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.

Comments

Will probably be used for VR applications.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Will probably be used for VR applications.

[should_be_linear]

nobody in display industry cares about Oculus Rift. For each Oculus Rift there is million phones sold. World is not Slashdot dot org.

Re:Will probably be used for VR applications.

[GuB-42]

Physiology will limit oculus rift and all others. Sure they'll get a grab early on but main stream response to the impact of using one over any extended period will hugely limit acceptance, especially as yet another device. With phones, lighter weight, longer life batteries, durability and more voice features are going to be the new goals. Marketing at exclusivity will inevitably fail, as common sense always eventually prevails over fads.

Common sense prevails over fads, really ?
With phones, we pretty much passed the "common sense" barrier. The smartphone is now becoming more and more of a fashion accessory, driven mostly by aesthetics. Just look at the new Galaxy S6 : less durable, worse battery life, but better looking than the previous model.
At least, with VR, there is potential for more than just slight incremental improvements.

Re:Oculus Gaping Wide Gash

[skaag]

That was my first thought too. The Oculus and similar devices will be the big winners with this technology.

Re:You probably could tell looking close up

[robi5]

I like resolution independence. So the long term future is bright, however that long term future is bound to include screens that have print quality resolition (600-2400dpi) and beyond. But during transitional times, it's nice for compatibility if applications etc. that were designed for lower resolution screens look OK.

For example, there's no way you can upscale a 640x480 screen to 1024x768 such a way that it looks as good as it would look with 640x480, and you don't want to leave black bars either. These are pretty low resolutions and the artifacts of rescaling are very obvious.

However there's decent content made with things like 720p, FHD and slightly higher resolutions that may suffer from similar rescaling artifacts if shown on a higher pixel count screen which is "just retina enough".

This is one reason I support resolutions beyond what's obviously discernable with the naked eye, e.g. into the print press resolution territory.

Another reason is that while visual acuity starts to fail to discern pixels at "retina" resolutions (around 300dpi), it's more of an entry point. Art, business and scientific visualisations, electronic press publications do benefit from higher resolutions. Not to mention that a lot of us have better eyesight than 20/20 and not everybody keep their devices at the 12" distance all the time.

Additional reasons:
- mobile devices "prime" the economically viable display technology for VR and AR stuff - way higher resolution there is essential
- larger screens tend to eventually follow DPI standards set by mobile, e.g. the iMac 5k is almost at the iPhone 4 level, in terms of DPI
- very high resolutions force the developer community to finally steer away from obsolete units and concepts like the pixel (useful at low level HW etc. only)

The increase to resolution is milking a known process in electronics, called scaling or miniaturisation.

Having said all these, the new areas of improvement should be here:
- viewing angle and independence of color from angle
- color gamut
- contrast, white level, black level
- calibration
- latency and blur
- integration (scanner, fingerprint reader, camera, touch, physical objects)
- plasticity and cost (eventually replace paper)
- directional projection for individual eyes with no 3D glasses (2 streams, or ideally, shared viewing)

So it's a long way before we can render a surface like the radiance of a butterfly wing...