Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
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.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Small point: If they keep making the pixels smaller, holographic displays could be possible.
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.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
At last we will be able to make VR Headsets for Eagles
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.
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.)
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.
I mean, really: Emacs looks great in character mode and 80 columns. Why all this other faffing about?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
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.
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...
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
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.
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.