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.

Comments

Does Sony also provide...

[xenog]

...high-definition bionic eye implants to be able to see the difference?

Re:Does Sony also provide...

[Rei]

The maximum physically possible resolution for the human eye to see is 2190 dpi. But that's not an average eye, but rather a flawless eye limited only by the size of the pupil; and viewed from as close as an adult can focus, 4 inches.

If we downgrade from a perfect eye to an average eye, the resolution drops down to 876 dpi... but still at 4 inches.

At a more practical 12 inches, this drops to around 300 dpi. Which is why magazines are printed at 300 dpi - it's good enough for most practical circumstances.

Also note some additional limitations:

  * These sort of resolution figures are based on the ability to distingish bright white lines from bright black lines without them blurring together into gray. The smaller the contrast and the dimmer the light, the less the eye can resolve.
  * The human eye also loses a great deal of ability to make out resolution when objects are moving.
  * Obviously the further away one is from the center of the field of view, the lower the resolution - with a rather fast dropoff.

Yes, 808 dpi is complete and total overkill, unless you've got superb eyes and are in the habit of holding your phone as close to them as you can focus while looking at high contrast stationary images.

Good work, SONY

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

3D...

[MadCow42]

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!

Pixel Whores

[Bugler412]

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?!

I got a 4K TV Yesterday

[jeffmflanagan]

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.

Re:Upscaling is BS

[fnj]

You do understand that 1080i has precisely the same spatial resolution as 1080p, right? There is no field fade (whatsoever) on an LCD, as there is on CRT. And the temporal resolution depends on the respective frame rates. 1080i is 60 fps in the US and other NTSC-legacy areas, and 50 in Europe and other PAL-legacy areas.

1080p may be either 24, 30, or 60 fps in the US, and 25 or 50 in Europe. The lower figures are the norm for film-derived material, since film has 24 fps. The lower figures give you in fact a LOWER temporal resolution for 1080p than for 1080i. The higher figures give you the SAME temporal resolution for 1080p as for 1080i. The difference is that in 1080i, only 1/2 the 2,073,600 pixels change every 1/fps seconds, and in 1080p all of the 2,073,600 pixels change every 1/fps seconds.[*]

In scenes with no motion, there is no difference in image quality whatsoever. None. 1080p and 1080i give identical images. Only in scenes with significantly rapid motion does 1080i introduce noticeable artifacts that aren't there with 1080p.

[*] The actual situation is modified by various motion-smoothing video-processing algorithms employed in any good-quality interlaced display.