Slashdot Mirror
Samsung Unveils New 10" Retina Display
adeelarshad82 writes "Samsung has unveiled a brand new 10.1-inch display that supports a maximum of 2560×1600 pixel resolution that could be ripe for next generation tablets. Samsung's new display is more of a tech demo than anything else at this stage. While it looks impressive, it's not quite ready for broad production. It does, however, prove that high pixel density and high-resolution tablet displays are possible without unreasonable power requirements coming along in the process."
"4 inches is fine!"
It does, however, prove that high pixel density and high-resolution tablet displays are possible without unreasonable power requirements coming along in the process.
I'm not sure the power requirements are the biggest issue with this type of display. I think cost is going to be the biggest hurdle it has to clear before it finds its way into a tablet.
Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but she lied.
Hi-Res? It's the same length as retina but has less syllables.
Unfortunately, it's one of those nasty 'Pentile' displays, where subpixels are treated as pixels to inflate the on-paper resolution. If you treat them as actual useful displays where each pixel contains all the sub-pixels required to display the full range of colours (3 for regular displays, 4 for pentile, despite the name implying 5), then the actual resolution is lower than a traditional pixel layout.
Screw tablets, I want this resolution on a laptop. It's damn near impossible to get a reasonable priced laptop with more than 1366x768. Most companies don't have them at all. Even MBPs only have 1440x900. A laptop graphics card can handle the resolution ... I would have thought these would be more common by now.
aren't the new tegra's that are due out this year (Kal-El) already slated for this resolution? While apple may wait a full year, there will probably be someone out earlier with hardware that can support this chip. I think it was debuted a couple months ago.
for some weird reason, resolutions are going down, not up.
A 5 yr old budget laptop had a 1280*1024 screen
My 3 year old budget laptop has a 1280*800 screen
current laptops in the same price range are 1366*768
A few years and will the resolution be 10000*1 ?
And worse, it is one with no real definition. At least HD has some definitions, even though people often play fast and lose with them. "Retina" just seems to mean "High pixel density." Apple's marketing department coined the term to imply that the display has a resolution equal to your eye. Of course that isn't the case, it is dependent on distance. However it worked for marketing and apparently has caught on with people.
The current Retina display is made by LG and Samsung competes with others like AUO here to be Apple's chosen supplier.
The final frontier is now: how to make it wrappable / roll-in and back again or similar? 10 inches is too big for my pockets..
You can have a fully bendable display once we figure out how to combat the creasing problem. Hint: Paper currency is "wrappable" -- Take a few from your wallet and look at a "straightened" piece of fully bendable currency and you'll get my point.
IMHO, It's more feasible to use projective displays to solve the "too big for my pockets" problem.
I've no objection to pentile displays in principle. Humans do have higher green perception and so perhaps such a display can be useful. For that matter it is similar in principle to the Bayer pattern that still digital cameras use for their sensors.
The problem I have is like you've noted with overselling it. You can't claim more resolution on less subpixels. The net result will be a more grainy image. Cameras like to do this too, their "megapixel" count is the total acquisition area, ignoring that each pixel in fact captures only one colour.
Also it seems that maybe it is not such a wonderful idea, since Samsung seems to be working hard to develop and market non pentile OLED displays. They call it "real stripe" and you can find more infor here: http://www.tested.com/news/pentile-vs-real-stripe-amoled-displays-whats-different/1868/.
I've been able to score a couple of IBM T221 monitors. 3840x2400 in 22", which comes out to 204dpi iirc. It takes some funky finagling and specific video cards to get it all set up, but if you can get it to work, it's really rewarding.
It's the only piece of computing hardware I've come across where the phrase "They don't make them like this anymore" actually applies.
However, what we truly need is an adoption of a dirty-rectangle update display interface, and hardware scaling on the display itself (so it can run upscaled video overlays without pushing full res at full framerate). However, with full-screen animations of tablet interfaces becoming the norm, instead of desktop-like 2d windows with only partial changes per refresh, that might not mitigate much anymore.
HDTV has absolutely ruined the 'high res' monitor market. They keep advertising larger sizes. 20!, 23!, 25! monitors but if you look at the resolution they're all 1920x1080. Monitor prices continue to fall but decent resolution monitors aren't because no one is buying them. All the factories are spitting out HDTV.
I found one T221 on ebay. It was 1700$.
Those are the 'wide screen' adaptations of older standard sizes that are being pushed now.
You might not mind, or even think it's great if you watch movies all the time on your laptop, but that's not what I do with one.
HD refers to resolution, not pixel density. A 100' screen at 1920x1080 resolution would not have a very high pixel density, assuming the resolution is mapped 1:1 onto the pixels. Pixel density, on the other hand, would be quite high if the screen was only 3". "Retina", if you use Apple's terms, means that 1' away, your eyes cannot see the pixels. This generally implies a pixel density of over 270 pixels per inch. Most LCD monitors are between 72 and 96ppi. Some may hit 120, but nothing close to this new display. That is why they are using Apple's term which describes density, not resolution.
today is spelling optional day.
It is getting there, but as of yet there are still hurdles to be dealt with.
The biggest is just cost. Pixels cost money, every sub pixel needs a transistor (or two if you want a nice high quality IPS panel) and so more pixels equals more cost. You might think you want a display like that, but are you willing to bear the cost? Such a monitor could easily cost $3000-4000. Still interested?
Another big one is UI scaling. Programs and OSes are only now getting on board with the whole resolution independence thing. Windows Vista and 7 are fully on board and scale beautifully but many, many apps for them do not. That means you get some things that don't scale at all, or some where only parts (like text) scale but others (like the box that contains the text) don't. Can be a real issue in the case of extreme scaling. Now Windows can deal with that, it can present the programs with a lower resolution virtual display they render to and then stretch it up, but of course that really eliminates the usefulness of a high rez display.
OS-X kinda supports it, but it is incomplete at this point (the next version should have it completely implemented) and because of that app support is not good. Linux? Don't make me laugh, it is a hodge podge disaster there.
Another issue that isn't critical, but could be problematic, is interconnects. It takes more data than you might think to do really high resolutions. So let's say you want to double a 1920x1200 display's pixel density, which would give you 186ppi. No higher colour depth or refresh rate, just more pixels. Ok that is 3840x2400. Not counting any overhead, that takes 12.4gbits/sec to drive. You can do that, Displayport 1.2 can handle it (17.3gbits/sec max) but that's all. HDMI 1.4 isn't enough, DP 1.1 isn't enough. So doable, but barely and only then with the newest technology, which not a lot of videocards support.
Video processing power and RAM are other issues too. 4x the total number of pixels means you need much more processing power to handle all that. For a composited desktop cards today could handle it no problem, but one of the little integrated units probably wouldn't do it, need a dedicated accelerator. For 3D? That will be a real problem. Even a very high end accelerator will have trouble, probably need more than one.
Ultra high rez displays are just some time off. You can pull high pixel density on small devices because it doesn't take many pixels. The "Over 300ppi" and "Retina display" of the iPhone sounds all impressive until you realize it is just 960x640, only about 1/4th of full HD. No problem, that is still low rez. However if you want around 300ppi on a 24" display you are talking around 5760x3600 (that's actually only 279ppi) which would require massive amounts of interconnect bandwidth, not to mention the cost and so on.
It'll happen, but the tech isn't there yet for it to be real feasible.
My 15" MBP has the 1680x1050 anti-glare screen, which really pushes the usability of some of the OS X widgets. Any 15" MBP can be ordered with it. I don't know if you'd want to go that much higher on any "modern" OS, until they are display resolution independent.
Too small of a dot pitch simply makes most operating systems unusable or irritating -- this box is too small, this text in this section needs to be enlarged, this document needs to be zoomed -- and so the demand for higher resolution displays just isn't there.
The guarantee is that given you are looking at the display from the intended distance, its pixels don't look like pixels. This isn't very much different from the guarantee of "HD ready" TVs or similar displays that HD footage always gets at least one pixel per pixel in the source material in that both look like ass under the wrong conditions and neither may be exactly what you want in a display.
You can quote "intended distance", and I'll quote "high definition", given 720p HD shown on a 80" TV. Pixels the size of peas given a sufficiently sized screen or pixels that are actually individually visible because you're holding your tablet at nose length - it's all "weak guidance"! However, given that displays don't grow larger and larger into infinity, I'm happy that someone finally cares about pixel density.