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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."
Apparently we should never ask a scientist, "How do you like *them* Apples?"
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.
... 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!
Palm trees and 8
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...
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
"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.
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
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
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.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller