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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.
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!"
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.
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..)
... surely will look sharp.
The curious quirk, in this case, is that you probably won't even be able to get a 'theoretically better; but not perceptably so and definitely not worth the price' product; you'll almost inevitably get a worse one.
Any phone/tablet SoC with claims to being remotely high end is already some mixture of thermally constrained and deliberately crippled to save the device's battery life. If you demand their full performance, they'll throttle within minutes; and if they somehow had the thermal headroom to avoid that, they'd flatten the battery in a some egregiously short time.
Assuming reasonably equal tech(ie. not a 1920x1080 phone from two years ago against a phone from next year with this screen) the higher resolution device will have worse battery life(or a visibly larger battery) and be at a greater risk of annoying frame rate/responsiveness issues in any applications that try to do complex GPU work at native resolution. Some amount of this is accepted, since visible giant eyeball-slashing pixels suck; but the returns on graphical prettiness diminish, while the power and thermal costs just keep on scaling...
At least audiophile nonsense is generally good at what it does, if you ignore the price tag and the nonsense; this will be actively worse than a similar device based on a slightly less ambitious screen.
The IBM T220 was launched in 2001 and has a resolution of 3840x2400, slightly more than 4k. Even back then, processing power wasn't really an issue, but getting enough display bandwidth was (four separate DVI cables were needed to get the full refresh rate of 41Hz).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
That was my first thought too. The Oculus and similar devices will be the big winners with this technology.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
Because of the high resolution.
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...
I don't see the point.
Look closer.
I have one of these (rebadged T221; ViewSonic VP2290b), got it second-hand in 2008 or 2009. It's not just the display connection bandwidth, the 41Hz and later-model 48Hz limit is from the display internals. They use huge custom FPGA logic chips to drive the signals, which are apparently not fast enough for more than that, although some of them can be overclocked to drive almost 60Hz. Without these internal display limitations, four DVI cables have enough bandwidth to run one at 60Hz (4x1920x1200@60Hz).
I haven't bothered to drive mine with four cables, because with just two (1920x2400) DVI signals I get it up to 34Hz, but I've scaled it down to 30Hz, because it's evenly divisible by 60Hz. In normal desktop use, it's fast enough. For gaming and movies, there are other displays.
Eventually there'll be a point in resolutions when it's bandwidth-wise better to have the GPU on the display side and just run some future thunderbolt-esque long cable than running even higher bandwidths to the display. An 8k display with a resolution of 7680x4320 would require 50Gbps of bandwidth to be driven at 60Hz at 8bpp or 60GHz at 10bpp. The actual required data rate between the CPU, RAM and GPU is much lower nowadays, especially because most of the heavy lifting like rendering and video decoding is done by the GPU.
About 17Hz or a bit more with most single DVI outputs, although 14Hz is the minimum required for DVI by actual spec. Twice that with two DVI signals. The display itself does the thing by partitioning the display; either 3840x2400@14+Hz or 2x1920x2400@28+Hz side-by-side or 4x1920x1200@60Hz in a 2x2 grid, capped by the display at 41Hz or 48Hz depending on the model.
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.
Virtual reality is the new economy. It is like Jesus feeding thousands with only five fish. Except you only need one, and it is computer-generated.
Virtual pizzas
Won't fill your tummy
Or virtual water
When the real stuff is scummy
Virtual housing
Won't clean up the slums
And a virtual car
Won't take you to mum's.
Meet the new economy
Same as the old economy
Burma Shave
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Stop wasting our time with this crap and give us a goddamn 4k 17" laptop! Or anything better than standard HD. Just 1 extra vertical pixel would at least show progress.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke