
Apple Retina Display: Under the microscope comparisons with 1G and 3G  - marram
http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/06/apple-retina-display/
======
watmough
Having queued for 7 hours yesterday to get my iPhone 4, I can confirm that the
display actually exceeded my expectations.

All natively rendered text in controls, etc., looks like it was printed in a
magazine.

This display is going to be _huge_ news once it hits the iPad and MacBook
Pros.

~~~
masklinn
> This display is going to be huge news once it hits the iPad and MacBook
> Pros.

Which is probably never. Those don't even reach the pixel density of the
2G/3G/3GS. 326ppi? That's already going to be pretty tall order on a 10"
screen (the iPad currently stands at 132 ppi, assuming the form factor doesn't
change we're talking about increasing the resolution by a factor of 2.5,
pumping the resolution to an insane 2560x1920. We're talking about a
resolution usually found on 30" computer screens here, and those things are
still pretty much all between $1000 and $2000...).

The 13.3" macbook pro would have a 3712x2320 screen, the 15.4" would move up
to 4200x2625 and the 17" would be sporting a 4000x3000 screen.

~~~
whyenot
30 years ago, you were lucky if you had a 300 bps acoustic modem. 20 years ago
9600 bps was considered state of the art. I am writing this while sitting in
Peets in Los Altos where I have a 54,000,000 bps _wireless_ connection, not to
some local BBS, but to this much larger, almost unimaginably (at least it
would have been to me in 1980!) complex structure, the internet.

In 1995, the little point and shoot camera I owned could fit 36 pictures on a
roll of film. My new little Sony point and shoot has an 8gb memory card. It
can fit 1,500 pictures on a "roll of film," and the memory card is so small I
could balance it on the tip of a finger. It also takes better quality pictures
than any 35mm camera I have ever owned, has an internal GPS, and an an
impressive amount of computing power, at least when it comes to image
processing.

We are living in truly amazing times. Never say never :)

~~~
matthavener
Meanwhile, the xerox lisa had a DPI of 90, while a regular macbook has a DPI
of 110.

<http://www.mprove.de/diplom/text/3.1.8_lisa.html>
<http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html>

~~~
mayoff
Desktop monitor resolution is still at ~100dpi because no desktop OS has
solved the scalable UI problem satisfactorily. The OSes have some attempts at
support for UI scaling, but none works well enough to run all of the popular
software decently at 200dpi.

Contrast that with iOS. I only have a handful of non-built-in apps, but they
all work perfectly on my iPhone 4, none look worse, and all but the graphics-
intensive games look better. I haven't seen any reports yet of software that
doesn't scale properly on the iPhone 4.

Apple's tight control of the iOS software marketplace may be a key factor in
this success. They may have privately checked a large amount of the software
submitted to the app store, and rejected apps which failed to scale properly.

~~~
WalterGR
_Desktop monitor resolution is still at ~100dpi because no desktop OS has
solved the scalable UI problem satisfactorily._

I'm under the impression this isn't a problem. Scaling is a problem when you
have bitmap images and try to scale from - say - an iPhone to an iPad. But on
desktops, monitors aren't growing in size by a factor of ~2.77.

If you leave the screen size the same but increase the DPI, bitmaps will look
exactly the same. They might seem visually out-of-place next to crisper UI
elements. Is that what you mean?

~~~
mayoff
I mean that things just don't look or act right. Try firing up Quartz Debug
(if you have a Mac), setting the UI Resolution scale factor to 2, and
restarting some apps. Every app I checked has problems.

For example, every app that used a standard Mac toolbar draws it incorrectly.
Address Book's split views do not resize correctly. iCal's colored checkboxes
are incorrect, and the popout from double-clicking a calendar item is very
broken. In Safari, the busy icon on tabs isn't drawn correctly, the Top Sites
search box is clipped, and the Bookmarks bottom toolbar is drawn incorrectly.
The Dock puts right-click menus in the wrong place and draws them wrong, and
handles drag and drop incorrectly. Finder doesn't scale the desktop icons.
Preview's notion of "Actual Size" doesn't honor the UI Resolution scale
factor.

Outside of Apple apps, I find that Photoshop ignores clicks on the menu bar
entirely. OmniGraffle's toolbar is extra-broken, the disclosure triangles in
its palettes don't work, and it draws the contents of documents incorrectly.

World of Warcraft scales up more than 2x. I can't even get to the
username/password boxes. (This could be a feature.) Sketchup draws my document
in the lower-left quarter of the window and random junk from the WoW login
screen on the other three quarters.

Contrast this to the iPhone 4 experience. Every app I've tried looks at least
as good on iPhone 4 as on iPhone 3GS, and none has had any drawing or behavior
defects.

------
grandalf
I looked at a iPhone 4G at the apple store yesterday and was curious to
compare the display to the HTC Evo 4G's display.

The verdict: slightly better crispness, comparable brightness, comparable
color.

The industrial design of the iPhone 4G is superb compared to any other phone
(or electronic device) I've seen. It's more comparable to what you'd expect to
find in a watch.

~~~
nooneelse
Using this article's threshold of 287ppi@12" for "retinal", and the EVO screen
specs on wikipedia which give it about 217ppi, it would be retinal at a
distance of 15.9".

------
ugh
It seems to me that the black gaps are bigger. I just did a back of the
envelope calculation, using the photos he posted and it looks as though black
gaps take up about 30 percent of the space on the first and second iPhone
while they take up about 40 percent on the new iPhone 4.

I wonder what the effects of that are. It probably just makes the display a
bit dimmer (if one were to use the same backlight).

~~~
Groxx
Though I'm not discounting that it may in fact be dimmer:

Larger gaps _alone_ implies dimmer, but this can be accounted for by having
the pixels put out more light. _Having_ larger gaps on a display doesn't mean
it's dimmer, as the pixels have likely changed characteristics in the process
of shrinking them.

~~~
ugh
(It’s, by the way, not that the gaps got necessarily bigger, maybe a little,
it’s just that they didn’t shrink either and, with more pixels, there are also
more gaps.)

------
macrael
Are the pixels on the iPhone vertically oriented like pixels on desktop
monitors usually are?

~~~
ugh
In portrait orientation they have the same orientation as pixels on desktop
monitors, i.e. the subpixels of individual pixels are next to each other, not
on top of each other. (I looked at my third generation iPod touch. Well, I
took a macro photo with my trusty Ricoh GR Digital II [1]. The only tool I
have with which I can make subpixels – barely – visible. Hm, water drops might
work, too, but that seems a bit risky.)

[1] <http://www.dpreview.com/news/0710/07103001ricohgrd2.asp>

~~~
macrael
How does rotating the screen affect text antialiasing?

~~~
ugh
I just checked Safari, they don’t actually do any subpixel antialiasing. Just
“normal” antialiasing. I would guess that if it’s not used in Safari it’s used
nowhere, so no problems with that :)

(Subpixel antialiasing seems unnecessary with resolutions like that. Heck,
even any other kind of antialiasing is beginning to become unnecessary with
resolutions like that.)

------
borisk
Super AMOLED > IPS [http://www.intomobile.com/2010/06/22/samsung-galaxy-s-
super-...](http://www.intomobile.com/2010/06/22/samsung-galaxy-s-super-amoled-
screen-has-180-degree-viewing-angle/)

~~~
yardie
Wow, that link was absolutely useless. No information, no comparisons,
nothing. It read more like a hit piece for samsung

~~~
borisk
How about '180 degree viewing angle', 'Quadrupling the resolution on the
screen would only increase the clarity at most only three to five percent' and
'the Retina Display is too power-hungry, which drains the battery up to 30%
faster than you’d find on their Super AMOLED screens'

[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=0jE&rls=org.mozilla:en-
US:official&&sa=X&ei=DfwkTMGMEY72OarKgPwG&ved=0CBYQvwUoAQ&q=samsung+super+amoled+vs+apple+retina&spell=1)

~~~
Groxx
Yes, lets all take a competitor's word at face value. And that clarity quote
is complete bull, just _look_ at a 3G and a 4G side by side. I like AMOLED
screens, but the article is worthless.

How _would_ one calculate clarity? It seems it would be a subjective
measurement... maybe they're looking at the phones from 10 feet away?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I've not read that particular link but Samsung have made that only 5% better
claim comparing the Retina screen to their slighly lower DPI Super-AMOLED
screens. While it seems common to compare it only to the previous iPhone
screens, they were no longer state of the art even before the new iPhone.

