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

From the TFA

[psergiu]

"the iPhone 4s infamous Retina display packs in 326 pixels"

Why INfamous ? Can we mod the TFA as Troll or Flamebait ? :)

Re:From the TFA

[captainpanic]

"the iPhone 4s infamous Retina display packs in 326 pixels"

Why INfamous ? Can we mod the TFA as Troll or Flamebait ? :)

Assuming you're not joking, I will reply and request a -1 Offtopic for myself rather than for you.

The use of a single subjective word is not trolling or flaming. It's just a poor choice of words and can happen to anyone.
If however the whole purpose of the sentence is to misinform, to be off-topic (like me in this post!) or to insult, then it can be called trolling or flaming.
Now, TFA has a lot of very objective information, and its goal seems to inform us.

On topic again: when would a display be "good enough"? When do we reach a point that we cannot possibly see the difference between a resolution, and an even higher pixel density?

Re:From the TFA

[MozeeToby]

That depends on how far away the display is from the eye. If you want something that is held at arms length the iPhone's display is probably already to that point, though there may be a subjective difference by going higher it isn't likely to matter much. If you want something that could be mounted on a pair of glasses however, you've still got a ways to go. I wonder what the minimum comfortable focus length is a single eye...

Re:From the TFA

[Surt]

We're not even close, thanks to the eye's variable focus. Think 20x off in x & y, for a combined 400X, and that's still probably not quite there for a few people with really good eyes. But for a more realistic 'when will no one practically be able to tell the difference', we are probably only 4x off in each dimension.

Re:From the TFA

[Gilmoure]

Infamous is when you're more than famous!

-- Ned Nederlander

Re:From the TFA

[Tumbleweed]

My guess is the submitter learned what the word infamous means from the movie "The Three Amigos"...

Oh, that movie has a veritable cornucopia of great words in it. A plethora, even!

Re:From the TFA

[captainpanic]

Could we say that, within certain limits for distance from the eye, there is a maximum amount of pixels that we can see, and that from that point on, any increase will not be noticed?

Certainly, the limit is reached once the atual wavelength of the light starts to play a role (once a pixel is just a photon, or something along those lines).

Re:From the TFA

[l0g0s]

But Steve Jobs told me that 326ppi was all the human eye was capable of perceiving. How do we REALLY know that this one has a density of 458ppi? --sarcasm

Re:From the TFA

[allanmackenzie]

This one goes to 11!

Re:From the TFA

[Khyber]

Steve Jobs is full of shit. I still see jaggies on the retina display, a full 65cm from my face.

But then again I've got some killer vision.

Re:From the TFA

[WidgetGuy]

When do we reach a point that we cannot possibly see the difference between a resolution, and an even higher pixel density?

That would be at about 50 years of age. Or when you have to take your glasses off in order to read the nutrition information on labels in the grocery store. Whichever comes first.

Re:From the TFA

[WidgetGuy]

Or when you fail to notice that your comment has been inadvertantly rendered as a quote before clicking on Submit. Sorry 'bout that!

Re:From the TFA

[edjs]

I wonder what the minimum comfortable focus length is a single eye...

Minimum focus distance is 100mm, more or less, but depends strongly on age: Presbyopia Anything eyeglass-mounted needs to be optically adjusted to appear in focus.

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....

[PsyciatricHelp]

I have been saying the same thing for a few years now. Why the Hell does my 40" not have 458ppi. http://xkcd.com/732/

Re:Too small....

[JaredOfEuropa]

I'd like to have them smaller, in a 3" size, for use in VR glasses. Most current VR headsets go up to 640x480, higher resolutions are horribly expensive.

Re:Too small....

[freeshoes]

One word, Glasses, with screens build in.

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.

Re:Too small....

[shadowrat]

That's why the systems tend to define a resolution independent mechanism for specifying text sizes. nobody is going to read 24 pixel type on that screen. it would be 0.04".

Re:Too small....

[macraig]

This is THE most intelligent response to this complaint that I've ever read. Mod this post up to +6, please.

Re:Too small....

[petermgreen]

We more-or-less reached the limit of human visual acuity at normal viewing distances in normal viewing conditions?
I can't agree, I have an ultraportable with a 10 inch 1366x768 display and it's perfectly usable at that resoloution. Even allowing for the facts that desktop screens are for longer term use and that you typically sit a bit further away from them the pixel density on larger desktop screens is FAR lower than I would consider desirable.

Afaict what really happened is that marketing realised the lusers look at screen size rather than pixel count and density. Combine that with a move to a display technology with discrete pixels and manufacturers exploiting synergies with the HDTV market is that most screens availiable today are 19-24 inch with resoloutions of 1920x1080 or lower.

Re:Too small....

[SWPadnos]

IBM made a much higher resolution display in 2001:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

This is a 22", 3840x2400 display. I still wonder why that kind of technology never caught on. I know the IBM displays (and the Viewsonics) were expensive, starting at $17000 or so (the VS was "only" $9000 new), but I had hoped that there might be economies of scale eventually. Sadly, these panels haven't been manufactured for about 5 years. Every once in a while there's a rumor that someone is making a new model, but it never seems to happen.

I'm also wondering just what happened for (almost) everyone to decide that 1080 is enough vertical pixels.

Re:Too small....

[BlackBloq]

You are really missing the boat on this one. This is about devices like camera's and stuff. Imagine you could see all of your 22 Mega pixel camera on screen at once. A photographer can read info from that extra information and use it. Same with science. Image field lab equipment, more cells on screen at once, no need to go to the real display (laptop/notebook). Same for Camcorders etc. So doing video recording you will be actually seeing all recoded pixels on the display;and that's rad.

Re:Too small....

[drinkypoo]

You are really missing the boat on this one. This is about devices like camera's and stuff. Imagine you could see all of your 22 Mega pixel camera on screen at once. A photographer can read info from that extra information and use it.

Not really, because the pixels are so small they can't see them. A better histograph display would be a greater boon to the photographer, who is already using an SLR or an optical viewfinder to overcome the limits of pixels.

Re:Too small....

[commodore64_love]

>>>We just got to a certain point and after that we just went "OOoohhh HD"

The screens are being produced for the general population, and they only have Blurays or HDTV (1920x1080) as their maximum resolution. No point going higher than that, just as there was no point making CRT TVs higher than approximately 700x525 back in the days of analog VCRs (1990s and earlier).

Of course if you need higher resolution, for CAD or CGI development, I'm sure those specialized displays can be bought and hooked-up to your computer.

Re:Too small....

[hvm2hvm]

Other problems that occur are simple wiring/connection problems. You'd need to connect 9000 horizontal and 5000 vertical channels. And then manage to synchronize the inner pixels between them by sending the right waveforms in the channels. Just that would be a huge task, requiring a very careful planning of circuitry, and combined with the amount of data you mentioned, a very complex mathematical and physical task. Another problem I'd see with this is power, all those circuits would probably consum a ton of energy.

Re:Too small....

[commodore64_love]

292 Gbit/s for a 1920x1080 display.

LVDS can't do it. You would need HyperTransport 3 or PCI Express. I got that from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths#Modems_-_narrow_and_broadband

Re:Too small....

[tverbeek]

It figures that they would develop displays with this pixel density just as my ability to focus close enough to appreciate them goes away. {sigh}

Re:Too small....

[Surt]

Right, and that's why we need the same resolution on our 4" screens as on our 24" screens? One of them has the DPI wrong. (It's the 24" screens).

Re:Too small....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also "bulit-in," not "build in."

Just sayin.

Re:Too small....

[maxwell demon]

Since 24" is exactly 5 times 4.8", the same resolution would even fit nicely for watching full HD movies (each movie pixel would cover exactly 5x5 screen pixels). You'd get a resolution of 9600x5400. Of course you'd have the problem that with 60Hz refresh rate and 3 bytes per pixel, you'd have to transfer about 70 gigabit per second to the screen ...

Re:Too small....

[Surt]

That's only 11X the resolution and framerate we've been able to feed for more than a decade. Seems like we should be able to manage it.

Re:Too small....

[commodore64_love]

>>>I'm also wondering just what happened for (almost) everyone to decide that 1080 is enough vertical pixels.

Because 1080i or 1080p is the standard used by ATSC and DVB and ISDB television broadcasts, and no one feels like going through yet another 10-20 year transition for higher resolutions. BTW the 1080 originally came from Japan's 1980s analog MUSE system, so you can blame them. ;-)

There might be need for high resolutions for CAD or CGI development, but you won't find those screens in Best Buy. You need to special order them (and probably pay $10,000 too).

Re:Too small....

[bernywork]

How did you do your math on that one?

Why not just do what people do with video walls and just break it up into sections, didn't Matrox do something like this a while ago?

Re:Too small....

[Nethemas the Great]

So you'd see a highly pixelated 72" display from a virtual 8 feet away. It's been done and they're not very good. Fine for movies (sort of) but it doesn't solve low quality display of text. These devices are better purposed for personal video viewing or high mobility while retaining situational awareness is key. i.e. military

Re:Too small....

[clone53421]

At some point, wouldn’t it make sense to use a vector-based format to define the contents of rectangular “pixels”? For images that were already pixel-based you could just send a simple rectangle or maybe use a gradient to smooth out the corners, but for vector-based shapes (e.g. fonts) you could get an ultra-smooth laser-print-quality rendering by sending the mathematical curve to display.

In other words, just like pixels are currently made up of red/green/blue sub-pixels, these pixels would be made up of red/green/blue sub-pixels, but more than one of each colour sub-pixel per pixel and with smarter sub-pixel rendering built into the display so that you could send it vector-based data to control the sub-pixel rendering.

The data transfer rate would be manageable for the entire display, and the individual “pixel” sub-units could manage their own block of physical pixels.

Re:Too small....

[epine]

Nice. That's what you need to have small fonts that scale smoothly without blotchy in-betweens. I don't much like squinting at small, fuzzy fonts. If 150 DPI is visually acceptable, why have I not seen a 150 DPI laser printer since the early 1990s? I suspect on the screen with some good AA that 200 DPI would permit smooth scaling of smaller font sizes.

It won't happen for large screens until the marginal cost of the extra pixel density is relatively insignificant, about five years I'd guess after 30" desktop screens become relatively normal, at which point the same number of pixels might become available in higher density screens a size or two less overwhelming.

I've never thought that 1080 was enough vertical pixels for programming. Both of my panels tilt, but then I figured out that this kind of buggers up the clear-type support. The first time I tried it my video card didn't have the horsepower to run transposed. It was SLOW. Haven't tried it with my new Evergreen card, but I'd assume the Linux drivers remain too broken to make a go of it. An open source driver that might work great someday beats a closed source driver that already does, in my peculiar world view.

I think the 6000 series will have multiple DP outlets.

One DP provides "17.28 Gbit/s of video bandwidth, enough for supporting 4 simultaneous 1080p60 displays or 2560 × 1600 × 30 bit @120 Hz" according to the bathroom wall of all knowledge.

The problem is not with the video cards, although it seems kind of obscene to make the electrons wiggle so much.

Re:Too small....

[rickb928]

Ok, so basically, you're not knocking 2160p or 4320p, which are on the horizon.

But compression is a cheat. All you get are shinier artifacts.

HD is a half-lie. Nice resolution if your cable company bothers to deliver a signal that has a modest data rate and doesn't pixellate when the scene changes or their translation engines decide to have a decaf latte.

Satellite is marginally better, if the box doesn't puke all over your screen.

Over-the-air is usually better than all of the above. I may buy an decent antenna yet.

Internet streaming is still a work-in-progress, since the data rate is just as challenging to the ISPs as torrents, and will eventually suffer the same fate unless you pay your ISP more money for reception, or they get into the streaming business and re-establish their monopolies on video no matter the source.

Whoever thinks consumers have any power in this are deluded. Maybe the FCC can require Internet carriers to act like the common carriers they are or let them filter and throttle so long as they admit that they deliver 'Internet' like AOL used to deliver 'Internet', that is, partly, mostly, whatever they want to.

It's not getting better. Just faster.

Re:Too small....

[Gilmoure]

Two words for you: BRUSH. YOUR. TEETH!

-- Tank Girl

Re:Too small....

[cynyr]

To make the math easier, lets assume a 16x9 display of 7680x4320. Now make each set of 4 pixels a "macro pixel" that gives you 1920x1080 virtual pixels. At which point mostly normal AA and sub pixel hinting can be used on the macro pixel with no need to send the display the full picture, currently. Once some sort of link is created it would then be easy to offer up a 4 fold increase in resolution without needing to do much other than a connector and some software.

Do you have a display that can show a 1:1 DSLR photo? how about the one from your camera phone? how about those high res images from nasa?

I'm waiting for a high enough res display that i could use it like a window.

Re:Too small....

[PitaBred]

1080p is "enough" because the mass market of people use their computers as mobile Internet + video machines. And for little else. These are the same people coming from setting 1600x1200 monitors to 1024x768 because the text is "too small".

Re:Too small....

[FauxPasIII]

FYI, a 40" display at that density and a 16x9 aspect would be on the order of 15938x8977 resolution. Might as well round off an call it 16000x9000. 55" diagonal would have about 21915x12321 resolution. You'd probably need a 2" thick strand of copper to feed it pixels, but man, what a picture...

Re:Too small....

[BronsCon]

I only looked at the Dell because it's exactly the resolution and size I'm looking for and...

It's almost 2 grand.

GP's point still stands. I recently threw out a 13" CRT that did 1600x1200 with no problems whatsoever; it was 10 years old. For those of you who can't figure it out, that's a 10.667% lower pixel count, but 72.144 more pixels per inch, linearly than the 27" iMac (1080p) in front of me right now. The mac is 81.702dpi, the CRT was 153.846dpi. Why can't I have that dpi on this screen? Fuck, I'll settle for 150, so... 23.5" wide screen would be 3525 pixels wide. Make it 1983 pixels tall (maybe 1984) for 16:9 or 2203 (or 2204) for 16:10 and I'll be ecstatic about it. Even better, give me a roughly 160dip display (163.404dpi to simply double the resolution of my current screen -- funny because it's literally not found anywhere) at 3840x2160, so 1080p can scale cleanly on it, while still giving me 4x the screen real-estate, and I'll buy 2; I've always wanted 8 displays.

Re:Too small....

[wisdom_brewing]

Unfortunately ill beg to differ... There are specs and real life versions of much higher reolutions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UHDV.svg

Re:Too small....

[garyebickford]

I beg to differ, at least for some serious applications. I agree that super high resolution (beyond 200 DPI) is not really needed for most moving image applications, but 200 DPI is really a minimum for engineering and mapping applications, as well as for very high quality print-type applications that require antialiasing.

(Antialiasing essentially trades off pure resolution for smoother lines, so it can be viewed as subject to the constraints of Nyquist Frequency regarding digital sampling of analog signals.)

At present, every engineer who used to work with E-size (basically 3 feet by 4 feet) paper drawings must now make constant choices between looking at detail by zooming in (and losing context) or looking at the whole drawing and losing detail. I have worked with oilfield engineers who regularly peruse multicolor drawings drawn at 200 DPI on a pen plotter, three feet high and 40 feet long, hung on a wall.

I did a bit of preliminary conceptual work at that time on a full size engineering display that used bistable phosphors and laser (probably UV, possibly something else) to achieve much higher resolutions than required, that would work similarly to the so-called 'storage displays' made by Tektronix (where I worked back then.)

Back in the day (actually about 1979) I was looking at an eight-by-ten foot wall map of the US, and observed that computer displays could be considered 'high resolution' when that map could be displayed at 200 DPI in full color. That would be a resolution of about 19200 by 24000 pixels.

For further perspective, I know someone who a few years ago was a principal designer of a head-up display that displayed full color using solid-state lasers that 'wrote' the pixels directly on the retina, bypassing a screen entirely. This was a full motion military application so the resolution was not overly high, but for lower refresh rates could have much higher resolution resolution.

Theoretically, the maximum desired resolution would be again related to Nyquist - two pixels per retina cell, at a refresh rate that is also twice the 'refresh rate' of the retina cells. There will always be applications that will push resolution higher, up to that point. Beyond that, there truly is no point in going higher. Until we get to that point, speed vs. resolution will always be a trade-off, that varies with application.

Re:Too small....

[blair1q]

What's the point of making a 32" screen with pixels so small you can only see them if your nose is pressed up against the glass?

Anti-aliasing.

Going from one array of discrete cells (the screen) to another (your retina) will result in alignment artifacts.

The fact that you can't see the individual pixels by looking at them doesn't mean you can't tell the difference by looking at the whole picture.

Re:Too small....

[blair1q]

I'd use the extra density to create a scotographic 3-D display at 320x180x30 resolution.

Re:Too small....

[jmikelittle]

I'm counting seven.

right, but the real on-topic question would be how many pixels does his sentence require?

Re:Too small....

[rockmuelle]

I had regular access to a T221/Big Bertha for years. While it was a great display, it had some problems and ended up being overkill for most applications.

It's biggest challenge was that there were very few cards that could drive it at a decent framerate. ~10 fps was the most it ever got, which made it just useful for interactive applications.

Most applications and windowing systems had a number of UI elements that were rendered based on pixel values (think 32x32 pixel icons). This made most GUIs unusable as the fixed pixel elements were too small (too small to even see in some cases).

200 dpi was also too fine grained for anyone to notice without the aid of external magnification. We kept a magnifying glass next to the monitor to help.

Despite those limitations, as a toy and a testbed for visualization ideas, it was a lot of fun. I used it regularly for GIS applications, often with the aid of the magnifying glass. I also developed large graph visualizations for it and it could easily display much more detail than a standard display.

For rendering, it was possible to render simple primitives and not worry about anti-aliasing or sub-pixel rendering techniques. Large scatter plots, in particular, benefited from the resolution. Sparse areas that would appear dense on a normal display (due to one pixel being used per data point) actually appeared sparse, helping people interpret their data easier.

-Chris

Re:Too small....

[dfghjk]

"If 150 DPI is visually acceptable, why have I not seen a 150 DPI laser printer since the early 1990s?"

Ignoring that you've never seen a 150 dpi laser printer since they started at 300, the reason is that paper and monitors have different viewing distances. The intended viewing distance is what determines how many dpi are enough. 150 dpi is visually acceptable at typical monitor viewing distances, and considering you replied to a T221 comment, I bet you haven't even experienced using a T221 at normal distances. In order to use one effectively, you have to sit unusually close.

Re:Too small....

[xded]

Good luck with dead pixels...
With a given manufacturing process, if you have more pixels you will also have more dead ones. And if you only accept 2-3 of them (virtually, none), the price of that thing goes linearly with the number of pixels, maybe exponentially (given the effort needed to refine the process).

Re:Too small....

[ShadowDrake]

It is actually annoying though to know that you can get 21" 1920x1080 and 22" 1920x1200 displays, but for any more, it means going to 30", 2560x1600, and from there, there is nowhere else on a single screen.

I'd love to see that newly-popular 26 and 27" size showing up in 2560x1600.

Re:Too small....

[drkim]

I believe that is called an HMD:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EmaginZ800.jpg

Re:Too small....

[BlackBloq]

As a actual photographer and a seller of camera gear you are so wrong. F1.8 needs high res to even be seen on the display without zooming all over. And yes AMAZINGLY I can easily see each pixel. And yes It makes a big difference. I'm talking about The 320x240 vs 640 by 480 (230 000vs 900 000) currently offered. And no you don't know what you are talking about. I use a 2x optical scope for fine focus on narrow depth of field for this lens http://www.kenrockwell.com/canon/lenses/85mm-f12.htm with cameras that have no live view (like film cameras).
Why people with no experience feel the need to comment is beyond me. For instance, per colour histogram has been available for almost ten years or so (live histogram for less time). I assure you photographers in the field who are experienced don't sit at the shoot staring at histogram. You should understand the EV values in a scene by looking at it. Plus the histogram and EV (exposure values) are not related to screen resolution at all. Talk about an unrelated and already moot point. But glad to see you know what you are talking about and got modded up by someone equally illuminated. It's /. Nuff said.

Re:Too small....

[drinkypoo]

As a actual photographer and a seller of camera gear you are so wrong. F1.8 needs high res to even be seen on the display without zooming all over. And yes AMAZINGLY I can easily see each pixel. And yes It makes a big difference. I'm talking about The 320x240 vs 640 by 480 (230 000vs 900 000) currently offered.

And I'm talking about much smaller pixels. You are talking pure shit. I have a camera with each resolution of display that you mention (QVGA and VGA, we call them here in tech-land) and therefore I know that this is not the difference we are talking about.

I use a 2x optical scope for fine focus on narrow depth of field for this lens http://www.kenrockwell.com/canon/lenses/85mm-f12.htm with cameras that have no live view (like film cameras).

Yes, that's what I said, idiot. I specifically said that pro photographers are already using an SLR or a separate viewfinder; a scope counts.

Why people with no experience feel the need to comment is beyond me.

Why people who can't read feel the need to respond to my comments is beyond me.

Plus the histogram and EV (exposure values) are not related to screen resolution at all.

I never said they did, but we've already established that you can't read.

But glad to see you know what you are talking about and got modded up by someone equally illuminated. It's /. Nuff said.

You're full of shit, and you're babbling incoherently.

Re:Too small....

[hcdejong]

So you would downsample high-res pixel images and send one vector per block? That would defeat the whole point of having a high-res display.

Re:Too small....

[BlackBloq]

MWAhaha!!! You are agitated, that's funny but not to troll... I know what I am talking about and you are struggling and emotional. I didn't put a 3rd term for displays (as it's obvious you have no field experience) because I already put two representations. Nice use of wikipedia. Or do you think people say "heya man you see the xga on that camera.!". Pla-eeeze! Go to DP review or even Cnet and read. But you would know this if you actually worked in the field/industry. I am a pro-photographer (sometimes videographer) And sell gear at a pro shop. Every niche has it's own jargon.. So don't talk out of your ass like this. It makes you seem stupid so, I hope you misrepresented yourself. Oh yea about the Histogram, you attached an unrelated point/feature as I clearly state with this comment "Talk about an unrelated and already moot point.". Or don't you get that?

Re:Too small....

[clone53421]

So you would downsample high-res pixel images and send one vector per block?

Not necessarily one vector, but one vector-based subdrawing that would require much less data to represent than the equivalent bitmap representation would.

That would defeat the whole point of having a high-res display.

No. It would be a trade-off. You wouldn’t be able to address the subpixels in each block separately, as you can in a straight bitmap. But you could tell it to display a simple line and it would display an ultra-high resolution line with quality rivaling that of a good laser printer, and requiring only a fraction of the amount of data that would be required to display the same line in that resolution as a raster-based bitmap.

Think of it as a form of anti-aliasing: it’s for rounding off the corners. Except that instead of a solid rectangle of some shade of gray, it would be a two-colour rectangular region with a proper vector-based curve delineating the boundary between the white and black portions.

Re:Too small....

[clone53421]

I just noticed that you said “downsample”.

No, you wouldn’t downsample. You wouldn’t have a high-res image to downsample in the first place. The whole point is to avoid storing and transferring that full-sized raster-based representation due to its unwieldy size.

You could implement different methods of up-sampling standard-res images for this sort of hi-res display, or you could send vector-based content (fonts) as vector-based shapes, giving high-res representations with minimal data transfer requirements.

Re:Too small....

[hcdejong]

There are cases where you would downsample. Eg when displaying a nice high-res photo.

Your idea has merit for drawing the UI, fonts and other vector data, but I just can't see it working with high-res pixel originals.

Also, I doubt vectorizing a pixel image will result in usably less data. If vectorization were a useful compression algorithm, we'd see it used in photo and video compression schemes.

Re:Too small....

[bhtooefr]

I own a T221 DGP (Japanese variant of the DG5,) and while I wouldn't give it up, here's why it didn't catch on:

1. Cost. And not just of the monitor itself, but of the card to drive it. By the time they were discontinued, you could get a Viewsonic for $3-4k, a DG3 for $5k (the Viewsonics were DG3s that binned worse, allegedly,) and a DG5 for $9k. But, with the Viewsonic or the DG3, here were your options:
   • Run at 3840x2400 13 Hz on a single link
   • Run at 3840x2400 24 Hz on two single links, on a card that genlocked outputs together (so we're talking Quadro, FireGL, or Parhelia, there's $500-1000 right there)
   • Run at 3840x2400 41 Hz on four single links, on a card that genlocked outputs together (EXPENSIVE - $2000 on up, back then. Although, now, there's a $150 card that was discontinued years ago, that with a terribly outdated driver on XP, or any driver on Linux with careful application of Xinerama, works for this.)

   The DG5, however, is tolerant of non-genlocked cards, and can take (with an adapter box) one dual-link, and one single-link DVI connection for 48 Hz. Or, the DG5's real party trick is, it can take four 1920x1200 60 Hz signals, and display all of them at once on the 48 Hz screen.

2. Resolution independence. Or, rather, the lack thereof. Iiyama's version of the DG3 actually says that you can spoil your eyes in 3840x2400, and if you're not able to increase font sizes, run at 1920x1200.
3. Demand. There just wasn't that much demand for a 3840x2400 monitor except in very small niche markets. This is actually why the price went down so much on T221s - they had tons of unsold stock. The T221 actually put IDTech, the joint venture between IBM and Chi Mei Optoelectronics, out of business, and now Sony makes TVs in that factory. In fact, even now, demand is low enough (in some markets, anyway) that you can get one for the equivalent of $300 or so in Japan. I paid $1300 including shipping - before the Japanese market for T221s had COMPLETELY crashed - to get two T221s to Ohio. (I ended up selling one of them, and it paid for both.)

Re:Too small....

[bhtooefr]

The sad thing is, if you want more than 2560x1600, you're looking at several thousand dollars, or 5+ year old monitors. (The original T220 did 3840x2400 in 22.2", for $18,000 at launch, with the video card to drive it. If you want that resolution now, well, you can't get it without buying used, but if 3840x2160 will do, and you're OK with 56", time to shell out $40,000.)

Re:Too small....

[clone53421]

There are cases where you would downsample. ... I just can't see it working with high-res pixel originals.

You just wouldn’t be able to. High-res raster-based images would have to be downsampled (once) in software before even attempting to display them on the screen, just as they would be for display on a conventional standard-res display. It should still be slightly better than a standard-res display for high-res raster originals, but the main advantage would come when rendering vector based images or text.

The whole point was that you can’t use the high-res raster original. Trying to buffer high-res raster images in video memory would be prohibitively expensive in terms of space and transfer requirements. For that reason, images would need to be copied to video memory at some reasonable DPI for display. Yes, you’re throwing away information... but it should still be better quality than standard-res displays. It’s a small win, but the main advantage of the design would be laser-quality text and vector-based images. The improvement in raster-based images would be slight, but that’s to be expected somewhat: most images on the Web are stored at very low DPI already. Any high-res display is already going to have to upsample the raster images to make them large enough.

If vectorization were a useful compression algorithm, we'd see it used in photo and video compression schemes.

For high-res raster-based images, I was sort of picturing an extremely aggressive JPEG compression that basically converts the image into small 16x16 blocks of pixels. It looks terrible when they’re large enough to see, but it would give a little more detail if the individual blocks were the size of a single pixel in a standard-res display.

It would take much more space than a single 24-bit RGB value for each “pixel”, yes, but it should still take much less space than trying to store RGB values for every sub-pixel in the high-resolution display.

Oh, look...

[amnesiacopera]

...Just in time for the PSP2.

Usable by humans

[tomalpha]

New tech is all good, but if this is now (supposedly) even more higher res than the human eye compared to Retina, is there any point?

Can you tell the difference?

Re:Usable by humans

[bemymonkey]

I could definitely go for a display like this, whether or not I can see the single pixels. Devices with displays this size usually run OS's that are relatively good at scaling - Android or iOS for instance.

Current screens, especially the huge 4"+ monsters on Android devices lately, are just too pixely at a measly WVGA, and I'd welcome higher resolutions such as 720p at 3.7" or so. Viewing web pages and large amounts of text is just more fun when you have enough pixels to play with - especially with web sites being designed for 1024x768 and higher these days.

The iPhone4 is close to perfect. Definitely the best display on the market, IMO, and mainly because of the nice pixel density.

No, I don't mind holding the phone 10" from my face in order to read text, as long as that text is nice and sharp, and I still have the option of zooming in with fantastic scaling. :)

Re:Usable by humans

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually yes. I can see some pixel borders on 326 DPI display that iDevices have when I'm looking really close up. Also I can clearly see differences in line widths so there is clearly room for some improvement, as technology has still not surpassed the limits of humans.

Re:Usable by humans

[Phrogz]

The Retina theoretical limit is based on a 'standard' viewing distance for phone displays. If you wanted HD glasses (using a far focal point) you would need much higher res. Did not RTFA, but perhaps that is the sort of target for this.

Either that or it's just geeky dick wagging. :)

Re:Usable by humans

[c]

> Can you tell the difference?

There will always be someone who will claim to be able to tell the difference, and as long as that someone is as crazy as the average audiophile you'll see companies trying to develop 1200 dpi displays that you can wear on your wrist.

Re:Usable by humans

[Walterk]

Of course you can tell the difference, as long as you wear special glasses with solid gold lenses as these conduct the photons better.

Re:Usable by humans

[Speare]

I'm sure many will correct me if I'm wrong, but the basic gist of devices like the Retina display is to match or slightly exceed the theoretical limit of an eye's ability to resolve details at a normal usage distance. This is an argument directly related to the Nyquist theorem: to capture a signal, scan at a resolution at least twice your desired sensitivity. The Compact Disc chose 44050 Hz sampling rate because our ears generally cannot hear anything over 22000 Hz.

What the Nyquist theorem misses is that the mind is not just taking a single sample, but a time series of many samples. A good listener or an observant viewer can see qualitative differences in a square wave and a smoother sine wave, even near the limits of resolution. In the visual realm, there's a good example. As you move an image across different photoreceptors, the brain will synthesize additional resolution. Our eyeballs do this all the time: tiny involuntary movements called Nystagmus help our neural edge-detectors gather more data to aid in perception. You can experiment with this using a video editor and one of those "pixelating" filters: move an object behind a coarse pixelating filter, and you can easily determine more about the original object shape than you could with a fixed image. Nystagmus beats Nyquist, if you will.

I think there's plenty of room for higher resolution sampling: music is often sampled at 48000 KHz nowadays, and I think handheld displays will benefit from 400+ or even 500+ DPI easily.

Re:Usable by humans

[wvmarle]

Depends on your viewing distance.

It's a step in the right direction: imagine this resolution on a 1" display. Now imagine two of those. Imagine some display holder that looks very much like a pair of glasses. And now imagine you wear those... the ultimate 3D display!

After that it should be come a relative small step to add some sensor to find the direction your head is turned and you have some great 3D VR goggles.

It may be a bit overdone for phone displays - but then the iPhone's "retina" resolution is of course based on something like arm-length viewing distance. Get closer and your eyes can manage more pixels.

Re:Usable by humans

[Sockatume]

Aliasing. Pixels too small to distinguish doesn't mean you've achieved display perfection, for much the same reasons that your games machine might do a 2x supersample, essentially rendering the game at double the display resolution to remove "jaggies".

Re:Usable by humans

[bjourne]

Absolutely! Normal printers manage to print at 600 dpi and there is a clear difference between text printed with that resolution and 300 dpi or even 150 dpi, which even that is higher than most LCD screens. The difference in readability is enormous. Imagine seeing the Times font look as crisp and readable on screen as on paper! Or not having to use stupid tricks like subpixel rendering to make fonts look good.

I can't wait for the day this technology becomes mainstream.

Re:Usable by humans

[migla]

The magic thing about a retina display is that if you get close enough it ceases to be a retina display.

I'd rather take two smaller displays of this super-retinal resolution, though, and have one for each eye...

Re:Usable by humans

[spankey51]

Fit it with optics and integrate it into a pair of glasses... with this tech, surely VR glasses will be getting smaller and lighter while simultaneously improving resolution.

Re:Usable by humans

[Jazz-Masta]

New tech is all good, but if this is now (supposedly) even more higher res than the human eye compared to Retina, is there any point?

Can you tell the difference?

Probably not. But guess what *magical, revolutionary* feature will make it into iPhone 5, TBA at the 2011 (or 2012) World Wide Developer Conference?

Re:Usable by humans

[Surt]

Two answers:

1) The 'retina' display is a big lie, based on holding the display further away from the eye than is realistic. Most people can make out the pixels on the retina if they hold it at a comfortable distance.

2) A 1080p display doesn't have to scale video output, which means less artifacts.

Re:Usable by humans

[Surt]

And basically everyone can tell the difference between 2400dpi printers and 600dpi printers as well.

Re:Usable by humans

[locofungus]

What the Nyquist theorem misses is that the mind is not just taking a single sample, but a time series of many samples. A good listener or an observant viewer can see qualitative differences in a square wave and a smoother sine wave, even near the limits of resolution.

No. This fundamentally misunderstands the Nyquist theorem.

If you low pass filter a signal and then sample it at at least twice the frequency of the highest frequency passed by the low pass filter then you can _exactly_ reconstruct the original low pass filtered signal by low pass filtering the digital signal generated from the samples.

Of course, CDs do not permit storing the samples at infinite precision so the theoretically perfect reconstruction does not occur but that's not due to the finite sampling frequency and the ear just isn't sensitive enough to changes in amplitude for the quantization of the samples to matter in normal circumstances.

Higher sampling frequencies allow the low pass filtering to be moved into the digital domain. Ideally we want a brick wall low pass filter but building a filter like this in the analogue domain is hard. Simple filters with a nice flat pass band have a relatively gentle 6 or 12dB/octave cutoff. Simple filters with a sharp cutoff introduce lots of non-linearity in the pass band.

Tim.

Re:Usable by humans

[nine-times]

This is an argument directly related to the Nyquist theorem: to capture a signal, scan at a resolution at least twice your desired sensitivity.

I think that's specifically related to waveforms and frequency, though. I'm not sure it applies to discrete pixels in a visual field of view. You do get aliasing in pictures, but I think the ~350 DPI *is* what you need to make it so aliasing isn't visible at ~10". It depends on the person's visual acuity, and of course there's still the question of "what if I hold the display 6 inches from my face?" But no, I don't think we need to go to 700 DPI for displays.

I wonder if, after 300-500 DPI, it might make more sense to put work into increasing the color gamut of displays, especially what can be visible in direct sunlight. It seems to me like that will be more fruitful.

Re:Usable by humans

[ArAgost]

I vehemently disagree - the Nyquist theorem misses nothing. In music, there is no reason sample over 48 KHz, unless there is some pitch/time stretching going on. Anyone claiming to hear a difference must have, by Nyquist theorem, a superhuman hearing (highly unlikely).
The nystagmus is a smooth pursuing movement... I don't know how it applies here, since the visual acuity, (spatial resolving capacity) is never measured in terms of the retina alone but as a property of the whole human visual system. Once we're beyond that, we're beyond that.

Re:Usable by humans

[JasterBobaMereel]

If you have this display nearer to your eye then you normally hold an iPhone4 then yes you might be able to see the difference, otherwise you can't

So this might be for display glasses for virtual reality?

the iPhone is around the maximum people can see at handheld device distance

Very good quality monitors need to be >300dpi to be about this limit

Most people view Normal TV on a small screen several feet away and unless they buy a big screen TV they cannot see the difference

Even HDTV is relatively low res on a big screen TV .... unless you sit back from it ....

Re:Usable by humans

[allanmackenzie]

Beyond a certain age you can't hold the display that close to your face and see it clearly anyways. I've gotten to the point that I can't see clearly closer than about 8 inches anyways... :(

Re:Usable by humans

[allanmackenzie]

Actually a good example of this is looking into the microwave. If you are moving you can see more clearly through the mesh into the microwave.

Re:Usable by humans

[izomiac]

Perhaps it's higher res if you average the number of photoceptors over the whole retina. The fovea handles your sharp vision, covers about four square inches at arm's length, and has more than 200,000 photoceptors. Throw in all the visual processing your nervous system does and I'd expect far greater than the 50,000 dpi resolution afforded by basic anatomy. There's also the fact that your photoceptors aren't perfectly aligned to pixels on the screen, so it's useful to increase the screen's resolution even beyond what the eye can see.

Re:Usable by humans

[Khyber]

"There will always be someone who will claim to be able to tell the difference, and as long as that someone is as crazy as the average audiophile you'll see companies trying to develop 1200 dpi displays that you can wear on your wrist."

Except my vision AND hearing are tested yearly for my insurance, and I'm still a bit more capable in hearing and vision than most humans, with the ability to hear up to 28,000Hz (with a TOTALLY dead gap at 17,000-18,500Hz, total silence,) and my cone/rod retinal density is about 4% higher than typical, with my vision being 20/18. The bad part of this is color becomes slightly oversaturated for me, but I resolve slightly higher detail, which is nice when I have to look at diodes under microscopes to check for flaws or separation from the base substrate, as is part of my job.

Re:Usable by humans

[Khyber]

"Of course you can tell the difference, as long as you wear special glasses with solid gold lenses as these conduct the photons better."

Actually you would NOT be that far from the truth, even though you are joking.

We used to coat magnifying and telescopic lenses with a type of silver to act as a photon guide and cut down the amount of scatter when we were trying to resolve highly-magnified objects. This was done back in the earlier 1900s.

Re:Usable by humans

[Khyber]

And still causing headaches as we try to do 3d focus on a fixed-distance 2d plane.

No thanks.

Re:Usable by humans

[garyebickford]

The human eye contains roughly 7 million cones (color receptors) and 150 million rods. Using the Nyquist frequency, to provide enough pixels to replicate digitally a complete replacement visual signal would require 2X the number of pixels in each direction or 4X the total number - that works out to roughly 630 million pixels. The frame rate would also have to be twice as high as the retinal cell firing rate. (I couldn't find that in a quick search).

Now, our retinal network actually fudges - there are only about a million retinal fibers. But it is known that the retina does (spatial encoding and data compression, so I can't say just what the data rate actually is (especially since IANA neurological researcher. :) )

Re:Usable by humans

[dfghjk]

You have a limited grasp of the issues. 44K was not chosen as the sample rate for CDs because of the desire for 22K response, it was chosen to balance the difficult demands of data rate and implementation of the analog antialiasing filters required. A 48K sampling rate makes the filters much easier to make at the cost of higher data rates that have become trivial. Regarding your claim that the good listener's ear can hear "qualitative differences in a square wave and a smoother sine wave" "near the limits of resolution", you are totally full of sh*t. Eyesight has variable resolution, so that discussion is pointless anyway. You couldn't prove that handheld displays benefit for 300 dpi except under specific conditions, so suggesting 400 or 500 dpi is easy is really laughable.

Re:Usable by humans

[Anonymous Coward]

-1, does not understand Nyquist.

Rather than try to explain Nyquist, I will show why your "tell a square wave from a sine wave" example is irrelevant:

A square wave of frequency N is the sum of a sine wave of frequency N and its odd harmonics (sine wave of frequence 3*N, 5*N, 7*N, etc). While you can easily tell the difference between a 500 Hz sine wave and a 500 Hz square wave, that is because you can hear the 1500 Hz, 2500 Hz, 3500 Hz, etc. harmonics.

If you have a sine wave of frequency 22 KHz and a square wave of frequency 22 KHz, unless you can hear the 66 KHz harmonic, they will be indistinguishable. You might annoy some dogs with the square wave, but it is beyond the ability of the human ear to tell the difference.

Nyquist only deals in sine waves, and all more complex waves can be built by combining sine waves.

Re:Usable by humans

[adolf]

The Compact Disc chose 44050 Hz sampling rate because our ears generally cannot hear anything over 22000 Hz.

Wrong, wrong, and mostly correct.

The sampling rate is 44100 Hz. If Nyquist were the only reason for that, it'd have been a more round number: 40KHz, 44KHz, or maybe 48KHz.

Why, then, was it chosen to be exactly 44.1KHz? Because that's the datarate supported by the video recorders of the time.

Way back then, we didn't have magic storage devices which could deal with hundreds of megabytes of audio easily. So, video recorders were used instead. Specifically, they used professional PAL recorders with PCM adapters to convert the bits to/from video signals.

It just turns out that the rate of (44.1KHz * 16 bits * 2 channels) 1411.2kbps is exactly what can be neatly and reliably encoded on these PAL machines, and that 44.1KHz was reasonable with Nyquist and humans.

This, simply, is how professional digital audio of the time was recorded, before CDs. It only made sense to carry that forward.

Quoth Wikipedia: It is quite interesting to see that the number 44.100 has its roots back in the old German TV system from the 1940s, which used 441 lines at 50 Hz field frequency, resulting in a line frequency of 11.025 kHz, which is exactly 1/4 of the sampling frequency used in Audio CDs today.

And, obviously, had the existing standard been different, they'd have chosen different tradeoffs: Either the bit-depth or the sampling rate could easily have been moved up or down*. 44.1KHz, 16-bit PCM stereo was simply convenient.

*: NTSC PCM adapters show this point neatly, by having a slightly different sampling rate of 44.056KHz.

Re:Usable by humans

[bemymonkey]

Of course there comes a point in time where you're going to have trouble with this, but I'm pretty sure I've got a few more years until I can no longer appreciate 1080p on a ~5" display :)

Re:Usable by humans

[thegarbz]

That's not entirely the full story. When you sample digital signals and then convert them back to analogue you invariably end up with nasty shit above the frequencies of choice. Depending on the design of the system these can have implications in the lower frequencies and therefore must be filtered out. Clever digital signal processing can move these images and aliasing effects further from the frequencies of interest but fundamentally it becomes a design issue. Therefore if you have a player that is designed from the ground up for nothing higher than 48kHz you may be led to believe that a player designed for higher sampling rates fed from a source with higher sampling rates sounds better due to usually a far nicer low pass filter. That same system then fed with a 48kHz sampling rate would then have insufficient filtering.

The only two solutions are then oversampling or recording at a higher sampling rate.

Note to Audiophiles: This paragraph does not justify your stupidity and any $100 MP3 players is capable of this, take a placebo and go to bed.

Re:Usable by humans

[flowwolf]

That perceivable by the human eye hogwash was just marketing buzz. Welcome to being suckered.

This is all a theorized limit that the marketing team at Apple ran with. Very little research from them went into it. It looks closer to magazine print than most screens sure, but to say it is the upper limit of the human eye?? Why then does real life look so much more vivid and detailed to me? Why then can i examine the detail in a pebble 2 meters away? Because my eye doesn't care about pixel density that's why /rhetoric

Re:Fresnel lenses

[psergiu]

The ElectriClerk - made out of a Mac SE, a Underwood typewriter and a Fresnel Lens

Too late!

[hcpxvi]

Brilliant. It arrives just at the point in my life where my eyesight is deteriorating, so that I have no chance of benefiting from it. Sigh.

Re:Too late!

[nyctopterus]

I'm not sure how this works exactly, but there might be some benefit to the sharpness of these displays, even if your eyesight isn't great.

What about "normal-sized" HD screens?

[Vlado]

While I applaud this development, I'm wandering about something else.

It was discussed here a few times, but it still strikes me as weird, that there do not seem to be more laptop screens of small-ish measurements (9", 13", 15") out there.

I was just recently buying a laptop. My current one is a 17" beast and I wanted to go with something smaller. But it's practically impossible to find anything below 15" that sports a full HD resolution. I would be willing to pay for that, but the offering available is just ridiculously low.

What gives?

Re:What about "normal-sized" HD screens?

[tengennewseditor]

You can configure a Sony Vaio Z with a 13" 1920x1080.

Re:What about "normal-sized" HD screens?

[AndrewNeo]

Marketing, or something like that. It's also near impossible to find a 15" laptop with dedicated graphics at your normal retail store (Best Buy, Walmart, whatnot)

Re:What about "normal-sized" HD screens?

[GIL_Dude]

At work we have several standard models from which users (or their management) can choose from. A couple years ago we offered a very nice Lenovo T61p with a 1920x1200 display. I still have one of them as a test machine. Most of the people who ordered them wanted to send them back to us because "stuff is too small to read" (yes, for a good number of apps you can scale the display up but for many line of business applications you cannot). After awhile of this type of response we stopped offering anything over 1440x900 (which we now have in the Lenovo X201 and T410 series machines). While some folks have great vision and can benefit from the higher resolution / higher ppi / dpi displays, many (most?) business folks weren't able to reap that benefit. Perhaps that's why the manufacturers are loathe to put such displays into the 12" - 14" notebooks.

Re:What about "normal-sized" HD screens?

[TheRaven64]

These displays are basically integrated circuits. That means that the cost increases a lot faster than the size, unless you are willing to accept stuck pixels. The denser you make the pixels, the lower the yield. For small displays, the error rate may mean that you are throwing 20% of them away (or selling them cheaply to people who don't care about the quality). When you double the size of the display, your errors per unit area remain constant, but the area of display that you have to throw away for a single error doubles. For large screen displays, you are likely to be throwing away almost all of them, while making tiny displays with the same process would have you only discarding a few percent.

It's worth noting that IBM made a 225DPI 22" (I think, may have been 23") display back around 2000 (it predated dual-link DVI, so you needed to drive it from two DVI ports). I used one briefly, and it was amazing - text looked crisp even without antialiasing enabled. They sold them for $20,000, so very few people could afford them. They couldn't get the yields high enough to bring the price down, so eventually they discontinued them.

Small screens are great but...

[boondaburrah]

When will the pixel density of my desktop monitor go up? It's been stuck at about 100ppi for quite some time now, and it's not like the prices for displays have dropped whenever they come out with new technologies like this. Did people really stop caring once they could fit a movie on their screen?

Though I suppose it would be a bad idea (for my eyesight at least) to feed the habit of running text-based consoles at max resolution. Mmmm... Monospaced characters. I'm a real hacker now!

Re:Small screens are great but...

[multipartmixed]

> When will the pixel density of my desktop monitor go up?

Not for a while if you own a mac.

For some strange reason, no matter the size and resolution of my monitor, Leopard insists that it's 96 dpi.

Ridiculous!

Re:Small screens are great but...

[psergiu]

MacBook Air 11.6" - 135.09 PPI
MacBook Air 13.3" - 127.68 PPI

Not much of a improvement over 100 PPI but ...

And there are PC laptops too with those densities at those screen sizes.

Re:Small screens are great but...

[nyctopterus]

What do yo mean "Leopard insists"? Genuine question, because I wasn't aware the OS had any mention of DPI (Adobe CS products have their "100%" zoom based on a stupid outdated number, but that's another matter).

Re:Small screens are great but...

[multipartmixed]

The OS doesn't mention DPI, but it still "knows" it. For example, a font of a certain point-size is, by definition, a certain size in other units. If I correctly recall high-school typing class, 10 points is 10 characters per inch wide and 6 lines per inch high.

Changing to a larger monitor of the same resolution should cause the same point-size to display with fewer pixels, as each pixel is now bigger.

Windows and X11 both allow you to set your monitor's DPI so that this stuff looks right. OS/X has some variable DPI stuff in the back end, but Steve won't let them expose it because they can't get it working right.

I had an unbelievably annoying experience in this regard last year. My Mac Mini with a 1280x1024 17" screen was working fine, but I needed a faster box and wanted a bigger screen. I went out and bought a 28" iMac..... only to discover that while the screen size increased, the resolution increase outpaced the physical size of the screen -- the net effect was that the writing on many dialogue boxes etc was so small that I couldn't read it. (My eyes suck, sue me)

To add insult to injury, there is also no official way on Leopard to alter the system fonts (like "Large Fonts" in Windows). Fortunately, I found some 3rd party software out there on the 'net that let me tweak the right prefs, and I now have a readable display.

But the DPI is still wrong.

Incidentally, I asked around in a bunch of mac forums and IRC channel. You know what the popular answer is among the fanbois? "Lower your resolution".

WTF?! That's stupidest answer ever! Yes, it DOES make the fonts bigger (actually illustrating the problem), but Christ almighty, especially when we're talking LCDs, what a moronic suggestion!

Re:Small screens are great but...

[Alioth]

No, because the data rates get too high. If you had a 450-odd DPI display, 20in x 11.7in, you'd need a data rate of about 65 gigabits per second at 60 Hz refresh rate going to the raw panel. This is more than ten times the data rate of DisplayPort. A completely new standard for connecting monitors would be needed and there would be significant challenges to overcome to make it work.

Re:Small screens are great but...

[cpotoso]

Mod parent up! I also had a mac mini hooked up to a 40" HDTV and from the canonical 10 feet (actually more like 12 or 14) the fonts in Snow Leopard are completely illegible for dialog boxes et al. Unfortunately there is no way to make them bigger, even with 3rd party utilities (which make SOME fonts bigger but then things "fall off the box"). Apple's implementation is quite primitive, indeed. Steve: stop being so damn controlling and instead fix what's broken!!!!!!!!!!

Re:Small screens are great but...

[drinkypoo]

Just to really drive this point home, NeXTStep had working device independence with Display Postscript. How did Apple manage to lose it in Display PDF?

Re:Small screens are great but...

[boondaburrah]

That seems incredibly dumb. Especially since apple advertises the fact that they sell 100ppi displays and higher (or at least used to) so that means their own cinema displays are out of wack. I'm a big fan of OSX, but you'd think for "The Desktop Publishing OS" they'd get that right.

You might want to try the command line though. I think there's something like: defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor SomeFloatingPointNumber that would help out. Netbook hackintosh users use it to make things fit on the screen without changing resolution. You have to kill finder and restart it for it to take effect. This may be the feature that went "missing" when they switched from NeXTStep.

Re:Small screens are great but...

[boondaburrah]

I'm glad that finally works. Last time I tried to up the PPI on windows a bunch of interfaces became unusable as fonts scaled but icons and widget spacing didn't, and other weird problems.

Re:Small screens are great but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quartz Debug is supposed to do what you're asking for. But as previously mentioned, I don't think it works perfectly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independence

Meanwhile:
This'll go great in a DIY projector.

HD is the new digital

[Anonymous Coward]

For those old enough to remember, back when consumer CDs came out in the early 80s, everything was "digital". Even analog speakers were digital! Now, everything is HD. So, my 56" 1080p TV is just as HD as a 3" display on a phone. Whats funny is that my 56" display is more than adequate at normal viewing distances, phones and smaller computer monitors are still a ways away from "HD" stuff like approaching print resolution. Thats in the 600-800 ppi range.

Re:HD is the new digital

[ColdWetDog]

Hah, my stuff is HD Digital.

The bestest.

Re:Enough already

[psergiu]

We will also need new video interfaces for a "4000x2000" display. A Dual-Link DVI or a DisplayPort interface can only drive up to 2560x1600. Dual-Link DisplayPort ?

rip the description from engadget, AC

[acomj]

The AC could of at least given a pointer to where the description was taken from

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/25/ortustech-unveils-worlds-smallest-full-hd-display-puts-retina/

Re:rip the description from engadget, AC

[jdkramar]

I also found it interesting that they ripped the text from Engadget but referenced the other article. And if we wanted to read Engadget's descriptions we would read them on Engadget.

Re:rip the description from engadget, AC

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

The AC could of at least given a pointer to where the description was taken from

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/25/ortustech-unveils-worlds-smallest-full-hd-display-puts-retina/

Ahh, but that article clearly says: "However, it still pales in comparison to that little 546ppi panel Casio announced back in 2008 which we still haven't seen put into a consumer product." - which would have dunked the gratuitous Apple Bashing. Oddly enough, the original submission contains a link to this article, which also contains the infamous "infamous Retina display", and claims it was posted half an hour before the Engadget article - but doesn't come with the "Ever heard of Ortustech?" entry the submission comes with.

Can they produce them in quantity?

[jcr]

I remember seeing prototypes of 250 DPI displays back in 1990, and 300 DPI in 1994, but the first one I saw shipped to a large number of customers was the iPhone 4's Retina Display. If this product is ready for mass production, that's great, but I'm going to reserve my enthusiasm until they're shipping it.

-jcr

Re:Can they produce them in quantity?

[TheRaven64]

Nokia has been using 200+dpi screens for about five years. My Nokia 770 has a 225dpi screen, and the same one is used in a lot of cheap Chinese devices. The retina display is a bit higher resolution, but it's certainly not the first one to be in that ballpark.

Re:Thats it?

[siddesu]

The spec sheet is in Japanese, not Chinese.

It claims that the thing is 14 grams, that it supports 260,000 colors, at brightness of 300 cd/m^2 it uses 10 mA per hour @ 3V and that it can operate from -20 to +70C, and RoHC compliant.

Need any other info?

Re:Thats it?

[Pojut]

Why do I need 1080p in something less than 5 inches?

Marketability.

I guess xkcd needs updating...

[noidentity]

I guess this xkcd comic will need updating soon.

Help Needed

[louzer]

I am kind of busy. Can anyone please do the Apple bashing for me?

Re:Help Needed

[EraserMouseMan]

Everybody is assuming that this will compete with Apple. Why, exactly? Apple's got a $60 billion cash stash. They bought Liquid Metal. They can simply buy Casio (or just this technology). Liquid Metal + 4.8" Super Retina = iPhone 5.

Re:Help Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what you mean, it's a hell of a Monday. Can someone take care of the fanboyz response too.

Re:Help Needed

[Khyber]

Apple, buy Casio.

No way in hell would Japan allow it, and most likely no way in hell could Apple afford it. Casio is a HUGE part of Japan's $400+ billion/year electronics economy.

Oh great!

[cpscotti]

Now, will it be news every time anyone can make it smaller? like.. every 2 months...

Post the news when we accomplish the worlds smallest *violin*!!

Well...

[Ecuador]

I am sure that with Casio's upcoming BionicEye artificial implantable eye bulbs, the difference will be astounding!

Re:How about a big screen for my PC?

[nyctopterus]

I sure would like to see something like a 28 inch screen with a resolution of 2880x1620 or 2880x1800.

Err, you aim too low! 27" LCDs from Dell, Apple, NEC all have a resolution of 2560x1440, which isn't far off the DPI of a 28" 2880x1620...

does it make any difference?

[zcold]

I thought HD resolution would only benefit the eyes at 40" screens.... Any less and you might as well stick with 720p... Would there really be any discernable difference with such a small screen?

Re:does it make any difference?

[PRMan]

That's for the typical TV viewing distance of at least 5-6 feet. It has nothing to do with small, handheld screens.

Re:does it make any difference?

[Surt]

Yes, it helps to eliminate scaling artifacts for 1080p content.

Re:Thats it?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Gasp! You mean it links directly to the available factual information, instead of a blog article that's three sources removed from the original data? The horror...

overkill for normal use, but...

[MadCow42]

it may be overkill for normal use (assuming the Retina display is already beyond the eye's capability to see detail), but there are other applications of such high density.

If you paired a 458dpi display with a 40lpi lenticular lens, you could display a whopping 11+ images for true 3-D. 11 images means that when you rotate the display back and forth the objects rotate too... so you can look "behind" things just like if they were really there in 3D - you get 11 different perspectives to view from. 40lpi lenses are good enough for hand-held lenticular (basically the minimum for handheld viewing distances so it doesn't look chunky). You could even do 80lpi decently, with about 6 images - which is still decent for rotation.

I'd LOVE to get my hands on one of those - the real trick would be matching the lens to the display, and getting it close enough to the switching plane to be effective (instead of on to of an already-thick cover glass).

MadCow

Re:overkill for normal use, but...

[MadCow42]

The other cool use would be integration into a stereo 3D headset... two screens at HD resolution would make an awesome immersive experience, where you could incorporate a decent field of view without losing too much detail to be useful.

Re:overkill for normal use, but...

[MadCow42]

I just RTFA, and the partner with Casio is Toppan Printing... one of the world leaders in lenticular lens technology. Maybe they're going down the lenticular display route already? FYI, lenticular is a "no-glasses-required" 3D technology. I know many people hate lenticular, but that's usually because it's badly done - poor registration between the image and the lens. But, for a display you'd invest much more in ensuring proper registration in the first place and could achieve high quality every time.

The other cool use would be integration into a stereo 3D headset... two screens at HD resolution would make an awesome immersive experience, where you could incorporate a decent field of view without losing too much detail to be useful.

Re:Enough already

[somersault]

HDMI?

Not the same device!

[pepax]

The spec sheet is for something different: instead of 4.8'' it is 2.4''; instead of 16.8M colors it displays 260k colors, and it is only 320x240 pixels (at 170 ppi). It appears to be a spec sheet for their previous announcement. I can't find anything about the current announcement on the Ortustech website...

Re:Thats it?

[pepax]

Rest easy... There is factual information, but it has nothing to do with the actual article.

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.)

Re:You're two orders of magnitude off

[Nethemas the Great]

I don't think anyone's really asking for even that. How about a 30" display with a res of 3840x2160, that would give it a dot pitch of 0.173 or slightly less than 147 dpi. That's not unreasonable and is within reach of dual DVI-D graphics card.

Re:You're two orders of magnitude off

[PitaBred]

Why would digital cameras have tens of megapixels? We've pretty much plateaued for megapixel counts on digital cameras for a few years now. There is a point where you get diminishing returns for more pixels, and you're better served by better sensors instead of more pixels.

Current "HD" isn't really high-definition except when you're talking about video. For everything else computers do, it's relatively low resolution as far as history is concerned.

Re:You're two orders of magnitude off

[DragonWriter]

Why would digital cameras have tens of megapixels?

Why doesn't really matter in terms of the prediction, since its accuracy doesn't depend on the reason, and the fact that digital cameras already have tens of megapixels means that the prediction is pretty conservative. Even in high-end consumer models they're already pushing 20 megapixels (The Canon Rebel T2i has 18 megapixels.) And, of course, pro gear goes even higher; the Leica S2 has 37.5MP and I think there are some models with even higher pixel counts. So "tens of megapixels" is now, not the speculative future.

We've pretty much plateaued for megapixel counts on digital cameras for a few years now.

No, we haven't. In the last few years high-end consumer gear has gone from topping out around 8 MP, to around 12 MP, to around 15 MP, to the 18 MP of the T2i (which I think is the top of the consumer DSLR range right now.)

These have usually been, I think, about 1-2 years apart.

There is a point where you get diminishing returns for more pixels, and you're better served by better sensors instead of more pixels.

Certainly, more pixels don't do anything without better sensors, but the same cameras that are the first to sport better sensors often do so with, unsurprisingly, more pixels.

Re:You're two orders of magnitude off

[Khyber]

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

No, your magnification isn't high enough to give you the detail resolution you need on a lower-resolution monitor.

640x480 not good enough? Increase your magnification 100x. Suddenly what you couldn't see is visible.

You're limited by your own optics, not the output hardware.

Re:You're two orders of magnitude off

[garyebickford]

I agree completely - I just posted a long bit a few posts up (trying not to be too shameless :) ), about how the many applications that really need better resolution and/or speed.

I would just point out that most cameras that normal people can afford are presently diffraction-limited by cheap lenses, so those extra pixels are just slowing down the useful shutter speed (smaller sensor pixels need more light to get excited.) Of course, if one can pay the price, much better ones are available.

Oh yeah- I run compiz on my work desktop on a dual-screen system. My desktop cube is a panoramic view from an island, which required a horizontal resolution of 8*1920=15860 :)

Re:You're two orders of magnitude off

[nobodyman]

I agree. Retina display resolution on a desktop would be great, but since most desktop displays have worse dpi than a Nintendo DS I'd be willing to settle for 147dpi. And I'm guessing that 200dpi on a 30" is totally doable on displayport.

Re:Thats it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a waste for a cell phone, but for a monitor for an HDTV shoot this will be quite useful. When you're shooting, you need to see what you're actually shooting, not a scaled down version, since the scaling can have all sorts of unexpected effects.

Now for the bigger end please

[__aazsst3756]

Why is my 24" screen stuck at "Full HD"? My 17" laptop screen from 5 years ago was higher resolution than that, and makes all these new panels look blurry. I can't wait for the higher dpi screens to move into sizes usable for monitors.

90 micron

[mrops]

Long time ago I read eye can resolute at no more than 0.02 to 0.03 deg, that means at 30 cm, u need to have pixels no bigger than approx 90 micron (if I calculated it correctly for the lower range), this includes the padding between the pixels. At 30cm, that is already achievable, its 282 ppi. Less than iPhone 4's and this new displays ppi.

Re:Thats it?

[Surt]

And to avoid scaling artifacts.

10 mA per hour?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is

10 mA per hour

anyway?

I know, I know. Units nazi here.

Re:10 mA per hour?

[karnal]

One more than 9 mA per hour, I'm guessing.

Re:10 mA per hour?

[RandomAdam]

about 2.8 micro Joules

Re:Enough already

[Bill Wong]

HDMI 1.4 can do 4096x2160 at 24p, which is great for film, but not so good for computer displays, which you will probably want at 60 fps. Displayport can do 3840x2160 at 60p incidentally, and probably higher than that I would bet. I wonder what the next revision of the HDMI spec will bump HDMI up to...

Re:Enough already

[Bill Wong]

Displayport is multilane (and Displayport 1.2 has twice the number of lanes as Displayport 1.0), and per spec has enough aggregate bandwidth (with 1.2) to drive a single display at 3840x2160 x 30bpp x 60hz. But, I'm not aware of any devices that actually supports that at this time.

My ideal small HD screen is 1280x768

[dara]

I'm happy to see research on higher DPI small screens because perhaps this forecasts seeing the next resolution jump in phones soon. As others have noted, the 4"+ diagonal screens on phones now are typically 800x480 or 854x480 and that just isn't good enough for my eyes (a bit worse than average). But go to 1280x768 (my favorite aspect ratio sitting between 1280x720 which seems kind of narrow for a phone and 1280x800 which is a little wide) and you have the following DPI vs. diagonal:

4.1 364
4.2 355
4.3 347
4.4 339
4.5 332

For me, bigger is better up to about 4.5 and after that (e.g. Dell Streak), devices get too big to comfortably pocket. But any screen in this range with at least 1280x720 will be a welcome addition to Android or other phone platforms.

Re:Enough already

[juhaz]

What we really need in the consumer market are good value for money 1920x1080 pixel displays for laptops in the 12"-16" range.

This. It seems that the resolutions on laptop displays not only have not improved recently, they've been getting steadily worse over the past few years - SXGA+ and WSXGA+ used to be common, and even UXGA and WUXGA displays were not that unusual, but nowadays it seems almost everyone is almost exclusively pitching horrifying WXGA panels with some WSXGA offerings and only a few having 1080p (which is still less resolution than WUXGA).

I suppose this is the price we pay for the commodization of laptops. They've only marketed at the half-blind.

PSP2?

[Tumbleweed]

That sounds like it could be good for the rumoured PSP2, though the power requirements could be a deal-breaker.

Videowall solution

[swb]

Seems like it would make sense -- have 2 or 4 video inputs on the display and treat the single monitor as if it were four smaller devices.

I'm sure there might be some alignment issues (solvable in software), but perhaps there might be timing issues that would be annoying with video or animation, especially when overlap occurs.

Smallest FUD display

[Attila Dimedici]

Did anyone else read the headline as "World's smallest FUD display"? I was trying to figure out if it was from Apple or Microsoft.

Re:Thats it?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Phew - that was a relief. For a moment I thought someone had switched out my bookmarks.

Viability?

[pdxp]

Is it really that big of a deal? Any text will need to be scaled up. I'm typing this on a 13" Sony Vaio (Z12) with "Full HD" (Best Buy speak for 1920x1080) and I wouldn't be able to see anything if I hadn't scaled up the fonts. Our eyes can only make out so much detail, and I think this new screen might be a bit beyond what most people will need for a quality small-screen experience.

1440x900 would be 3.14" - decent for VR glasses

[G3ckoG33k]

My Ray-Ban Aviator are about 2.4", so 1440x900 would be 3.14", quite decent for VR glasses!!!

Re:Enough already

[Khyber]

"A Dual-Link DVI or a DisplayPort interface can only drive up to 2560x1600."

Which is sad because a single VGA cable can handle that without thinking about it. You need dual-link DVI for that resolution otherwise? What a joke.

Stupid Story

[DarthVain]

So let me see if I got this right:

Your comparing the 326ppi of iPhone 4's Retina display that currently exists AND is being mass produced to 458ppi fictional one that was "announced" that you can't actually get anywhere, in anything, and is not being produced currently.

Just to let you know... Tech companies announce shit all the time, it doesn't mean all that much. Many times they are less than accurate or honest... GASP!

Useful for camcorders

[Something Witty Here]

The display on my camcorder is lower resolution than what it actually captures. So I can't tell if I am capturing enough detail to read text or not. A small high resolution display would be wonderful. Lugging around a desktop monitor (and battery and inverter) is not practical.

Re:Enough already

[TD-Linux]

Which is sad because a single VGA cable can handle that without thinking about it.

Ever tried 2560x1600 over VGA? Unless you have a really good cable and hardware, I guarantee it will make your eyes bleed. The ringing is pretty terrible on most highres VGA setups I've seen.

why can't someone make a better flat panel?

[roc97007]

Instead of working on handheld devices with resolution better than the eye can see, why not improve the current state of flat panel displays?

I'm still using an old 19 inch tube because it supports 1600X1200 and my work requires a display at least 1200 pixels tall. Try buying that in a flat panel. In 16X9, it works out to be about 2140 pixels wide. But no matter what size flat panel you get these days, their maximum resolution is 1080P, 1920X1080, which is too damned short. In this case, the HDTV standards have messed us up, because of the perception that 1080P is all anyone could ever need.

I'm not talking about showing video at a higher resolution, I just want to get some work done.

Re:why can't someone make a better flat panel?

[Yosho]

But no matter what size flat panel you get these days, their maximum resolution is 1080P, 1920X1080, which is too damned short.

What are you talking about? There are plenty of LCD displays that have a vertical resolution of 1200 or better. Here's a few from Newegg.

Re:why can't someone make a better flat panel?

[blair1q]

It took years to get 1080-height screens into the mainstream. The collusion between manufacturers meant that computer monitors came out at either 1050 or 1200 height for a long time, but no 1080, even though HDTV had become common. That meant that you couldn't buy one screen to get the best fit for both your TV and your computer, meaning you had to buy 2 screens to do the job right. Then some manufacturers got nailed in court for monopolism, and that broke the embargo. Now 1080-height computer monitors are common, and HDTVs commonly come with computer connectors.

Re:why can't someone make a better flat panel?

[paradigmic]

Where are you looking for monitors? Just doing a quick search at Newegg shows 9 monitors with a native resolution of 1920x1200, and 4 with even higher vertical resolutions. They're definitely not as common as 1080p displays but they're not really that hard to find either.

Re:$WIDGET1 eats $WIDGET2 for $MEAL.

[blair1q]

I got tired of it when $WIDGET2 was the wheel.

Now get off my lawn.

World's Smallest?

[TheLostSamurai]

I'm sorry, I can't understand how this can be considered the world's smallest Full HD display when LCD projectors have 1920x1080 LCD panels that are about 1" diagonal. They simply use lenses to enlarge the picture but you can still view the panel directly and see a picture.

Re:Enough already

[Khyber]

I've done 2560x1600 on my Mitsubishi Diamond Pro. Looks just fine and I used a crap cable from RadioShack.

Re:Enough already

[toddestan]

What can be done is have two DVI (or DisplayPort) cables going to the monitor, which hook up to a dual-head video card. Each cable controls half the pixels. To the computer, the monitor shows up as two 2000x2000 displays. Set the driver to span the image across the two displays and there you go. This is more or less how some of the super high-res displays like the IBM T221 work.

Re:Thats it?

[gordguide]

So that when you are watching a TV program, and the commercial comes on, and you switch to your alternate channel (we choose things like National Geographic HD with no ads, ever) you can still see the drivel view on the tiny display.
You need enough to identify it's drivel, but not enough to have it intrude into your view. Picture-in-Picture gives you way too big a screen, and right in the way. I want a tiny, HD screen, alongside my 50-inch. Hi-Res, so it's clear and easily identifiable what's on it, but tiny, so it's just not big enough to intrude into anything.

Essentially, all I need to see is ... not football ... not football ... okay, football. Switch to the big screen.

death to QWVGA terminology, it SUXGA

[spage]

at a measly WVGA

Why does the computer industry persist in using these brain-dead failed acronyms instead of writing 800×480? Someone added the "Hyper-extended graphics array series" to Wikipedia's Graphic display resolutions article, surely WHSXGA is a parody. Maybe the reason manufacturers don't sell monitors with more than 120 pixels per inch is these mindbendingly stupid names. "We don't quite understand why, but our extensive surveys demonstrate nobody is willing to pay even $1 extra for QXGA resolution over a WUXGA monitor." Meanwhile digital cameras have raced to 12 megapixels because it's a number.

I want a 200 pixels per inch, 27-inch monitor. I think that works out to 4700×2650 pixels.

Re:death to QWVGA terminology, it SUXGA

[bemymonkey]

I know what you mean... WQVGA... WSXGA+... WTF. Acronyms are good, as they save you from typing "XXXXX by XXXXX" every time, but this is getting ridiculous.

Re:death to QWVGA terminology, it SUXGA

[bhtooefr]

The shitty part is, the placement of the Q (or even the resolution in question) determines whether it's quarter or quad, and there's no consistency. See:

QVGA = 320x240 (quarter VGA)
QXGA = 2048x1536 (quad XGA)

Oh, and for real fun...

WQXGA = 2560x1600 (wide quad XGA)
QWXGA = 2048x1152 (quad wide XG.. wait, what? First off, this is a 16:9 resolution, the standard is to call it "1152p," second, if it were 16:10, it'd be quad wide SVGA, not quad wide XGA. Quad wide XGA is 2560x1600, damnit.)

At least the higher stuff is usually sensical, although H can mean half or hexadectuple (16x.)

QUXGA-W = 3840x2400 (this was an old designation, I've also seen WQUXGA used, quad ultra XGA, wide)
WHSXGA = OK, you win. That one's not sensical, partially because nobody can agree on WSXGA. (Damnit, SXGA is a 5:4 ratio, and is 1280x1024. Base everything off of that, 1440x900 would be something along the lines of WXGA+, not WSXGA. But then WSXGA is sometimes used to refer to WSXGA+, which is based on the (4:3) 1400x1050 SXGA+.

Re:Thats it?

[Surt]

Redundant? Who else posted that before I did?

...and 640k RAM is enough for anyone

[nobodyman]

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)

I disagree. Try turning off antialiasing on a 100dpi display and then tell me if it's "more than enough".