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Sony Unveils Smartphone With 4K Screen
An anonymous reader writes: Sony has taken the wraps off its new Xperia Z5 Premium smartphone, which has a 5.5" display that operates at 4k resolution. "The company acknowledged that there was still a limited amount of professional content available in 4K — which provides about four times the number of pixels as 1080p high definition video. But it said the Z5 Premium would upscale videos streamed from YouTube and Netflix to take advantage of the display." Sony's answer to the obvious battery concerns raised by such a pixel-dense (808 ppi) screen was to use a 3,430 mAh battery and memory-on-display technology. The video upscaling can also be turned off to decrease battery drain.
...high-definition bionic eye implants to be able to see the difference?
Fix bugs? Address users' complaints? Release updates within the schedule *you* announce? Maybe add basic functionality to your 'premium' music playing software, functionality that media players have had for well over a decade now?
Naaaah, fuck that, let's put a 4k screen on a 5.5" phone! Yeah!
That type of resolution lends itself very well to doing things like lenticular 3-D. I know people often don't like lenticular, but that's usually because it's done so poorly so often. Well-done lenticular is amazing to see and is not a strain on the eyes. If glass lenticules were built into the display itself, and were appropriately sized and spaced, it could be impressive.
There are other interesting technologies too that could be done, such as barrier-screen - that could be implemented by LCD over top of the display - which would be less intrusive and could be turned on/off.
I write software for these applications - I would drool over a screen that had 808ppi!
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
They say 8k is the ultimate target for a VR headset.
Sounds like it's time to bring back the 1940's era TV screen magnifiers so users can take advantage of all of those pixels.
I'm waiting for the technology to completely fail, and then they'll announce the next thing.
The people making it are all going "yarg, teh 4K". The average consumer doesn't give a crap.
Having rode out the first decade of HD waiting until it stopped being a moving target on $10K TVs no sane person was going to buy ... seen the format wars to move on from DVD ... and having see a couple of early adopters discover their TV could no longer display HD because of the copy protection stuff ... I can tell you the average consumer doesn't care about this and doesn't wish to get sucked into another format war.
The people who care about this would buy anything if you claimed it was new and better.
The industry is drooling at selling us new TVs, and DVD players, and amps, and monitors, and phones every few years because they've got the new hotness.
But people didn't care about 3D for the most part, and still don't care about 4K displays. Consumer demand isn't driving this, marketing is.
My 55" HDTV (without 3D and with no internet connection) is all I want for now. My BluRay player is fine. My amp does what I need it to. The 2x24" 1080p screens on my desk are just fine thanks.
If someone thinks I'm going to splash out on this stuff every few years because they've started selling it ... they're morons. I mean, come on, 4K on a phone? And this would exhaust your data plan in, what, 30 minutes?
I have no doubt people will buy this stuff. But I also know they'll likely be wasting their money for little added benefit or to have bragging rights. Pretty much everybody else will view this with complete indifference.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Same as the MHz wars of yore, or megapixel wars in digitial cameras. Meaningless (beyond a certain usability point) spec chasing by uninformed or hoodwinked general consumers. What possible function other than driving phone sales can 4k on a 5.5" screen have?!
Um excuse me, of course I can resolve that kind of resolution, because my sight is so much better than the ~average~ human. *Mashes phone against eye socket* See??
Back in 2009 I bought a beautiful 50" Panasonic 1080p plasma. I (still to this day) absolutely love that TV and the images that it renders. When I used a BluRay for the first time (Actually the only way to fully use the 1080p, as Comcast isn't 1080p), I realized that by standing a couple feet away from the TV I could see things that I wouldn't be able to see at a normal distance. 4k must be amazing - it's like a microscope, as you can see detail that you wouldn't be able to see with the naked eye if you were standing where the camera was.
About Upscaling - This is the biggest load of crap ever. You can NOT create detail beyond that which you started with. An upscaled picture, displayed at 4k, that was captured with a 1080p camera can't possibly be any more accurate than the same picture displayed on a 1080p TV. Of course, the masses don't understand this. This seems to be the "MO" of most technology these days, since non-tech-savvy people are using a lot of tech gadgets - you can say meaningless things that sound "good", and people will accept them as "good" since they don't know what the hell they've really got.
"To get to the point where you can't see pixels, I think some of the speculation is you need about 8K per eye in our current field of view [for the Rift]." -- Palmer Luckey, the founder and creator of the Oculus Rift
I did some side-by-side comparisons between a year-old Samsung 1080p set, and a new Samsung 4K set.
NetFlix 4K looks a lot better than their 1080p service, but just like the 1080p service, the video is over-compressed, so fine detail is missing. YouTube 4K videos look amazing.
The 2x24" 1080p screens on my desk are just fine thanks.
In fairness, there's a pretty spectacular improvement in moving to a "retina" class display on your using-it-all-the-time monitor. I can see no rational reason for having a higher resolution on my phone than I do on my 27" computer monitor though, even if I do hold it half the distance away.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
To go along with the 4K display Sony will be offering an optional 30lb. battery (with an available backpack). A Sony spokesperson, when asked to comment on this, confirmed that the optional battery should allow users an entire day of phone use without the need for a recharge.
"These things are flying off the shelf" according to I.P. Nightly of Sony. "Our customers are demanding 4K screens for their phones and, by gosh, we have delivered in a big, big way!" claims Nightly.
Stay tuned for more news as it develops....
Not that it has stopped some, but a 16:9 display in a phone is not optimal for VR. It is difficult to drive such a display while doing something interesting, and a phone just doesn't have the CPU to do it locally, or the bandwidth to do it remotely.
An wired 8:3 would display would be a much better fit, as it matches the human visual field more closely, and wouldn't require batteries or other useless hardware.