Nano-Pixels Hold Potential For Screens Far Denser Than Today's Best

Zothecula (1870348) writes "The Retina displays featured on Apple's iPhone 4 and 5 models pack a pixel density of 326 ppi, with individual pixels measuring 78 micrometers. That might seem plenty good enough given the average human eye is unable to differentiate between the individual pixels, but scientists in the UK have now developed technology that could lead to extremely high-resolution displays that put such pixel densities to shame."

Comments

What's the point?

[Etz Haim]

If the average human eye can't tell the slightest difference, what's the point of making displays that dense?

Re:What's the point?

[scsirob]

The human eye is limited to certain pixel densities at certain distances. Technology such as this can create QHD displays in Google Glass applications where the pixels are much closer to the eye. In fact, it may be possible to implant this inside the eye and have augmented reality without p*ssing off the people around you.

Re:What's the point?

[FireFury03]

If the average human eye can't tell the slightest difference, what's the point of making displays that dense?

I would guess there may be applications for things like VR/AR headsets, where you're using a very small screen to cover a large field of vision.

However, I more or less thought the same thing about Apple's retina displays - I can see some restricted uses, but for the general case I don't notice the pixels on my non-retina phone so I'm not sure why I'd want to waste the battery power moving even more pixels around.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Small point: If they keep making the pixels smaller, holographic displays could be possible.

Re:What's the point?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Virtual reality, perhaps? Combine this with an eye tracker to render portions of the screen selectively, since doing the whole screen at full resolution would be prohibitive. You might have to combine this with real-time region updates. Sounds like an interesting problem...

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody said the eye could not tell the differnce, only that they couldn't differentiate between the individual pixels at that density.

Re: What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that not the same thing?

Re:What's the point?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Less exciting; but sufficiently dense pixels might also make subpixel defects less obnoxious, even if the actual resolution requirements are low enough that multiple physical pixels are driven as a single logical pixel to reduce computational costs or display link bandwidth. And more acceptable defects means fewer scrapped panels.

Re:What's the point?

[Lussarn]

If the average human eye can't tell the slightest difference, what's the point of making displays that dense?

The whole retina thing is just a marketing ploy. Perhaps some wants to hold the phone closer than what Steeve decided was the optimum range. There is no denying text is sharper and you need to zoom less when having better than retina resolution.

In any case, I'm not average.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you can't tell the individual pixels apart, you always want anti-aliasing. Aliasing is technically a frequency domain thing. No matter how high the sample rate (the spatial resolution in the case of displays) is, aliasing will always be visible if you sample frequencies that are higher than half the sample rate. The correct solution is to use a display resolution just high enough that individual pixels can't be distinguished and apply anti-aliasing. The point of higher display resolutions is not to do away with anti-aliasing!

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

the point is ... niggers!

Re:What's the point?

[demon driver]

Is that why more and more camera manufacturers, while sensor resolution becomes higher and higher, find anti-aliasing filters unnecessary?

Re:What's the point?

[Guspaz]

VR and AR are something, as are things like the Google Glass, but another one is EVFs (electronic viewfinders), which typically use microdisplays.

Then again, these microdisplays already feature pixels FAR smaller than what they're claiming these new "nanopixels" are.. the article is kind of confusing. They seem to be claiming pixel sizes a bit less than half what an iPhone has, but there are already smartphones out there with pixel densities almost double the iPhone (like those phones with 1440p displays), and microdisplays go many *times* more dense than that, so... what's new here exactly?

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not having an explicit anti-aliasing filter is tacit admission that there is an implicit anti-aliasing filter somewhere else. In other words, the optics are shit.

Re: What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

There will always be some use for higher density display technology, even if of interest to a small number of people who would be targeting things other than the human eye. There is plenty of near-field microscopy work that could be done using even pixel sizes much smaller than the wavelength of light being used. From a distance you couldn't distinguish pixels much smaller than a wavelength. But if something of interest were right on top of the light emitter, closer than a wavelength of light away, you can selectively illuminate parts of the subject and distinguish that from a distance.

Re:What's the point?

[AmiMoJo]

There is a limit, but it is way above the 326 PPI of a "retina" display. You only have to compare such display to other phones with higher PPIs (pretty much any medium to high end model made in the last couple of years) to see that.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is "Retinal Display"
well Dr.Phil Plait has a dissertation on the subject and his PhD is in optics having designed a camera in the Hubble Telescope
http://blogs.discovermagazine....
The critical number is "5730 number as a scale factor; multiply an object’s size by that, and, if your vision is perfect (OOOooooo, foreshadowing!) you get how far away you can see it as more than a dot."
so 78 micron * 5730 = 0.45m which is about the usual place for holding your phone.

Re:What's the point?

[Carewolf]

The human eye CAN tell the difference. What it can't do it distinguish individual pixels, just like you normally can't see individual frames when a movie or game is faster than 24fps. If your eye-sight was so poor that you coun't see better than 300dpi at one meter, you would not be allowed to get a drivers license in most countries. Road signs are designed to be read by the minimal allowed vision at a certain distance, that means you must be able to read half a meter high letters at 1km, which requires 1/5cm resolution, which is the same as 600dpi at 1m, and that is minimum.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Smaller pixels will unnecessarily drive up cost. Devices with normally sized pixels will be cheaper.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

You will still piss off people around you, they are only less likely to detect it. Big difference.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not for my eyesight. But you're such a big Android fanboy it wouldn't matter. Keep telling your weaboo self whatever it takes.

Re: What's the point?

[jrumney]

I can understand the benefit of higher resolution capture capability to microscopic applications, but displays? Do you look at your display through a microscope?

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Secret messages in the phone screens, communicated via scanners. Perfect for spies, terrorists, members of drug distribution chains and children.

Re:What's the point?

[smittyoneeach]

I mean, really: Emacs looks great in character mode and 80 columns. Why all this other faffing about?

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Either that or the optics are designed to blur/filter the signal enough to avoid aliasing.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except even the iPhone 6 is rumored to have a 416 PPI. I was going to say what a fool you'd look like if and when this is proven true, but we're way past that already.

Re: What's the point?

[EvolutionInAction]

Read. He says that if you can have a light emitting grid below the object of interest you could do some neat tricks with illumination.

Of course, if you could actually get pixels much smaller than a wavelength, the big application would be true holography. You aren't drawing images at that point, you're drawing interference patterns.

Re: What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends what you mean by "microscopic applications", I reckon. Some of my colleagues are using conventional digital projector displays (i.e. the micro-mirror assembly) to deliver patterned light on very small specimens. The size of the display is irreverent, since they reduce it optically with lenses. A higher resolution display, with smaller pixels, wouldn't be helpful for this microscopy application.

Re:What's the point?

[ilsaloving]

I don't know if you read books or anything on your devices, but I've found that reading on an iPad Air to be *significantly* better than my previous devices. Less strain to read, I can make the text smaller without it getting blurry.

I didn't see the point in high density displays either until I took the same pdf on an older and a newer device side by side. The different is striking.

Of course, if you don't use your device for such things, then I agree, the higher density doesn't grant you much.

Re: What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously the goal is realism, otherwise we would have stuck with 320x240. If you want true realism, you need a pixel size approaching the Planck length, if such a thing exists. Anything larger is just saying "it's good enough" and NOT a good representation of reality, regardless of the receptor density of your retina. Light is never a parallel projection directly into your eye. There are all sorts of interactions and interference that occur in the light before it reaches your eye. THAT is what the goal is, not simply ejecting photons at a density that matches the density of your retina. For most people, "good enough" is probably good enough, but something tells me that we won't stop there.

Re:What's the point?

[Fuzi719]

Except even the iPhone 6 is rumored to have a 416 PPI. I was going to say what a fool you'd look like if and when this is proven true, but we're way past that already.

Which is still less than the 469 PPI of my year-old HTC One (M7). "Retina" is so cute. :-P

Re:What's the point?

[TomGreenhaw]

How about a super high resolution watch or phone that along with a pair of glasses that magnify the image to look like a big screen?

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Technology such as this can create QHD displays in Google Glass applications where the pixels are much closer to the eye.

Sure, when/if they figure out how to change the pixel values without an atomic force microscope.
As it is now, they don't have a display technology, only a super-dense printing technology.
It's only pixels, adding lines and logic to drive them will inevitably and strongly reduce the resolution.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

The contentious point in Google Glass is the camera in front, not the display.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

You may not be, but the average person is.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you missed three orders of magnitude there - 30nm vs 78microns.

Re:What's the point?

[MillionthMonkey]

If the average human eye can't tell the slightest difference, what's the point of making displays that dense?

Maybe eagles want to watch TV too.

Re:What's the point?

[dfghjk]

20/20 vision is defined as 1 arc minute of resolving power. It is rare for anyone to achieve resolving power more than twice that.

1 arc minute translates to 87 dpi at 1 meter, although I have no idea why you mix inches and meters here. It is 95 dpi at 3 feet; 100 dpi is the commonly used number. People with 20/10 vision can resolve 190 dpi at 3 feet, 175 dpi at 1 meter.

No one living sees better than 300 dpi at 1 meter, so it is not likely to be the standard in ANY country, much less "most". 600 dpi for road sign legibility is even more absurd.

At 1km, 20/20 vision can resolve a "dot" about 29cm in size. That's 3.5 dots per METER. 1/2 meter letters would not be legible. 20/40 vision, a common driving standard, would be closer to 2 dots per meter, or the feature size you are quoting.

See http://www.safetysign.com/cont...

A road sign that should be legible at 1km should have a minimum letter size of 1.1 meters, not 0.5 meters.

2 dots per meter at 1km is 2 dots per mm, 50 dpi, at 1m not 600 dpi. In order to resolve text at that size someone would need 250 dpi of acuity which no one has.

Carewolf, everything you said was wrong. You may need a new calculator.

Re: What's the point?

[Pinky's Brain]

Don't even need to get much subwavelength, half wavelength is already enough for a 180 degree viewing angle.

That said, materials which can do this are hardly new ... OASLMs were first used for holographic displays approximately 2 decades ago AFAIK.

Re:What's the point?

[FireFury03]

I don't know if you read books or anything on your devices, but I've found that reading on an iPad Air to be *significantly* better than my previous devices.

I don't own a tablet - I use a desktop machine for every day work, a laptop around the house and an Android smartphone. I wouldn't really want to read books on my smartphone except in an emergency - screen's too small to be comfortable. And I don't want a bigger smart phone because then it wouldn't be convenient to carry around and I honestly can't think how a higher resolution display would make my phone better.

On the other hand, my wife does have a tablet... She occasionally reads books on it, but it mostly gets used for facebook, web surfing, photo browsing, etc. My experience of using it for reading books isn't great - if I want to sit in the garden in the sun I find the screen too reflective, and if I want to sit in bed at night then a backlit screen is really glaring.

I think, if I were going to buy a device to be an ebook reader, I would have to buy an epaper device to be really comfortable with it, and epaper is a bit too limited to use the device for non-book uses. So since I can't get a device that would be a reasonable all-rounder then I'm not likely to buy one soon. The perfect tablet for me would probably be one that has an LCD display on one side and an ePaper display on the other so I could just turn it over to choose which display was most suitable for the current situation - no one makes such a thing.

In truth, the prevalence of DRM on ebooks is likely to keep me from being especially interested in buying an ebook reader. Whilst I do consider tablets to be quite "shiny" and nice for surfing the web on, when I look at what I'd use it for honestly, I really don't think I'd get a lot of use out of it so there's not a lot of point in me buying one.

Re:What's the point?

[stjobe]

Aye. My Nexus 5 has a 1080x1920 445 PPI display. Although I didn't know that until just a minute ago when I looked it up, it's not something they make a big deal of in their marketing..

iPhone 5 only has 326 PPI you say? And they brag about the iPhone 6 getting a 416 PPI display?

I'll never understand marketing...

Re:What's the point?

[towermac]

Very interesting.

The eye tracker thing is interesting; only update what I'm looking at. Unless there are idle cycles, then go ahead and update the rest of it.

I was thinking of a fractal style display environment, where oop and inheritance are taken to ridiculous levels. Each item to be updated is the child of a child of some child region possibly, although I was thinking more of in game objects instead of predefined areas. Like all the mice or grass waving or whatever.

Assuming we are stuck with a single master thread in games for the time being, you're going to run out of time long before you updated just the changes in a cycle, even if the changes were few. So this fractal structured graphics thing updates the highest parents first, then drops a level and runs their child commands, which might be the basic outlines of leaves or other terrain, with the details, broken into how ever many levels of detail as the programmer saw fit, encoded within. The GPU may, or may not, get to those children in time, if it does not; you would see blurry graphics, at least for that frame.

On the next update, the GPU gets it's new changes, and still has a list from the prior cycle that didn't get drawn. Some of those get drawn on this new cycle, and eventually, the GPU catches up. If it doesn't catch up, then that is the best you will be able to run this game with the graphics card you have. Instead of game programmers having predefined fall back modes, (like a poor-good graphics slider), they throw everything they want at the GPU, and it will take care of rendering what it can. And unless your GPU is just really bad, then you will be able to see something besides big color splotches, and hopefully play the game with degraded quality.

But you never again miss a frame, and if you stop and stare, the detail will fill itself in on your glorious VR holographic screen with no additional help from the programmers. Then, you'll drop a grand or more on a video card..

Re: What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going to reduce the image with lenses, then you are going to hit limits somewhere near the wavelength size.

Re:What's the point?

[Megol]

In my experience things like contrast, backlight quality and _the_lack_of_glare_ are more important for readability than pixel density.
A high enough pixel density combined with good anti-aliasing and subpixel precise rendering makes a huge difference though - not that I'd call the existing solutions good (unless I've missed something).

Re: What's the point?

[davester666]

You need these high-res displays so that you can enhance video like they do on TV, where you get a grainy 640x480 video feed of a car several blocks away and you zoom in and read the license plate. It's not possible without using a high-res display, preferably one that is semi-transparent, like the ones on CSI Miami.

Re:What's the point?

[rsilvergun]

it may be possible to implant this inside the eye and have augmented reality without p*ssing off the people around you.

Wait, are you suggesting there are _other_ uses for augmented reality? Sir, you've just blown my mind.

Re:What's the point?

[Guspaz]

Yep, you're right.

Re:What's the point?

[MatthiasF]

This is an important point. Today, most screens are designed for only 2d in mind, meaning the light is being sent out omni-directional.

If pixel density increases past what can be seen by the human eye, they could develop 3d displays using polarized films that could allow for directional displays. This means they would be similar to today's planar holographs, where as you move your head you would see a different version of the image.

This would be a huge advancement in display technology and such science fiction concepts as holodecks could be possible for numerous people to walk around a boxed display and see accurate 3D.

Re:What's the point?

[Bengie]

The human eye can see individual frames in one aspect. It has been known for quite a while that humans can recognize a single frame at over 300fps. They injected a single frame that was in high contrast to the current video, and not only were people able to recognize when it occurred, but they were able to recognize the simple shape being displayed.

Humans don't see motion as "frames", but our visual system is great at picking out something when it's drastically different. The only reason we don't see "frames" past a certain fps is because it gets "close enough" that the brain kicks in and perceives it as a smooth motion.

Perception is a tricky thing. Do not mix up what we see with what we perceive.

Re: What's the point?

[shadowrat]

I can understand the benefit of higher resolution capture capability to microscopic applications, but displays? Do you look at your display through a microscope?

no, but do you look at your kitchen table or your hand through a microscope? The resolution of the world is very very small and it contributes to the appearance of items on a macro (human) scale. The engineer in me gets the argument that 1080p is already fulfilling and surpassing the use case of reading text, but i'd be interested to see what kind of magic can be pulled off when we have enough pixels to really mimic the way light is scattered off of microcopic surfaces.

Re:What's the point?

[Z00L00K]

So next generation of Oculus Rift can get better image quality.

Other applications may be more light-weight devices for disabled people as well.

A higher density also means better images at short distance between eye and screen (you may want to add some optics to relieve eye stress though).

Re:What's the point?

[ilsaloving]

That is entirely true. And I had spent a long time looking at ePaper devices. Unfortunately, the devices I was looking at turned out to be far more expensive than comparable tablets, and with ePaper you were locked into only reading books. (Or view web pages, email, etc, assuming they even provided that functionality). I didn't want to be restricted to just books, so I went with the tablet instead.

Some company in India actually came up with a design similar to what you describe. I forget the name now, but they called the display a Qi Display. The last time I looked into it, there were issues with quality, so I stopped paying attention.

Re:What's the point?

[fnj]

300 dpi at one meter? Are you high? NO ONE can come anywhere close to that. You fail basic reality.

FYI, 20-20 vision resolves roughly 16 dpi at 6 meters, and you don't even need 20-20 to drive.

Re:What's the point?

[ArcadeMan]

I think both AMD and nVidia are pushing displays manufacturers toward higher-DPI panels.

Re:What's the point?

[Blaskowicz]

Interesting.

I for one would simply like a high res monochrome LCD (or greyscale, if monochrome implies 1bit).
It was prevalent in the 80s and 90s, works unlit, is usable outdoors and gives you much longer battery life to boot. I wouldn't give a damn about black and white if I had a long-lived, always usable device. Hell, a 1989 Game Boy is still a better gaming device than a smartphone and I tried to read a book on one (read the first chapter before being bored with it. Blocky font with very few pixels per character is not exactly ideal)

Re:What's the point?

[Blaskowicz]

Is that why I've looked at some shots on the web that were very high res and very noisy?
Maybe you have to do the anti-aliasing / proper reconstruction in the RAW importing software.

Re:What's the point?

[InvalidError]

There isn't much of a point in pushing display densities much beyond 300dpi for hand-held applications since most people can barely tell the difference but Apple was the first one to make a big deal out of it. Announcing higher resolutions sold many of the previous models and will sell future ones too - with the progress stagnation that has hit smartphones and tablets for much of the past two years, higher resolutions and the IGP power to drive them are almost the only two things that have improved by a fair amount.

Personally, I would be far more interested in seeing 1920x1200. 2GB RAM and 32GB SSD become the norm below 10"/$300. Right now, the N7-2013 is still practically the only tablet below $300 with those specs and price point. Most other devices below $300 launched in 2013-2014 have specs closer to the more ancient N7-2012 or sometimes even worse, which is sad, a shame and ridiculous. If analysts and manufacturers are surprised to see tablet sales dropped, they have not been paying attention to the crap the market has been flooded with for most of the past two years; no surprise sales are dropping when there is nothing worth upgrading to on the market.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

And they brag about the iPhone 6 getting a 416 PPI display?

I'll never understand marketing...

Apple never announced any specs of a product before launch. You are a complete idiot. So yeah, you don't understand a lot of things, not just marketing.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aye. My Nexus 5 has a 1080x1920 445 PPI display. Although I didn't know that until just a minute ago when I looked it up, it's not something they make a big deal of in their marketing..

iPhone 5 only has 326 PPI you say? And they brag about the iPhone 6 getting a 416 PPI display?

I'll never understand marketing...

These kind of stories are a bait for these philistines.
Can we just make a whole thread of the "I don't care about DPI, but mine is higher for sure" morons, so we can ignore it?

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

300 dpi at one foot is closer to reality: http://arthur.geneza.com/content/resolution-explained

Re:What's the point?

[ayesnymous]

I mean, really: Emacs looks great in character mode and 80 columns. Why all this other faffing about?

Most people don't find ASCII pone all that exciting.

Re:What's the point?

[doccus]

Graphics artists claim they can sure tell. In my own experience I would tend to side with them, provided every other component of the artistry is up to that level of quality also... I mean, it's no help with a lousy scan or 16 bit color (not resolution!). It's not immediately apparent however until somebody shows you what to look for, and then it does become obvious, if, perhaps very subtle. It's exactly the same as Hi res audio.

Re:What's the point?

[HappyPsycho]

After dismantling one of my phones after a broken screen, higher pixel densities can probably be used to increase the resolution of projectors as well (most I come across don't pass 1024x768, the few that do are extremely expensive).

I'm concluding this after finding 3 layers in my phone's display, the digitizer then the screen and finally a backlight. I've been tempted to dismantle other screen of this type and get a 5W LED behind it to build my own projector, biggest problem was how to drive the display from something other than a phone.

Re:What's the point?

[WillAdams]

However, one doesn't read highway signs at arm's distance.

Also, lower resolution reduces the amount of information which one can fit on a given highway sign and diminishes legibility by obscuring finer details.

The human can distinguish the difference in character shapes at resolutions up to ~2,000 dpi --- see Smeijer's book _Counterpunch_ for an examination of this.

Current smart phones aren't quite able to adequately represent typeface designs w/ subtle curves such as Optima at text sizes, and engravings become a pixellated blurry mess compared to the sharp originals, some of which require extraordinary printing techniques such as two black plates to capture.

Re: What's the point?

[leenks]

Somehow I think the capture technology is more important for that use case than the display technology...

Re:What's the point?

[dumky2]

I was thinking about this too, but I don't know what size pixels would they have to reach to make holographic displays possible. Any ideas?

Re:What's the point?

[WuphonsReach]

I don't own a tablet - I use a desktop machine for every day work, a laptop around the house and an Android smartphone. I wouldn't really want to read books on my smartphone except in an emergency - screen's too small to be comfortable. And I don't want a bigger smart phone because then it wouldn't be convenient to carry around and I honestly can't think how a higher resolution display would make my phone better.

I took my HTC One (m8) smartphone on a long flight a month or three ago. Ended up reading almost an entire fiction book on the flights on a little 5" screen. This is a 1920x1080 display packed into a 5" screen.

It actually worked quite well - far better then I was expecting. The higher DPI on the modern phones (441ppi on the HTC) makes for easy reading.

Re:What's the point?

[smittyoneeach]

Unimaginative gits.

where is the news?

[Anonymous Coward]

pico and femto pixels hold the same potential

What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try drawing a non-aliased almost horizontal black line on white background on a retina display at normal viewing distance; you won't have any problems noticing the staircasing.

Tiny Projectors

[sdack]

This should be very interesting for making tiny projectors.

Re:Tiny Projectors

[kamapuaa]

You'd think, but microprojectors/picoprojectors haven't really advanced over the past five years.

Re:Tiny Projectors

[synaptic]

This might allow for very high-resolution interference fringes for holographic displays.

Re:Tiny Projectors

[sdack]

I am saying that the new technology will lead to advancements. Hence it is interesting for making (future) projectors.

Re:Tiny Projectors

[kamapuaa]

The idea is, commercial affordable pixel densities have gotten higher and higher over the past few years, but tiny projectors haven't really improved. Why should further advancements in pixel densities start helping now? Perhaps it's something else holding them back.

Re:Tiny Projectors

[sdack]

"Why should further advancements in pixel densities start helping now?"

Because every bit helps.

Re:Tiny Projectors

[Anonymous Coward]

Because "too much is always better than not enough!"

Hardware Struggles Now Though

[ButchDeLoria]

At this point, we're making consumer grade hardware strain to drive 4K monitors. Pixel density doesn't matter if the device can't easily run at that resolution.

Re:Hardware Struggles Now Though

[CastrTroy]

This. When I was shopping for a tablet last Christmas, there were a lot of reviews saying that the 2048x1536, tablets were slower than their predecessors at many tasks even though the processor was faster, because it took so much computation just to run the screen. For a 10 inch tablet, 1080p seems to be good enough. And trying to cram more pixels in there just for the sake of it, at the expense of battery life and framerates seems be a bad idea.

Re:Hardware Struggles Now Though

[Anonymous Coward]

Eventually, we'll reach the point where it's not practical to throw huge bitmaps around and we'll have to draw screens using vectors or other procedural methods.

Re:Hardware Struggles Now Though

[Blaskowicz]

We're soon gonna see display using Displayport compression. Analogous to texture compression, small blocks are compressed but that is done in real time with dedicated hardware, with a supposedly very good algorithm. The goal is to enable power savings on mobile devices (including laptops), by reducing the insanely high bitrates for transmission between the GPU or SoC and the display. It will also allow a PC with Displayport 1.3 to output to an 8K display, even though the bandwith (increased from the current standard) would be too small to do that uncompressed.

Re:Hardware Struggles Now Though

[Anonymous Coward]

360p should be enough for everyone.
or 480p (they crammed those 120+ from 480p just for the sake of it, its a global conspiracy I tell you!)
or 720p
or 1080p
or 2k
or 4k
or 8k

I recently had the chance to compare a 1920x1080 screen vs a 2560x1440 screen on a 5 inch phone. Guess what! You can clearly tell the difference, plain normal text is way more clearer! From a normal distance. And I bet 4K will look better too.
All that crap about" 20/20 vision is defined as 1 arc minute of resolving power" is bullshit, our eye vision is not digital.

With every upgrade in technology, I see morons bashing it, only to embrace it in an year or two, followed by bashing the next one. We have 4K on tablets/laptops now, soon on smartphones. You have a choice: live in the past or in the present. I see tons of people still bashing 720p/1080p on TVs as useless, and thinking 40 inch TVs are too big - way to live 10 years in the past. But those people have no place on Slashdot!

You know something, I think its way more simple: Cmon, just fkin admit it you were looking for some cheap Android crap tablet, because iPads were expensive. Don't hide behind wanna be reviews of guys who don't know crap about tech stuff.

Nice try

[Anonymous Coward]

But the LG G3 is already down to 47 micrometer. And it's mostly about battery life.

Finally,

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, our genetically engineered descendants will have displays that won't have noticeable pixels.

VR Headsets for Eagles

[WarrenOwen]

At last we will be able to make VR Headsets for Eagles

Re:VR Headsets for Eagles

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know Henley/Fry et al were into VR...cool!

I can really see the difference... not.

[Anonymous Coward]

"the average human eye is unable to differentiate between the individual pixels"

How can they tell if it's working?

Re:I can really see the difference... not.

[InvalidError]

That's what magnifiers and optical microscopes are for.

Even if you cannot individually identify pixels, you can still notice the marginally sharper text/line-art edges, smoother gradients, reduced stair-casing along polygon edges in 3D applications, etc.

But beyond 300dpi at typical tablet/smartphone reading/playing distances, I doubt that many people would really care about difference between 300-350dpi and 400-450+dpi.

Pixel master race

[jones_supa]

Pixel master race.

There are better than Apple's

[erroneus]

Why do they mention that and fail to mention devices which present even higher density displays? My Nexus 5 has 445ppi display density.

I find it annoying that despite the existence of common devices which are "better" that the "best" is still considered to be Apple's. Nothing like product endorsement which wasn't [likely] even paid for. At the very least, they should have included the trademark sign to indicate they were making a commercial reference in their endorsement. (They did, at least capitalize "retina" in retina display... that's not quite the same thing and kind of makes it worse.)

Re:There are better than Apple's

[drinkypoo]

I find it annoying that despite the existence of common devices which are "better" that the "best" is still considered to be Apple's.

Congratulations, you have just lived down to your nickname, and it has led you to whine about Apple's popularity — the only reason why everything is compared to Apple.

Re:There are better than Apple's

[Anonymous Coward]

So what 445ppi (57079nm) is of the same order of magnitude as 326ppi (77914nm), compared to this new technology which has a resolution of 30nm some 2600x finer than your Nexus 5.

A more accurate comparison would be to compare it to SLMs (DLP/transflective LCDs) used in projectors which have much higher resolutions than smart phones. This device might be useful for maskless lithography, assuming it can stand up to the intensities of light involved, but it probably can't. this looks like it has the potential to be better than LCD and eInk, and like it could have utility in projection systems which require higher resolution than direct viewing displays.

-puddingpimp

Oh good grief

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

They're drawing pictures with AN ATOMIC FORCE MICROSCOPE, and we're discussing it like it's going to be on the next generation of smart phones.
This technology is at the "hey, look at the shadow of this Maltese cross created by the cathode rays!" stage.

Re:Oh good grief

[NormalVisual]

From the *very next* sentence in TFA: "They then found that the "nano-pixels" could be switched on and off electronically, creating colored dots that could be used as the basis for an extremely high-resolution display."

Does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many fall for such marketing ploys as retina displays or 4K resolutions? I supposed the same people who cannot watch a HD movie but must have BlueRay or have 3D TV. The problem I have with this technology is that its always marketed as being needed because its better. I have myself looked at 4K TV's and retina displays from a standpoint of real world content and not the special demo content the manufactures of these products use. Take a streaming content from Netflix or Amazon or even Google Play and your already limited to HD at best and really its compressed HD to start with. Unless your a BlueRay fanatic to boot, the high density pixel displays won't help you. I also do not see bandwidth improving enough with the internet to have all these streaming services move to a even higher definition content then 1080P. Even satellite and cable TV have bandwidth limitations and they do not have the pipes or satellites to do high bandwidth content on all channels. Even going as far back as content production, they have to juggle using anything more then 720P as their costs go up to produce higher res. content.
Just like sports gave up on 3D production as being too expensive and not having the viewers who even have the equipment to view it. The ideal of higher pixel TV's and monitors is just another way to up margins on products. Its like giving you a 700HP car and then govern it to 55 MPH.

Re:Does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cars will never catch on, i tried the real world approach of straddling over it and giving it a kick... it moved nowhere!

If/when real-world content is optimized for the improvements, you will notice the difference.

Re:Does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If I’d asked people what they want, they would have said higher-resolution horses."

BadBIOS is real

[Anonymous Coward]

I've taken a standard PC, freeware Audacity, and manually generated both Morse Code and Binary data in a simple .wav file using 20kHz - 22kHz "sound" with some fade in/fade out to clean up 'tics'. When played you cannot hear it (the dog goes nuts though). I then used my iPhone and a sound spectrum analyzer (free app) and monitored the inaudible frequencies.

BINGO...

A partition type virus combined with modem type software (but modified to use inaudible sound) could easily perform communication between PCs.

1.2 arcminute per line pair

[Anonymous Coward]

The human visual system is good for at most a resolution of around 1.2 arcminute per line pair. That's an outstanding eye, with outstanding conditions. Granted, looking at a light source like an iPhone screen is in general what I would call excellent conditions, except in the shadow detail areas. If they go OLED, even that will improve.

But the bottom line is, do the math. It's pretty simple geometry. If you exceed what the human visual system can perceive, all you're doing is making marketing hype.

Same thing applies to movie theaters -- where the hype is now 4k. Even Sony admits unless you are sitting in the first few rows of the theater, 4k is overkill and 2k is plenty. If you like the back row, a 4k projection won't give you any improvement over a 720p HDTV signal.

I'm just sayin'... Do the math.

Re:1.2 arcminute per line pair

[SpankiMonki]

I know, right? Pixels schmixels. What really matters is dynamic contrast ratio. If these new screens don't have at least 10,000,000,000,000,000:1, I'm just not interested.

For any particular reason? What use?

[AbRASiON]

I already can't see the pixels even up ultra close on an iphone 5, I have difficulty on my Samsung Galaxy S3 and both of those displays are only "fairly good" by the new mid 2014 phone standard which is up to over 500ppi

You want to impress me, get OLED happening everywhere, I've done the reading, I understand the tech, the colour range, refresh rate and incredibly black blacks are awesome.

Also, 2d / 3d graphics processors are going to melt pushing this many pixels sooner or later :/

Re:For any particular reason? What use?

[camperdave]

The problem of OLED is that it cannot compete with sunlight. So you can't see your display outside. We need full color e-ink, or something similar; a reflective/refractive or absorbive technology rather than an emmissive one.

Re:For any particular reason? What use?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s5-review-1064p3.php

Actually, modern OLED screens are fine outside.

Re:For any particular reason? What use?

[tlhIngan]

You want to impress me, get OLED happening everywhere, I've done the reading, I understand the tech, the colour range, refresh rate and incredibly black blacks are awesome.

Blacker blacks maybe, but color range is actually excessive. We're already at 100% sRGB using LCD displays (see iPhone 5/5s). OLED displays have a gamut larger than sRGB, which results in photos that actually look worse - the images are completely oversaturated and start to look hyper-real.

About the only good thing with them is you can tone down the color so you don't use the entire range so it stays within the sRGB range, and then modify the transfer characteristics so you get more accurate colors. (Using full range OLED just results in inaccurate colors)

Re:For any particular reason? What use?

[camperdave]

Actually, modern OLED screens are fine outside.

I'll believe it when I see it. Besides that, there's the power requirements. My phone needs to be charged daily, whereas my e-ink Kobo can go for a month between charges. Granted, the Kobo is monochrome and is only switching between pages. whereas the cell phone is contacting cell towers periodically, and such, but still, the display on the phone eats up an extraordinary amount of energy.

I can see why!

[sd4f]

It's good that they're working on this, getting better pixel densities will no doubt have applications somewhere (such as VR, google glass type hardware), but really, I don't want to start seeing 4k phone displays.

Monitors?

[Lawrence_Bird]

So.. you mean I might live to see a 35" monitor with over 300 dpi? (ok, I'll settle for a doubling of the current 100dpi).

Ideal PPI

[Twinbee]

SO...... if you paint a white single-pixel width 15 degree line without any anti-aliasing onto a black background, what does the PPI need to be at so you don't notice any jaggies?

300? 600? 1200? 2400 or more?

Re:Ideal PPI

[Pinky's Brain]

Whatever PPI is necessary to make it invisible.

Re:Ideal PPI

[Twinbee]

I think that's a very good point, and something I considered too. I'm not sure that would work for ever-increasing brightnesses though.

Re:Ideal PPI

[thesupraman]

Why?
Because you dont want to use the built in hardware antialiasing (or are apple and cannot do anything competent like that, limiting things to integer pixel scales)?

At what distance? I would suggest that at 100 meters, the PPI would be about 1, or less.

Want to try again?

Re:Ideal PPI

[Twinbee]

Anti-aliasing is a hack that complicates things for a few reasons:

1: Anti-aliasing may look smoother but it also looks more blurred than non-antialiasing. That's why I based my test on no anti-aliasing.

2: If Apple isn't do it, then it must be at least somewhat inherently tricky to get right. And at the least it breeds bugs. Kludges usually breed bugs somewhere down the line as a rule of thumb.

3: Anti-aliasing complicates the OS (such as using Cleartype which has to be adjusted for every monitor it comes across etc.). Taking a screenshot and zooming in on the anti-aliased bits produces colour fringing.

4: Anti-aliasing complicates paint and word-processing software which has to take into account the techniques necessary for smooth line and curve drawing. Additionally, try filling in an area in paint software; anti-aliasing is not your friend.

5: Certain pictures with anti-aliasing use more colours, and eat up more memory as a result, especially when compressed in PNG format. A black and white picture uses 256 colours when it should use two. A colour picture..... well, the sky is the limit.

6: Scaling is much faster/simpler when you can do it the easy, and not to have worry about averaging neighbour pixels. Need I go on?

Re:Ideal PPI

[Anonymous Coward]

> ...especially when compressed in PNG format. A black and white picture uses 256 colours when it should use two.

Huh? PNG is perfectly capable of using a color table with 1-bit depth, for 2 colors.

Doesn't seem to work

[LongearedBat]

On my screen, the sample pictures they show in the article look just as pixellated as any other picture.

BadBIOS is real, blame the audiophiles

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if they didn't insist on unrealistically high sampling frequencies, to the point where every integrated sound device is running at several times the human sound frequency limit, we wouldn't have this problem.

1.2 arcminute per line pair

[Anonymous Coward]

For computer monitors, though, 4k and even 8k will be completely viable. Sadly, by that point consumers will have soured on UHDTV, because the exact same problems exist with 4k at the theatre as with 4k in the home - people sit too far back from their screens. And since television standards dictate mainstream computer monitor technology, UHD monitors will be around for only a short period of time.

Witness the industry's insistence on standardizing on 1366x768 and 1920x1080 for everything - anything at a higher resolution is simply not sold in US retail outlets. If I go to Best Buy or Micro Center, I'll probably find a 27" 1080p monitor sitting there. *Maybe* the super-pricey Apple Thunderbolt Monitor, which is 27" 1440p, since they also sell Apple products. But if I go online, I can buy a 28" 2160p monitor, from multiple vendors, for about 60-70% the price, displaying literally quadruple the amount of pixels as the (roughly) same size monitor you can get at retail. Only caveat is that it's TN, but all the crap at retail is bound to be TN anyway for the same reason why they're 1080p at 27 inches.

So, yes, 4k is a marketing fad - but, for the sake of your desktop, pray that people are fooled into thinking it's worth paying money for, or you'll be stuck with 1366x768 laptop screens until the end of time.

Where's the middle ground of usability?

[udoschuermann]

I'd be plenty happy if I could buy a 24" desktop monitor with 2560×1600 pixels (125 DPI).

Back in 2004 (10 years ago!) I had a Sager laptop with 135 DPI (1600×1200). That was an awesome display, but it seems like we have not made any progress since then: It's either barely stretch for 100 DPI on the desktop or 400+ DPI on a tiny mobile phone. Why can't we get 150 or 200 DPI on the desktop? Am I really the only one who cares?

Re:Where's the middle ground of usability?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'd be plenty happy if I could buy a 24" desktop monitor with 2560×1600 pixels (125 DPI).

Here you go: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005JN9310/

Re:Where's the middle ground of usability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops... my mistake. That's 1920x1200. I was fooled by its inclusion in this review of best 2560x1600 displays.

Re:Where's the middle ground of usability?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is good news, though:

NEC Display Solutions Introduces 24-Inch UHD Display

Re:Where's the middle ground of usability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually high DPI displays in desktops and laptops are quite common. There are many laptops with displays in the 220 - 275 DPI range (Apple MacBook Pro, Lenovo Yoga 2, ThinkPad X1 and IdeaPad Y50, Razer Blade, Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus, Toshiba Satellite P50t, to name a few), plus 4k desktop monitors in the 24" to 32" range like the Dell UP2414Q are pretty common, albeit expensive, too.

Can I have an indigo pixel?

[jfengel]

One possibility would be improving the color range, even if the resolution isn't improved. Rather than cramming in three phosophors per pixel, perhaps we could have four, or more. There's a considerable chunk of color space not well represented by RGB color.

I don't know how much of a difference it would make to TV viewers or gamers, but I know that artists would be grateful for a better color range. The conversion from RGB to CMYK is always a bit of a crapshoot; things that look great on your screen don't look as good when they come back from the printers, and there's a whole range of stuff it doesn't occur to you to try because you can't see it.

I could even imagine that it might be handy for medical imaging and other applications where you want to cram as much information onto the screen as possible: more pixels may not improve things but more colors might. Though more pixels could achieve that as well: it would be nice to be able to zoom in by bringing your face closer to the screen without simply seeing bigger pixels. Head motion is kinaesthetically appealing: you can move in and out without losing your sense of overall place.

Sharp already makes a four-pixel TV, with an added yellow (which is especially helpful in skin tones). I think it would be neat to be able to produce true indigo, violent, and cyan. If this lets you add more phosphors without costing resolution, it might not be a killer app, but it could be a desirable thing.

Image size and camera

[angel'o'sphere]

I wonder how big images to be displayed on such a screen would be, or more important: what camera do you need to be able to support such resolutions?

Only 326 ppi huh?

[Grismar]

You could have mentioned a bunch of non-Apple phones available right now, with far higher ppi than those two Apple devices - without fancy future "in 5 years"-tech. And I'm not talking obscure brands either. But I guess that was kinda the whole point right? A small advertisement with a tech article hardly anyone on here will read.

Can be used foor true 3D display

[Prune]

Currently we do have auto-stereoscropic displays (no glasses), but they only account for stereopsis, not accommodation (different focal distances for the eye). In current 3D displays, the 3D cue of stereopsis conflicts with the information from accommodation to a flat plane, and the 3D effect is significantly diminished (and can even cause discomfort or headaches). With an ultra high pixel density display base, lightfield displays become practical, and they can reproduce both stereopsis and different focal depth per image element. Current prototypes I've seen at SIGGRAPH have been very low resolution, as you need a patch of 2D pixels under each microlens (lightfield displays are based on a microlens array with multiple pixels under each lens). I imagine a 1920x1080 microlens array with 32x32 pixels under each microlens. If the display is also high-dynamic range and with extended color gamut, it would be the ultimate visual equivalent to a window into other worlds.

The math of retina displays

[mark-t]

Human visual acuity in a healthy human eyeball can discern features as tiny as 30-arcseconds in size. If you holding a retina display device 30 centimeters away from your face, 30 arc-seconds is only 48 micrometers at that distance, while retina displays use a resolution of 78 micrometers. Further, because the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem suggests that you will need at to sample at at least double the highest frequency of a signal to receive the signal with minimal distortion, suggesting that a true retina display would need pixels that are only 24micrometers in size, and not 78.

So basically, increase the resolution by a factor of slightly more than three, and then you're looking at something that you could truly call "retina".

Nano pixels?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a CRT ya fucking idiots. Fuck this website now, bunch of god damn mouth breathers who wouldn't know technology if it raped them.

Re:Nano pixels?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, yeah... CRTs have a dot pitch typically no smaller than 0.2mm, which is 200,000 nm... idiot.