

Toshiba announces 2560x1600 6.1" display - shalmanese
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5002/toshiba-releases-61-display-with-resolution-of-2560x1600

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yahelc
I always feel bad for companies trying to show off a higher resolution screen
-- if my screen has a lower resolution, by definition it's kind of hard for my
screen to accurately portray its quality; at best I can only see what my
screen can deliver.

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hammock
Yeah, Sharp acknowledged this limitation when they introduced their four-color
Quattron TVs <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4DK1Yx4R6k>

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wmf
But AFAIK, profiling of the Quattron shows that it's no better than RGB LCDs.

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pixie_
Can we squish it down to 1" so I can have my VR goggles now. I've been waiting
15 years.

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wisty
Turn it on its side, and put two pieces of glass in front, and you have two
times 1600 X 1280. It might be a bit heavy, though.

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aheilbut
Why aren't there any higher-resolution desktop displays? If they can make a
6.1" panel like this, why can't they make a 24" 4K panel?

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ChuckMcM
Two answers, biggest is yield (number of 'good' screens made for a given run)
and the second is bandwidth.

Assuming a 16:10 display a 4096 wide display would be 2560 lines 'tall' and
have a total of 31,457,280 pixel elements (r,g,b). Each of those would include
a transistor as well so another 31.5M transistors, coming out to driver logic
at the edge of the screen. At 498 ppi that would be about an 8" x 5" screen.

To drive that screen at 60hz you would have to push out 31.5M * 60 bytes of
pixel data (that is for 8 bits per color, higher fidelity 10 bits per color
would be more. At 60hz that is a bandwidth of 1.8 GBps or 18 Gbit/sec. This is
faster than the current DVI spec is rated for, although I believe dual-channel
can get there.

The yield rate inversely increases the cost per good screen, so a yield rate
of 50% doubles the cost, and a more likely yield of 25% quadruples the cost.
This can be offset somewhat by bigger glass (more chances to succeed,
semiconductor manufacturing is in many ways a game of statistics) but bigger
glass may require different factory layouts (they might have to build a
factory just for this type of display).

So Nvidia helped make some progress when they announced the Tegra-3 could
drive 2560 x 1600 displays. That's more than halfway to your 4K display. And
this will be the 'killer' display technology in the next gen 10" tablets.

If the tablets can keep up the ship rate then they will give manufacturers a
better feeling about being able to sell enough even higher resolution displays
to offset their costs and that is when we'll see something like this demo come
out in a larger size.

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parbo
I have a 30" Dell with 2560x1600 at work. It's about $1000. I wish there was a
24" with the same amount of pixels, but there aren't any..

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Samuel_Michon
30" @ 2560x1600 translates to 101 ppi [1]. Apple's Thunderbolt Display is 27"
@ 2560x1440 (109 ppi) and costs the same. A 24" screen @ 1560x1600 would be
126 ppi, the same pixel density as the screen of a 13" MacBook Air. [2]

All of those are a far cry from Toshiba's prototype (495 ppi) or the screen
Apple uses in its iPhone and iPod touch (330 ppi).

[1] <http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html>

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_densi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_density#Apple_Inc).

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JoshTriplett
Very impressive technology, but I agree with the conclusion in the article:
6.1" seems like an odd niche. Too large to fit in most pockets, so it doesn't
work for a smartphone, but a bit on the small side for a tablet.

The same 494.9 DPI would allow for a ~4.5" 1080p display, or ~3" 720p display,
both of which seem far more practical for smartphones. For a tablet, the
2560x1600 10.1" screen from Samsung seems sensible, and personally I'd settle
for a 10" 1080p display to reduce cost.

(All of this and still no 12" laptop displays with better than 1366x768 or
so.)

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eftpotrm
I found myself wondering if it was for a vehicular application.

I've never had a car with a built-in LCD info/nav/etc system to play with
them, but I can imagine 6" being a plausible size for some given other
standard sizes. Because it's bundled as part of a much, much larger whole than
with a phone it's likely able to support a potentially higher price point and
it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that a high-end car brand felt a
500DPI screen would be a good differentiating factor from competitor 100DPI
screens. 'Read as easily as paper' is a compelling selling point.

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icki
I imagine that this display is merely a proof of concept. There aren't many
electronic devices that use displays of that size, but perhaps 6.1" was the
smallest that Toshiba could scale a 1600p display.

Or perhaps the electronics required to produce such dense pixels are still
quite large, and whose rectangular dimensions wouldn't allow for displays of
the same density without a wide bezel.

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Too
What's the proof of concept with high res screens, they've been around for
some time, just not in any consumer products. I saw some 1280*1024 2" screens
several years ago. From texas instruments, i think its main use was in
projectors, i don't know if it could have been used for displays but from the
demo it looked exatly as an lcd but semi-transparent.

6" sounds pretty optimal for e-books i would say. ipad is too big and
smartphones are too small. This is also where there is good reason to have
such high res.

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6ren
I don't know, maybe the extra resolution is perceivable in the precise ends of
strokes of ideographic Japanese, Chinese and related writing systems? If so,
it is a huge market. (For the english alphabet, even old monitors seem fine to
me.) Also, 500 ppi is just unbelievably awesome - useful or not.

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capnrefsmmat
> (For the english alphabet, even old monitors seem fine to me.)

Possibly. But operating systems have to go to great lengths to display text
well, with subpixel antialiased rendering and all sorts of clever tricks to
make the most out of the limited resolution. This often doesn't work well,
leading to complaints like these:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000041.html>
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html>
[http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-
All...](http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-All-That.htm)

If we get up to 500 ppi, that's well into inkjet-printer quality text without
any antialiasing at all. Text would look rather nice. (Although I may be alone
in peering at laser-printed text just to admire how smooth it is.)

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JoshTriplett
I do agree that with a sufficiently high DPI, we can stop worrying so much
about anti-aliasing and especially sub-pixel anti-aliasing

The articles you mention don't so much represent cases of "doesn't work well"
as "no one solution satisfies everyone"; that problem does indeed go away when
you have enough DPI.

(We still have to care about hinting, though, because among other things we
want character boxes to overlap to avoid excessive whitespace in strings like
"AV" or "Tr".)

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panic
That's kerning, not hinting. Hinting changes the glyphs themselves to lie more
regularly on a pixel grid.

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JoshTriplett
As far as I know, the hinting instructions embedded in a font also includes
information about how to do kerning for that font, as well as replacement
glyphs for particular sets of adjacent characters (such as ff).

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artursapek
I thought the whole point of the "Retina display" is that it reaches the
threshold of pixel density where you can't see pixels anymore (at that
distance from the screen).

6.1" seems more the size of a small tablet than anything fit for a phone.
Assuming people hold a tablet about the same distance away from their eyes as
a phone, perhaps even farther, what's the point of having an even higher pixel
density? Isn't this going to cause more design problems than it provides
marketing benefits?

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alt_
Higher resolutions will still be needed for implementing autostereoscopic 3D
displays[1], where multiple angles of a scene are displayed at the same time.

Unlike 3D displays that use active glasses to time-division multiplex the
viewing angles for each eye, autostereoscopic displays use parallax barriers
or lenticular lenses to multiplex the images inside a single 2D image,
reducing the effective resolution per angle/eye.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopic_display>

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pace
the real question is:

why is there still no ppi independent OS?

i'd love to have +300ppi with OSX

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InclinedPlane
It's sad that both Windows and OS/X laid the groundwork for that sort of thing
years ago and yet neither have really made good on it yet.

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toyg
Last I checked, KDE 4 already supports SVG pretty much everywhere, making it
work with high-resolution screens without problems (in theory).

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kijin
I wonder how these high-res tablets would affect HTML5 media queries. Right
now, many of us do something like "screen and (max-device-width: 480px)".
That's going to get rather awkward if pixel density varies a lot between
devices. We won't be able to fool ourselves forever by implicitly multiplying
that by 2 (or some other factor).

Perhaps we'll need to standardize on a unit that is independent of screen
resolution. But it won't do to convert everything to millimeters, because
different devices are also meant to be used from different distances. 2mm on a
smartphone is OK. 2mm on a cinema display is virtually invisible.

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ori_b
A CSS px is not necessarily defined as a pixel -- The reference pixel defined
in the CSS spec is the length crossed by a 0.0213 degree arc at the typical
viewing distance (which works out as 96 DPI at arm's length).

