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The World's Smallest Full HD Display

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-can-see-clearly-now dept.

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."

42 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Too small.... by bernywork · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

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    1. Re:Too small.... by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
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    2. Re:Too small.... by freeshoes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      One word, Glasses, with screens build in.

    3. Re:Too small.... by Alioth · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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    4. Re:Too small.... by shadowrat · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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".

    5. Re:Too small.... by SWPadnos · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
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    6. Re:Too small.... by clone53421 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
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    7. Re:Too small.... by epine · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    8. Re:Too small.... by PitaBred · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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".

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    9. Re:Too small.... by BronsCon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
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  2. Usable by humans by tomalpha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Usable by humans by bemymonkey · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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. :)

    2. Re:Usable by humans by Phrogz · · Score: 3, Informative

      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. :)

    3. Re:Usable by humans by c · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > 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.

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    4. Re:Usable by humans by Walterk · · Score: 3, Funny

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

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    5. Re:Usable by humans by Speare · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    6. Re:Usable by humans by locofungus · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --
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    7. Re:Usable by humans by ArAgost · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    8. Re:Usable by humans by izomiac · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

  3. Too late! by hcpxvi · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Too late! by nyctopterus · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

  4. Re:Enough already by psergiu · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 ?

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  5. rip the description from engadget, AC by acomj · · Score: 3, Informative

    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/

  6. Re:Small screens are great but... by multipartmixed · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > 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!

    --

    Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
  7. Re:Thats it? by siddesu · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  8. Help Needed by louzer · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
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    1. Re:Help Needed by EraserMouseMan · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

  9. Re:What about "normal-sized" HD screens? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
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  10. Re:From the TFA by captainpanic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "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?

  11. Re:Small screens are great but... by multipartmixed · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

    --

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  12. Re:Small screens are great but... by Alioth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

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  13. Re:Thats it? by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

  14. Re:Small screens are great but... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

    --
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  15. Not the same device! by pepax · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  16. You're two orders of magnitude off by LeDopore · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.)

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    1. Re:You're two orders of magnitude off by Nethemas+the+Great · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

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  17. Re:Thats it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  18. Re:Enough already by Bill+Wong · · Score: 2, Informative

    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...

  19. Re:From the TFA by Gilmoure · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Infamous is when you're more than famous!

    -- Ned Nederlander

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  20. Re:Small screens are great but... by boondaburrah · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  21. why can't someone make a better flat panel? by roc97007 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:why can't someone make a better flat panel? by Yosho · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

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