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Sharp Announces 4K Smartphone Display
An anonymous reader writes: Japanese electronics giant Sharp has announced production of 5.5" displays with 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution. They'll hit the market next year. The display will have a pixel density of 806 PPI. It's not known yet which smartphone makers will build devices with these screens. The displays cost significantly more than a more typical 1080p or 1440p display, so they'll probably only make it into high-end phones. On the other hand, this will help to drive down prices for lower-resolution displays, so it could indirectly benefit everybody.
Coming soon.
I'm dumbfounded.
Small high res screens like this are in high demand for the occulus rift and its competitors. Provided it has a low latency and reasonable refresh rate we should see it in a HMD device soon.
"Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades!"
"Fuck Everything, We're Doing 4K"... (reference)
It's not just the monetary cost that you have to consider. How much power does it take to drive these displays? High end phones might have more room in the profit margin to account for the higher monetary cost, but they are still subject to the same power constraints as cheaper phones.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Not 8K?
Well, if that's all they can do, I'll make do.
I expect my smartwatch to have 16K by 2020 though. And my monitor to have 640k. That's all. 640k ought to be enough for anybody.
Apple is opening the door to more expensive gadgets with $1000 iPhones and $17,000 iWatches. Maybe that will incentivize advances like 4K smartphones and 4K watches..
As a gamedev, that's quite dumb. The GPU isn't up to that level yet, and I doubt that your eyes can tell much of a difference between it and 1080p. Even on a top-end mobile processors the speed difference between 720p and 1080p is staggering. The sad thing is, even if you render at a lower res and scale it up you still have to fill all those damn pixels. Fill rate is a bitch.
Now, for things other than games? Meh, maybe. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying more pixels is bad, just that pixel fill rate needs to account for GPU and CPU power too. The display is ahead of the power of current phones even if you're rendering simple 3D displays (like most "2D" GUIs these days).
Everytime they mention 4K and i see 3840 it makes me itch... some clever folks at the display producing companies are just like the ones in the HDD business making up the term gibibyte. (and yes, I know 3840 is 2x1920, but still..)
While the picture and the quality are amazing, only a small fraction of televisions are sold are 4K,
The 4K content online is only experimental.
For televisions there are not too many 4k capable blue players.
Yet 100 times smaller cellphone has a need for 4K....
Let's fuckin hope that apple is nearly done testing their 8K, or was it 16K phones, just to show who is the boss here.
We're waiting for [cheap][usefull] monitors.
Not for [$$$][useless] smartphone displays
... surely will look sharp.
If the average reading distance is 1 foot (12 inches = 305 mm), p @0.4 arc minute is 35.5 microns or about 720 ppi/dpi. p @1 arc minute is 89 microns or about 300 dpi/ppi. This is why magazines are printed at 300 dpi – it’s good enough for most people. Fine art printers aim for 720, and that’s the best it need be. Very few people stick their heads closer than 1 foot away from a painting or photograph.”
Wow, so much effort put into the resolution, and almost none put into the latency of the device. How sad.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I don't see the point.
... would be use for VR headsets. 4k is NOT needed on a phone. on a headset? definitely far more useful.
Seriously, what is the point of having such high resolution on a small display?
The only good use I can see for it is to put a big bright light behind it, add some lenses, and project it on a wall.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The video industry is the greatest planned obsolescence racket since the invention of the light bulb.
First you sell them a TV.
Then you sell them cable to watch on the TV.
Then you sell them a videotape player.
Then you sell them all their media on videotape.
Then you sell them a DVD player.
Then you sell them all their media on DVD.
Then you sell them a HDTV with a resolution just slightly higher than the DVD.
Then you sell them a Blu-Ray player so they can use that higher resolution.
Then you sell them all their media on Blu-Ray.
Then you sell them a 3d tv.
Then you sell them a 3d blu-ray player.
Then you sell them all their media on 3d blu-ray.
Then you sell them a 4k TV.
Then you sell them a 4k video player.
Then you sell them all their media for 4k.
And so on. The moment there's not a Next Big Thing You Have to Have, the whole industry goes belly up.
Benefits everybody? How? All this will do is make phones more expensive, eat batteries faster, and fuel the useless cock measuring contest that samsung and htc are perpetually engaged it.
The PPI of current phones is already far more than a human can make out.
i could care less about 4k, on a phone. worse is the race to the"top" with displays that shorten usable battery life. how about a low power high res eink, or oled display? something that doesn't make screen on time the killer metric for EVERY device?
Anyone else things it doesn't make sense to go that high res on a small device like this?
In the end, you'll only cut the things you need the most, battery life and performance.. More pixels = more gpu requirements.
I understand marketing and all that, but 3.86!=4.
3.86 is very much equal to 4, just as 2+2=5 for sufficiently large values of 2.
Significant figures FTW
(I could point out that 4K is actually 4096 x 2160 pixels if you're talking DCI/Cinema sizes, but that's a whole different argument)
.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It depends though. If you mean moving from 640x480 to 1024x768 where the pixels cannot be resolved by the naked eye (aka retina), then you can scale it up smoothly provided the graphics are in vector format. The normal issue is that the graphics are not in vector format, and are usually optimised to make use of pixel boundaries to improve the resolution (i.e. a sharp edge looks infinitely sharp because it is placed at a pixel boundary). When interpolated the underlying lack of image quality becomes apparent unless you interpolate by an integer factor, which is what Apple did when it moved to retina.
The real solution is to move all graphics operations towards vector based formats, then it won't matter what the pixel count is as long as the dpi is visually high enough. Since this is actually much easier to develop for (it is much nicer to just draw up your icons etc in illustrator than having to mess around getting pixel boundaries right at different dpis) it shouldn't be hard to convince developers to shift. The main issue right now is that many screens are still quite low dpi.
Over 100 comments now, and not one person has mentioned how lifelike and delicious those downscaled chestnuts look. Honestly, it's like nobody bothers to click on TFA anymore.
I'm always amused by cultural differences like this though... you would never see chestnuts used as screen porn in the US. Actual porn, maybe, but not chestnuts.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere