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

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.

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: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 )

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