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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."
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.
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!)
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.
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.
Palm trees and 8
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.
"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.
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.
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
--- What?
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.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
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.
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.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
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...
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.