according to all the hype, I mean).

Re:What a pack of lies

[adolf]

I don't have an iPhone. But I do have an iPod Touch, which for this discussion is close enough.

One of my favorite things to do with it was to load up Pandora and listen to it over some speakers out back by the fire ring, with friends and drinks and such. I think this is a perfectly normal thing for folks to want to do. It works great for this application, and the battery lasts plenty long doing it.

But the combination of friends and drinks and conversations these days always seems to come a need to Google some trivia or fact of some kind.

With the iPod, the music has to stop for this to happen. With the Droid I've been using for a few months, it easily does both at the same time.

And nevermind the perfectly reasonable task of listening to Pandora in the car, with turn-by-turn GPS nav happening. It works good.

The point is it wasn't a selling point

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is it wasn't a selling point. Nobody other than Apple or their fans thought of "this is like half the resolution of the human retina at 12"". Apple did and "forgot" that the eye resolves an edge which requires TWO pixels to resolve, not one.

"Note that Apple didn't market their device as having higher resolution than a competing device."

Yes they are. That is why they called it "retina display" and said that it was a revolution. Rose tinted retina?

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[jedidiah]

So Apple's success really all just marketing and hype?

Thanks for clearing that up that for us.

It's not about the technology. It's about the salesmen.

This is a site for "nerds". We shouldn't let Apple's advertising agency lead us around by the nose.

Dithering...

[wowbagger]

I cannot RTFA being it is dead, but my question about all of this "retina-level" stuff is: are they factoring that the eye uses dithering and jittering to increase the spatial resolution?

Last I'd heard, the current theory is that by using micro-saccades, the eye can increase the spatial resolution over what your would naively predict based upon the angular spacing of the cones.

Re:Dithering...

[snowgirl]

I recall hearing that some research found that we can notice a single pixel change in an image at 6 feet, even with a ridiculously high resolution.

Re:Dithering...

[Timothy Brownawell]

I recall hearing that some research found that we can notice a single pixel change in an image at 6 feet, even with a ridiculously high resolution.

If that's for example lighting up a single pixel in a dark area, it's not terribly surprising. If it's swapping two neighboring pixels (even across a sharp full-bright area vs full-dark area boundary), then yeah it's a bit more impressive.

Re:Dithering...

[Bigjeff5]

The guy's field of study is the human retina, so I'm sure he is aware, though he mentions neither. In fact, from what I've just dug up, dithering and jitter do indeed help you see, but they don't necessarily increase spatial resolution.

Dithering, at least, would actually reduce the resolution in order to reduce resolution-related artifacts. Things look smoother, but you actually see them less clearly.

With jitter, the primary purpose is to keep the image "alive", without it as soon as you looked at an image it would begin to fade from view - not cool. It's possible that it does piece together bits from the jittered images to get better resolution - we do the same thing with cameras in some cases (which I'm sure is where that idea came from). In any case, I'm not sure that hurts anything when the screen is high enough detail that the resolution falls well within the limits of what the eye can see at any one time. Crappy security cameras certainly don't qualify, so I think that's why we see such a huge improvement in resolution. Just a guess though.

Re:Dithering...

[Sir Holo]

...by using micro-saccades, the eye can increase the spatial resolution

There are optical microscopes that do this. They take several images with sub-pixel offsets of the CCD, and then lace them together.

Re:Dithering...

[ceoyoyo]

Yes. Visual acuity is empirically measured, not calculated by counting cones with a microscope.

Re:Dithering...

[snowgirl]

I recall hearing that some research found that we can notice a single pixel change in an image at 6 feet, even with a ridiculously high resolution.

If that's for example lighting up a single pixel in a dark area, it's not terribly surprising. If it's swapping two neighboring pixels (even across a sharp full-bright area vs full-dark area boundary), then yeah it's a bit more impressive.

I recall it was a full picture, not upon a full light/dark field. Somewhere between random and detailed.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Bing Tsher E]

Just shut up and spend 30 more bucks on the rubber overcase that makes your new cellphone look the same as a 3G.

Way to selectively cut and paste.

[Petersko]

What you claim I said: "Note that Apple didn't market their device as having higher resolution than a competing device."

Your reply: "Yes they are. That is why they called it "retina display" and said that it was a revolution. Rose tinted retina?"

What I REALLY said: "Note that Apple didn't market their device as having higher resolution than a competing device. They are marketing it as being so high that it no longer matters."

Now, either show me some proof that Apple has said, "The IPhone 4 has better resolution than (insert some competing device)" or go away.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[BarryJacobsen]

This is just buying into the hype. Apple came out with a new phone that happens to have the highest pixel density yet (325 ppi). The next closest is the Motorola Droid at 265 ppi. About 20% higher than the competition... Not really a groundbreaking move by Apple, just them taking another step toward higher density displays. It's what any company would have done. Where was the news story when the Droid came out, besting Apples then best display on the 3GS (of 163ppi) by 40%?

Disclaimer: I don't have an Iphone, or a Droid, but I do have a brain and I tend to use it when I smell hype.

There probably wasn't a news story specifically on that feature, but there probably was a story that listed that as a feature. The reason the Retina Display (is | may be|) worth a story is that is surpasses an important threshold (they eye's ability to see distinct pixels). Similarly if when movies came out (this is totally made up, do not take this as a history lesson) they started at 10 FPS, an increase to 20 would be a 100% increase, but wouldn't be as interesting as the increase from 20 to 30 (which is only a 50% increase) when the flickering stopped.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just buying into the hype..

Apparently, we are at a point in the American market where iJobs can say anything he wants, to advertise his latest plastic. I mean, Jesus, the Apple marketing department is out-and-out lying, now, and the Apple troops are just nodding their collective heads in unison. If Apple built an SUV, iJobs would be claiming it gets 500mpg. Before the next iZombie corners me on the virtues of his iThing, I'd like to request that they first consider how far the iJobs marketing department has screwed their perspective. Your iThing does NOT get 500mpg, even though they are telling you to repeat it.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[zdzichu]

There are few contenders between Droid's 25 and iPhone's 325: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_density
There are entries about and over 300 dpi.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[sjonke]

Why does this make the Retina Display simply hype, as opposed to something pretty impressive? I don't recall Motorola making any mention of their display's ppi. Apple has made a mention of it and made it clear what this brings to the table for the user - a display that produces images that look like print. What exactly should they have done? Not made it? Not mentioned it? So, yeah, Apple is a lot smarter then Motorola, and the Droid had previously bested the iPhone = 3GS's display ppi. Congrats on that.

Jobs did say the distance: about a foot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jobs did say the distance: about a foot. And that's why "retina display" is wrong: at a foot, the new screen resolution is half the retina can display: it spots edges which requires two pixes to produce. This is why "dpi" is not "lpi". Lines require a change from base to foreground to base again.

If Jobs had proclaimed how high the resolution was, 20% more than the nearest competitor, then that would have been correct (if assinine). If jobs had said that the screen resolution is double, so there's no artifacts when scaling up your old application and you get more resolution with the new applications, then that would have been a GOOD reason (they could have upped 75% which would have made the upscaling pants).

Another Apple advert ?

[McTickles]

Meanwhile: "Turn of Wifi!!!" "Don't hold it like that!!!" "Don't use unauthorized software!!!" "Dead pixels are a feature!!!"

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[jeffmeden]

Because it's not "like looking at print on paper"... if you hold the thing a x inches your retina will not be able to distinguish the pixels. The same went for the Droid (albeit at a slightly farther distance) and the same has applied for any LCD at any point in history. It's not as good as print, for one because modern printers use 600 dpi; 300dpi is 80's technology. For two because even when you print at a given DPI, there is chemical dithering that takes place to make the edges indistinguishable. A LCD cannot do that, even if it too ran at 600dpi.

But no, all of a sudden Apple declares "this is the most pixel density you will ever need" and people are falling over themselves proclaiming how awesome he is for coming up with the concept. It may be the highest density display, it may look fantastic, but get a grip already. There will be another phone in another year that does it all better.

Has this been beat to death enough?

[noidentity]

First story about how it's not really retinal resolution was dumb. Then a rebuttal to it wasn't toally dumb, but that was enough. Now this. What next, a detailed analysis of what the word retinal means, or what the meaning of the word is is? Yeah, I know, skip the article if I'm not interested, but I figured I'm not the only one who finds this retinal-grazing a little extreme.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[CompressedAir]

Ok, normally I let this go, but you capitalized freaking MS!

NASA is an acronym. Nasa is nothing. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. N-A-S-A. NASA. Not Nasa.

Sit Peeve, sit! Stay. Good Peeve.

(On an unrelated note, has anyone else noticed NASA is the only space agency that does not have its country (or organization of countries) in its name? ESA, JAXA, RSA, but NASA just expects you to know which nation they are talking about. :+D )

Not News

[DIplomatic]

Who is going to be more popular? The guy who can show off how slick his iPhone 4 screen looks, or the guy who goes around with an electron microscope reciting pixel length in microns?

Pixels too tall even by his calculations

[mdmkolbe]

The article uses a benchmark of 1 arc minute at 1 foot which is 88 micrometers, but the pixels are taller than that (102 micrometers) even if they are only 78 micrometers wide.

Note, the 1 arc minute number he uses is still bogus because that number actually represents the resolution at which doctors think your vision "good enough" to not need further correction. It also is only measuring the reliable recognition of letters. The width at which lines completely blur into each other or at which aliasing artifacts are not noticeable is much smaller. Cf. vernier acuity which is only 0.13 arc minutes.

(Fun fact: In Knuth's original work on digital type setting he says he stopped somewhere around 300-600 DPI not because that was "good enough" but because of the limits of the printing process. Beyond that resolution the ink/toner starts to "stick into clumps". Steve Job's might have been more accurate to say that the screen has (almost) printer quality resolution.)

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[snowgirl]

people are glomming onto and straws they can grasp to justify waiting hour to buy a product that they could walk in and buy in 2 weeks.

Yeah... there's a crazy mentality about being "the first" sometimes. Waiting for a movie, waiting for a product, etc. People just have this "first post" mentality in just about everything. (I am particularly not immune, myself.)

I have however gotten through a lot of the hype around Apple stuff. I still really like their products, but as with most people who have been with Apple for over 5 years, I'm always holding out for at least the second generation. I want an iPad, but I know the second generation will be better than this one, so I wait.

Last "first edition", I got was the iPod Touch. The thing was great, and I really enjoyed it, however being the first generation, it had no external speaker... "awesome"... if I wanted to play any of my games, I had to carry head phones around with me... not cool.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[MikeBabcock]

Recently we've been hearing about how Apple has grown bigger then MS, but their R&D budget was 10% of Microsoft's in 2009. Investors have became angry with other companies for spending so much on R&D and they point to the example of Apple that makes better much money by spending their money on marketing.

So do Coke and Pepsi and other basic consumer brands.

Apple is not the next Lockheed Martin, its trying to be Coke; ubiquitous and popular, not particularly innovative.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Bigjeff5]

It's impressive, but it isn't super impressive. The Toshiba Portege G900 already had a screen at 313ppi, and Sony Erickson X1 is 312ppi.

What makes it newsworthy, is Jobs said (I paraphrase) "It's as good as the human eye can perceive." That's why he named it the "retina display".

A scientist with a Ph.D. came along and called bullshit, saying that the human retina can perceive pixels much higher.

The Ph.D. in this article respectfully disagreed, and said the previous scientist:

A.) Used the wrong figure for retinal resolution when he made his calculations (0.5 arcminutes instead of the 0.78 arcminutes established by a recent, authoritative study) and

B.) Failed to factor in losses in the optics of the human eye regarding how much light will actually hit the retina.

With A fixed and B factored in, the scientist concludes that the practical limit of the human retina (what it can distinguished given the amount of light that hits it) is 286ppi when held at 1 foot away from the eye (the ideal distance for viewing detail). The iPhone is well above this, at 326ppi, which means Jobs was right, and the name is apt.

It's worth noting that there are quite a few phones that beat the 286ppi limitation, but the iPhone has the highest.

Basically it looks like we don't need any higher resolution than what the iPhone and others have achieved, anything more would be pointless.

That, to me, is very impressive.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Bigjeff5]

Where the hell did that come from?

In England, your English is incorrect

[Aqualung812]

The English people use Nasa when you pronounce an acronym, and ATA when you spell it. Scuba when you say it, VGA when you spell it. Scsi and IDE. So, depending on who is reading it, you're both wrong. :)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[aliquis]

that are breaking new ground with this type of research.

Do you really think Apple is manufacturing the panels? Can it really be called "research" when all you do is increase the resolution of a display? Maybe in the manufacturing chain if there was an issue to be solved, of that I'm not sure.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

the iPhone is better than print. I can hit the center button and no one can tell I was looking at porn while at work/on the bus/etc. You do that with a copy of Juggs, Hustler or Nasty Asians

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[jollyreaper]

Do you think Dell for example has a team of physics PHDs figuring out these technologies and pushing their vendors to tool up for them?

No, but their handheld computers still have network connectivity when you're holding them in your hand.

(I'm so getting downmodded for this)

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Animaether]

Good thing that list doesn't include head-mounted displays. Some of those models, such as those from CyberMind, are easily 1280x1024 with a .. had to check here ( http://www.cybermindnl.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=50&category_id=11&manufacturer_id=0&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1 ) .. 0.77" display area.

That's (looks like the wiki assumes square pixels and measures the diagonal) sqrt(1280^2+1024^2)pix/0.88inch ~= 1863 PPI.
Even if that's just marketing and the resolution refers to subpixels, any which way you measure that (e.g. horizontal subpixels: sqrt((1280/3)^2+1024^2)pix/0.88inch ~= 1261 PPI) is going to show a much greater pixel density than any of these phone displays.

Of course those goggles are also a lot more expensive - but it truly isn't a groundbreaking bit from Apple so much as breaking the 'high' PPI into the mass market on a screen the size it is (the LG and Samsung are higher PPI but smaller total size screen)

Well...

[mea37]

...I'm glad that's resolved.

Actually, it seems a bit odd, given the facts presented, that the conclusion indicates the claim holds up. If the conclusion were "it pretty much holds up, far more than you could expect for marketing", I'd be on board... but I think a true purist would withhold the claim of "retinal" resolution for another generation or two, for a couple reasons:

1) Perhaps nitpicky, but this measurement assumes a viewing distance of 12" on the basis that the ability to resolve detail may be best at 12". However, at 6" the arc spacing of the pixels would be twice as large; whereas my ability to resolve detail at 6" may not be optimal, but probably isn't only half what it would be at 12". Now you can justify that away, I suppose, by arguing that nobody would try to use a touchscreen at a viewing distance of 6", but...

2) The threshold spacing TFA calculated is greater than the spacing of pixels along the short axis, but not along the long axis.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[RDW]

'Where the hell did that come from?'

Direct advice from Steve:

'First of all, this is not a big issue. If you're experiencing this, most likely it's not the phone at all -- most likely you're just living in a place where there's bad reception, in which case the solution is simple: you need to move.

Or maybe you're living in a place with good reception but you just need to buy a bumper for your phone and/or wear latex gloves while holding the phone.'

http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/06/you-assholes-need-to-stop-sending-emails-to-me-about-this-antenna-issue.html

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[aliquis]

Oh well, so by then Motorola outsmarted Apple by bringing new 265 ppi displays out when Apple only had the iPhone 3G! Poor Apple! You don't see them innovate .. ;D

I like how it's "innovating" when Apple does anything. Touch screen? Clearly Apples innovation. WIFI? Most likely. IPS-panels? Hell yeah, nowhere to be seen before iPad! Video calls? Yes! The tablet PC? I for sure hadn't used one before the iPad came out (and I haven't used that one either ..) Higher than average resolution displays? Totally! 64-bit addressing? Most likely!

Not to forget basic things simply better than others for some reason, like how a mac laptop totally got a completely different power consumption PC laptop! (I know, i know, no need to tell me, under ideal circumstances OS X power management may outperform Windows, on the other side surfing the web with OS X flash not so much ...)

So, should I post as AC for obvious troll moderating or not? Decisions decisions ..

Non-Square pixels? or just non-square sub-pixels?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the bits that light (the sub-pixels) up aren't square.. but if you take consecutive row spacing to consecutive RGB spacing, it looks like the resulting pixel is reasonably square to me.....

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Nerdfest]

A HTC Diamond has a pixel density of 286 ppi and it's over 2 years old. I'm amazed at the kind of media attention Apple's marketing achieves.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Wovel]

They all have had stories in the past few months too. (Well except gigabyte). Apple has more stories because they release more products that catch the publics attention.

Selling One Million phones in a day is no small task. Despite what a lot of people here seem to think, it is not all marketing. It is not even mostly marketing.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Anonymous Coward]

An electrical engineer (*cough*Woz*cough*)* would probably see the problem with the antenna design when it was proposed.

* I'm pretty sure Mr. Wozniak is an electrical engineer, but he may have picked up other skills...

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[ChaosDiscord]

breaking new ground with this type of research

If "people like higher resolution displays, maybe we should make those" counts as ground-breaking research, do you think Apple will fund my research into my theory that people like fitting more information into smaller spaces, so maybe we should make denser flash memory?

Yay.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Yeah... this topic is soOOOoo worth all the discussion.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[aliquis]

and they point to the example of Apple

Microsoft:
Revenue $58.437 billion (2009)[7]
Operating income $20.363 billion (2009)[7]
Net income $14.569 billion (2009)[7]
Total assets $77.888 billion (2009)[7]
Total equity $39.558 billion (2009)[7]

Revenue $42.91 billion (2009)[3]
Operating income $11.74 billion (2009)[4]
Profit $8.24 billion (2009)[4]
AUM $26.83 billion (2009)[4]
Total assets $47.50 billion (2009) [3]
Total equity $31.64 billion (2009) [3]

The stock market may see things differently, but they tend to always do ..

Character whitelist (5:erocS)

[tepples]

No, it's just crap following of standards.

Actually, it's a character whitelist. After past abuses of bidirectionality override characters to wreck the layout, the SLASH engine was modified to strip out any code points that aren't on a whitelist before saving a comment.

Re:Character whitelist (5:erocS)

[Khyber]

As in they were too stupid to realize that the whitelist they created stopped most pertinent technology discussion symbology?

Sorry, I don't buy that. I'll still chalk it up to laziness and lack of knowledge of the coders of the site.

Re:Character whitelist (5:erocS)

[hedwards]

I have to agree with Khyber, this is a technology site for nerds, if they can't actually get the engine to work properly with the subset of Greek characters with legitimate use, then they need to start over and do it right. Or at least bring in somebody that knows what they're doing. Worst case is they can introduce a proper token to embed them into the post.

Really?

[bashibazouk]

Or so the apple haters would have you believe...

2009 apple advertising was 1.37% of revenue or $500 million

Microsoft the same year: 2.4% of revenue or 1.4 billion
Dell: 1.3% and 811 million.
RIM: 2.4% and 337 million

Sounds to me like they are less of a "Marketing" company and more of a hardware company putting out better selling products...

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their marketing budget might be smaller than Microsoft's, but the "quality" of what they spend it on is way beyond anything MS have ever managed. Microsoft's marketing efforts are just embarrassing. Comparison of the marketing budgets doesn't touch the hypothesis that Apple are superior only in marketing, not in product design.

Personally I'm completely baffled by their success, by how completely people buy into the Apple cult. By how people applaud the most basic things Jobs announces in his keynotes and declare that they need an £800 oversized iPhone. I don't see that any of that can be ascribed to their condescending marketing or their uninspired design. But I don't understand a lot of populist obsessions, so that's not really anything new.

Re:Really?

[Fantastic Lad]

Ha ha!

It's not how many dollars you spend, it's HOW you spend them.

Nobody could afford the mountains of free press attention Apple has received over the last year. Apple knows how to play the market like a violin! And what have they offered us? A touch screen and an internet converted into a pay-per-click environment for people who don't like to express their own thoughts (who needs a keyboard?) and who primarily want to consume pre-packaged media -where the artist STILL doesn't get his/her fair share.

And for this, they come off like saints!

Yes, it took extremely clever marketing to pull off a con job of that magnitude!

-FL

Re:Really?

[tknd]

First of all, marketing is not just advertising. There is a lot to marketing that is not advertising like focus groups, surveys, strategies, and measurement.

And although you claim that Microsoft spent more as a percentage of revenue on advertising, they also spent way more than Apple on R&D:

all numbers in millions

AAPL (52 weeks ending 2009-09-26)

Total Revenue 42,905.00
Research & Development 1,333.00
R&D percentage of revenue: 3.1%

MSFT (12 months ending 2009-06-30)

Total Revenue 58,437.00
Research & Development 9,010.00
R&D percentage of revenue: 15.4%

DELL (52 weeks ending 2010-01-29)

Total Revenue 52,902.00
Research & Development 617.00
R&D percentage of revenue: 1.16%

Financial information taken from http://www.google.com/finance

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

they also spent way more than Apple on R&D

MS still makes almost all their revenue on software. Apple primarily hardware. That makes a comparison based upon percentage of revenue fairly meaningless. Most of Apple's revenue goes to paying for all the hardware they buy to go into their devices. Take that out of the equation (or look at percentage of profit) and you have a very different picture.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Wovel]

It is also about the implementation of the technology. Technology in and of itself is useless. Creating new, even useful technology is certainly praiseworthy. Taking technology and deploying it in a useful manner is also praiseworthy.

Feature lists are for short-sighted nerds. Apple is successful because they try to keep the feature list shorter and not longer.

There would be no Android phone, as we know it now, without Apple, there may have been a phone, it would have looked just like the Blackberry and Windows Mobile crap that came before it. People who try to discount Apple's contribution to the smartphone industry or call it "marketing fluff", only show how utterly technology ignorant they truly are.

Apple completely transformed the smart-phone industry. There is a day when the look, feel, and function of smart phones all changed. That day was the day Apple announced the iPhone. You don't have to love Apple, or even be a fan. Writing off their success as marketing just makes you look ignorant.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Wovel]

You know fake steve is not Steve Jobs right?

All Real (tm) Steve said was to not hold the phone that way if it messes up your signal.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Wovel]

There have been countless studies (In fact I doubt there has ever been one to the contrary) detailing the fact the R&D budget has nothing at all to do with creating new and innovative products. Apple focuses their R&D on products. Their contribution is still valuable. Making people want to use that technology is useful.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[aliquis]

I like how it's "innovating" when Apple does anything. ...

I forgot about the "Superdrive!"

Clearly the DVD-burner is Apples innovation to!

I could go on but Slashdot got limited storage.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Anonymous Coward]

Hummm, I thought IPS was developed by Hitachi?

Funny. The Irish Times technology experts told their readers that Apple invented MIDI. Not so. Gotta luv dem astroturfers eh Steve?

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[dogmatixpsych]

It's because Apple is good at marketing, plus they make good products (usually), and people care. Companies are all about marketing, whether it is by word of mouth (as much of Apple is) or slick presentations (which Apple does too) or just good performance (which Apple does as well). I'm not saying Apple is perfect but you should be amazed at their marketing; they are as good as it gets, marketing-wise.

12 inches away from the face

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought the retinal display claim was kind of dumb. What PART of the retina (should have called it a fovea display)? How far do I need to hold it from my face?

god, mod parent down! like hell that's insightful. mods are on crack.

Steve Jobs didn't omit this information. He said 12 inches from your face multiple times.

and mentioned in the articles in the media http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364871,00.asp

and from the Slashdot summary on the related article http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/06/09/2130232/iPhone-4s-Retina-Display-Claims-Challenged

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Anonymous Coward]

You had a chance there to post all the links to those stories, so we could have read them ourselves!

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[bill_mcgonigle]

Basically it looks like we don't need any higher resolution than what the iPhone and others have achieved, anything more would be pointless.

A 23" panel made with this kind of technology wouldn't be pointless, though! WANT.

Wow, Slashdot

[LBArrettAnderson]

More Apple praising, and yet still not a single Slashdot story about the iPhone's absolutely disastrous antenna design. I thought there were at least a couple of /. editors who weren't Apple fanboys.

Re:Wow, Slashdot

[RightSaidFred99]

Or the display yellowing issues. Or the fact that you are contributing to hipster douche-ism by buying Apple products. That latter one is a societal ill that will have serious repercussions, and we're all paying the price of your choices.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Solandri]

People love to whine about all the Apple stories. I would defy any of them to submit their own stories about all the other computer companies that are breaking new ground with this type of research.

Eh? This is hardly breaking new ground. IBM achieved a "retina display" 10 years ago. Kudos to Apple for identifying a supplier who could provide something similar but smaller for a device held closer to your eyes. But unlike Apple, IBM actually did the R&D themselves, doubling the state of the art at the time before bringing it to market.

Apple has become like the Microsoft of old. Repackaging old things and presenting them to an enamored audience of fanbois who oooh and aaah at all the wonderful things Apple/Microsoft "invented". I still meet people who think Microsoft invented the Internet just because they're ignorant of the rest of the tech market and were only exposed to Microsoft products. I'm starting to see the same thing happen with people who shroud themselves entirely within Jobs' reality distortion field.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Eric Sharkey]

Basically it looks like we don't need any higher resolution than what the iPhone and others have achieved, anything more would be pointless.

Unless you happen to have a $5 pair of magnifying eyeglasses that is.

The biggest problem with viewing web pages on a cell phone is that you can't see enough pixels at the same time. If you want to keep a 1920x1080 display in your pocket, you need to go beyond retinal and use a lens to magnify it.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Gnavpot]

I like Apple, but let me be the first to say they they do need a team of physics PHDs to work on antenna design...

Apparently, they let a team of PHBs work on a press release instead.

gotta pick a nit

[Chirs]

"standard 35mm film is around 10,000 DPI"

Um, no.

Ultra high res ASA 25 slide film, with expensive glass, a tripod, and mirror lockup *might* get to 10000DPI. (Last I checked it was more like 6000.)

Your average Joe with a point-and-shoot and 400ASA consumer film would be lucky to get 2500DPI.

Re:gotta pick a nit

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconded. I used to shoot Velvia 50, but it certainly never got to 10k DPI even with decent primes. All digital now. you'd be shocked how good 22MP @ 35mm looks :D

ppi means nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

480x320=153 600
848x480=407 040
960x640=614 400

The iPhone 4 has about 50% more pixels (1.5x) than the Droid/Milestone, which had 2.65x the pixels of the iPhone 3GS.
We don't care about ppi. That's just a marketing trick. I could make a 1x1 pixel display so small that it has a 400 ppi resolution. Such a display would of course be useless. Ppi means nothing. The number of pixels is what I care about.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[LordVader717]

Neither does Apple. They assemble their own products (computers, phones and monitors) using products developed by other companies (Display Panels and Microprocessors). Sure, like any good manufacturer they employ some really talented engineers and they do seek to be first to market new bleeding-edge technology, resulting in close cooperation with manufacturers. But to suggest they deserve the same credit as say Samsung, Sharp or Intel who do have labs making new displays and chips is highly inaccurate.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Anonymous Coward]

Indistinguishable PPI isn't a universal constant. It's a function of how good your eyes are, what resolution the image data is, and most importantly what distance you are holding the device at. This guy's (and Jobs') selection of a viewing distance of 12 inches isn't quite arbitrary, but it is an assumption that places the iPhone conveniently above the limit.

With a display of, to arbitrarily pick a large number, 1000 ppi, you might be able to distinguish pixels only closer than, say, two inches. And since that's probably something like the 99th percentile minimum human eye focus distance, it's a lot more definitive a limit than 12 inches. So with a 1000 ppi display, you could examine the screen in detail to resolve very small features, bringing it close to your eye like you would a physical object. That might, or might not be useful. But the very possibility makes this statement that 300 ppi is all you could ever need very brazen.

Not that any Apple people will care.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[RightSaidFred99]

What exactly have they transformed? The HTC touch and LG Prada phones were out at the same time or before the iPhone. The only thing they lacked was the polish. Apple is good at design and at making people think they did something revolutionary when they really just took something that already exists and made it look nice.

They are a marketing and design company, not an innovative technical company. Jesus Christ, Jobs is on video sounding all excited about this wonderful antenna technology Apple "invented" for the iPhone 4. Seriously?

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[elistan]

You had a chance there to post all the links to those stories, so we could have read them ourselves!

It's easy to get to anybody's submissions.

http://slashdot.org/~geekoid/submissions

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[shutdown -p now]

My thoughts exactly. Those high-ppi screens on mobile devices are awesome as they are (ever since I first saw a ppi of 250+ on, what was it, HD Touch?), but I'd kill to get a full-size display with the same density. We could finally throw away font anti-aliasing for good, and no-one would notice.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Anonymous Coward]

You're probably right. But there is a rare possibility that Apple actually did something impressive. So, either bellow like you know what you are talking about, and just assume you are correct, if that works for you, or you can actually know and find out beyond any doubt simply by going to take a look for yourself. You may have guessed that this is a bated suggestion. You see, I already know beforehand that as soon as you actually see it for yourself you will be in a state of cognitive dissonance.

IBM T221 LCD @ 200 PPI

[purduephotog]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

We've got a few. They're awesome. You can't see structure more than 2 feet away from the monitor- even with corrected vision.

Now motion performance, that's another issue...

Re:IBM T221 LCD @ 200 PPI

[Khyber]

Your t21 22-inch monitors can't even handle 80Hz at the highest resolution. Don't give me that bullshit. If they cant handle more than 60Hz how the fuck do you expect an accurate color reproduction?

Try again when your LCD can match my current CRT for gamma/gamut.

self test

[Iamthecheese]

In case anyone is interested in their own hearing ability, this site has up to 24KHz. test yourself! have fun.

Re:self test

[Khyber]

I can hear that too easily. Maybe because I'm used to 30+ KHz guitar feedback.

Re:hinting fonts

[metatechbe]

Timmmm, how do you add hinting to fonts ? I am also a manic of manually hinted fonts, and find any anti-aliasing much too blurry to my taste (especially the MacOS one).

Density per square inch, not per inch

[tgibbs]

This is just buying into the hype. Apple came out with a new phone that happens to have the highest pixel density yet (325 ppi). The next closest is the Motorola Droid at 265 ppi. About 20% higher than the competition

I suppose...for a 1-dimensional display with a single line of pixels.

But for a 2-dimensional display, we measure pixel density in points per square inch, so that works out to about a 50% higher density.

Antenna design

[tgibbs]

Any cell phone will show some signal degradation depending upon hand position, because your hand is a bag of salt water and it absorbs RF. So far, nobody has shown that the "hand effect" is any worse with the new iPhone than with any other cell phone with an internal antenna, much less "absolutely disastrous." It may just be that there is a visible cue that makes it easier to figure out what the "worst case" hand position happens to be. Of course, it also means that it is easier to figure out how to hold your phone for best reception when signal strengh is marginal.

While there are certainly people who love everything Apple does, it is obvious from your post and others that there are just as many looking for any excuse to attack Apple.

Re:Antenna design

[LBArrettAnderson]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gb3aQ5XoQw

Please tell me where I put my finger on my Nexus One to cause it to lose 4 bars.

Re:Antenna design

[LBArrettAnderson]

Sorry for the double post. This is not the same issue as what happens with other phones. It is certainly a disaster, and piss poor design and testing. As the comment above this shows, this can be done with a single finger. Calls can be dropped because you have a single finger in the wrong spot. Please tell me of one other phone that will drop a call if I place a finger in a very common and natural position on the phone itself.

Re:Antenna design

[tgibbs]

Cell phones of all brands drop calls all the time. What is your evidence that none of those dropped calls are due to a finger in the wrong place?

Re:Antenna design

[LBArrettAnderson]

It has been demonstrated that iPhone 4 drops calls because of a finger in the wrong place. It's now up to you to provide evidence of it happening on another phone. It's impossible to provide evidence for the opposite.

Re:Antenna design

[tgibbs]

So you acknowledge that aside from your obvious bias against the iPhone, your only evidence for a uniquely severe problem with the new iPhone is an observation that reception is affected by hand position, something that we know just from the basic physics (and a statement by an antenna engineer) must be true to some extent for any phone with an internal antenna.

Re:Antenna design

[tgibbs]

Here is a report of a similar phenomenon on the iPhone 3gs

Re:Antenna design

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been demonstrated that iPhone 4 drops calls because of a finger in the wrong place.

No, it's been demonstrated that an iPhone 4 has dropped a call when a finger was in the wrong place. I've also seen my previous iPhone go from five bars to no signal and back while it was sitting on my desk. My iPhone 4 doesn't drop calls all the time like my first-gen iPhone did.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Pieroxy]

DPI in print has barely anything to do with dpi on an LCD screen. This is mostly because the 'D' doesn't represent the same thing.

On a screen, one 'D' is a pixel, which can take any color.

On a printer a 'P' is a dot of ink, which can generally take only one color, hence the need for dithering. The higher the resolution, the less you can see dithering. Now, I know color printing has evolved, but I think it is still true.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Pieroxy]

The thing is, outside geeks circles, nobody has ever heard of the HTC Diamond. What is the use of a great phone if you don't let people know you have one?

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[ceoyoyo]

Did you miss even reading the summary? A 300-and-a-bit dpi screen has pixels that are unresolvable by people with 20/20 vision at a normal working distance for a smartphone (which is similar to working distance for a sheet of letter size paper). That is, at normal distances, anything higher doesn't matter. That includes dithering effects or whatever (which are actually just blurring, decreasing the resolution).

Also, anyone who has ever done any print work knows that a printer that says it does X dpi actually prints at effectively about X/2 dpi, due to a variety of things. So a 300 dpi printer produces an effective output at 150 dpi. I remember 600 and 720 dpi printers being a big deal. After that, nobody cared, despite the marketing quickly ramping it up. I think the last printer I bought said it does something like 1600 dpi, but it doesn't matter.

Re:Professional Perspective?

[ceoyoyo]

Several posters on Slashdot have done the math. That would be the equivalent of what, the homeless guy at the train station on the way to work?

FUNDAMENTAL FLAW IN THIS PIXEL ANALYSIS

[Anonymous Coward]

A PIXEL IS NOT A SQUARE!

alvyray.com/memos/6_pixel.pdf

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[dangitman]

This is just buying into the hype. Apple came out with a new phone that happens to have the highest pixel density yet (325 ppi).

Actually, it's more like anti-buying into the hype. This whole "retina" thing would not be a big deal on slashdot if it weren't for a bunch of anal-retentive nerds taking the "Retina" moniker as some sort of scientific statement, and nitpicking about it. It's a fucking trademark! A name given to a product. What next, people complaining that the "Superdrive" doesn't actually have super powers? That a "$100 Grand" bar isn't actually worth $100,000?

The ironic thing is that it's the Apple haters and critics who are feeding the hype that they say they despise. They're just bringing even more attention to it.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[dangitman]

I forgot about the "Superdrive!"
Clearly the DVD-burner is Apples innovation to!

How the hell do you make the logical leap from it being branded as "Superdrive" to it being a claim that Apple invented the DVD burner? Do you also think that a Toshiba Satellite laptop computer is actually an orbital space vehicle?

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[mmkkbb]

This has never been true for dye-sublimation printers, which do not require dithering.

Not anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

What rads are you working with that are using off the shelf LCD's? That is, unless you consider a BARCO a relatively stock consumer display.

Re:Retinal scientist here...

[khchung]

What PART of the retina (should have called it a fovea display)?

I don't understand, don't we always use the same part of the retina when reading?

I mean, when I read, I have to move my eyeballs to track along the line, so I actually only really focused on a few words in the line at a time, I have never been able to focus on one single spot and really "read" other parts of the text even though they are clearly in my field of vision.

So I suppose there is really a small part of my retina, where I "focus" on, that has high enough resolution to really read text. Isn't that true?

One word: timbre

[Anonymous Coward]

One word: timbre. Harmonics. The reason why a tin whistle at high C doesn't sound like a piano high C.

And most (>90%) of children can hear past 28kHz and over 30 isn't uncommon.

Did you miss that the resolution is too low?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you miss that the resolution is too low? You would need a nearly double resolution to make it indistinguishable because your retina can see a change from black to white to black again in the ~320dpi resolution screen pixel, but that pixel cannot change within itself from black to white to black again, requiring TWO pixels to manage this feat.

Therefore the resolution is too low for what you suggest.

ACLU

[konohitowa]

It's articles like this that make me wonder whether kdawson is trying to change the color of his stripes, or whether he's just pulling an ACLU: i.e., taking that 1 out of 100 cases that are the polar opposite of the normal agenda just to get street cred with the uninformed masses. "Well, I don't normally agree with the ACLU... BUT... one time they took this case..."

So when they tout retina display

[Anonymous Coward]

So when they tout retina display as being new and being so high as to be as good as a human retina, either

1) this is not a higher resolution than others in which case you're right
2) this is a higher resolution than others, in which case I've just shown you saying what I accuse you of

So pick one or go away.

Re:Retinal scientist here...

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends on what you mean... For the most part yes, character recognition happens in the fovea, but it isn't just resolution, it seems to also be practice. That is, if you scale up letters to compensate for the drop in cell density, you still have trouble reading in the periphery. But you do use your near periphery to do some subtasks involved with reading, for example planning eye movements to the next word.

You right hover that the fovea is tightly linked to attention.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[mcgrew]

Whoever modded that should have his moderation priveledges permanently revoked. How is that in any way a troll?

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Keebler71]

It's worth noting that there are quite a few phones that beat the 286ppi limitation, but the iPhone has the highest.

Which is all irrelevant, since by definition, the "clarity" of any phone that exceeds 286ppi are identical and beyond human perception... may as well be 500 or 1000ppi.

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Lars T.]

Why would dell? they don't make electronics. They build computers byu assembling other peoples electronics.

Why would they the hire (among other jobs):

• Acoustics Engineering Project Mgr iPhone
• Camera Design Engineer - iPhone/iPod
• Cellular Systems Architect
• Display Electrical Architect
• Failure Analysis Material Scientist
• Hardware Engineering Project Manager
• iPhone Wireless Certification EPM
• Mechanical Design Engineer
• Mechanical Mfg Enclosure Engineer
• OpenCL Drivers Engineer
• Senior Test Engineer
• Sr. ASIC Design Engineer
• Sr. MacBook Hardware Design Engineer
• Techical Program Manager - Antenna
• Technical Program Manager - Battery
• Touch Hardware Engineering Manager
• Wireless Project Manager - iPhone

if they just buy stuff from others?

Re:B-b-b-but I thought Apple was a marketing compa

[Lars T.]

What exactly have they transformed? The HTC touch and LG Prada phones were out at the same time or before the iPhone.

The LG Prada was a pretty basic feature phone more expensive than the iPhone, with Adobe Flash, but no way to look at web pages. The HTC Touch was rushed to the market a month before the release of the iPhone (but months after the announcement), a Windows Mobile phone with a few applications changed to allow touch gesture operation.

Did I mention both were MONO-touch?

Such nerd rage!

[soppsa]

Still enjoying your virginity I see.