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