The World's Smallest Full HD Display

An anonymous reader writes "Ever heard of Ortustech? Probably not. But you have heard of Casio, right? Ortustech is a joint venture between Casio Computer and Toppan Printing to develop small and medium sized displays. Today, the company is announcing a doozy with its 4.8-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel HAST (Hyper Amorphous Silicon TFT) LCD with 160-degree viewing angle, 16.8 million colors, and a pixel density of 458ppi. Amazing when you compare that to the lauded 326ppi of iPhone 4's Retina display."

Comments

Too small....

[bernywork]

4.8" ?? How about giving me 24" or 32" at the same res?

FFS, for so long now we haven't been going up in DPI on screens. We just got to a certain point and after that we just went "OOoohhh HD" or basically, "OOOhhhh shiny!"

WTF happened?

Re:Too small....

[Alioth]

It's the data rate that's a problem.

Let's imagine 458dpi on a relatively "modest" screen that's 20in by 11.7in. That makes a display resolution of 9160 by 5358.

To update that screen at 60 frames per second would require a data rate of 6.9 *terabits* per second to the actual panel. Now you can say, "compress the data before sending it to the screen", but that would just increase the processing power needed, and at the end of the day, something still has to feed the raw panel the data at 6.9 terabits per second.

Big screens aren't getting higher DPI because (a) it's not needed (generally, you're looking at a big screen from a few feet away, and 100 dpi is more than enough) and (b) it would be fantastically expensive to do it and (c) no one has developed a standard to shift data from the computer to the display at the kinds of data rates that would be required to drive such a display.

You're two orders of magnitude off

[LeDopore]

Ummm...

9160 * 5358 * 60 * 24 = 70410355200

That's 70,410,355,200 with commas, about 70 Gb/s (8 GB/s). That's about one order of magnitude faster than the current HDMI spec. It's technically feasible now, and will be easy to do in about 4 years.

By then, many digital cameras will have many tens of megapixels, so the resolution of the screen won't be unused.

What kind of applications would benefit from such uber-high def? One idea: I'm looking forward to the day we will be able to use commodity cameras and displays to get digital microscopy good enough to replace having to stare down an eyepiece. Imaging also being able to show other scientists what you're doing without having to switch seats, refocus, etc. Bring it on.

(And no, current HD is about 2-3 times too rough to do the really fine observations I need on a daily basis.)