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A Professional Perspective On Apple's Retina Display

Posted by kdawson on from the eye-for-an-eye dept.

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."

4 of 346 comments (clear)

  1. Apple is a marketing company by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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
    --
    Palm trees and 8
  2. Re:We knew this years ago ... by lxs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Droid at 265 ppi was no big deal. by Petersko · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

  4. Re:We knew this years ago ... by omnichad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.