As a side note, doesn't the guy talking to the woman with the baby look like a younger and chubbier steve jobs? You know iClone is coming soon. Everyone will get a hot model. Hell with Microsoft, I'm switching for sure when that happens.
What on earth are you expecting? Should Apple load pictures of your friends off Facebook or Flickr?
Models used in advertising have always been more attractive on average. Even the comparatively unattractive models are more photogenic on average. And what does this have to do with the topic?
Stop cluttering HN with petty complaints about Apple.
Yeah, I know what sarcasm is. Famously known as being difficult to communicate on the Internet. You might want to read up on that.
It's only obvious this is sarcasm after reading the last line of the OP. Without that context, it's indistinguishable from the petty complaints around here. Therefore, misdirected anger remains. Rargh.
I also don't think the OP is making a petty complaint (even if it probably got upvoted for petty reasons), as the representation IS potentially misleading, despite there being good reasons for it.
Isn't this obvious to anyone seeing the ads? I don't think people skiing are actually going to fly out of my TV when I see those ads, or that a humanoid rabbit is actually going to try to steal my Trix.
I think a better example would be do people think they will experience similar changes to the people in the before and after photographs (beauty/weight loss/dental) or do they believe the examples of computer speed/performance improvement (download times or computing performance) products.
No one that sees these videos or ads on the web will be using a 300dpi screen so they need to overcompensate. A more interesting comparison will be what resolution they show in their print ads.
> No one that sees these videos or ads on the web will be using a 300dpi screen so they need to overcompensate
No reason to overcompensate. What Apple shows is one enormously blown-up pixelated "before" screen compared to an "after" one displayed on the native best-possible resolution of the display people are seeing. They show much more than a 2x improvement (it's twice as high, not 4 times, because resolution is measured linearly, not by area)
They could always take the approach those ads for some television with George Takei took: simply inform the viewer that their current display is inadequate to the task (1) of showing the screen image, make a joke about it, and not-so-subtly hint that they go check it out in the store.
1- Whether or not this is, in fact, the case is not relevant.
Well, looking at the keynote slide, the samples are heavily zoomed in so 'old' pixels are depicted as tens of screen pixels high. For an honest portrayal, it's easy: 'new' pixels just need to be depicted as half-as-high. Sorry, but the '300dpi' blather is complete reality-distortion nonsense. :)
Do you have the slides? I just saw the image from the guy's site. I'm not sure how much the angle of the photo will compress the distant (high quality) letter. those displays are huge, so maybe the letters are 30' apart? it's not clear how far away the camera is.
They are kind of weird samples. For example the big pixel side is highlighting 25 pixels, but you could easily draw a 16 pixel square and assert the light row should go in the next sample. Also, the big side is taken from a point with a -1 slope, but the little side is much steeper, maybe 5? It seems like you'd want to compare the same section of both letters.
Also, it's not really clear to me why each red box in the lower left sample has 2 or more colors. That seems like a good indicator that the red box != one pixel.
Sorry, no, when I say slide I'm looking at the photo of Steve Jobs with a big screen behind him showing two letter 'a's. One is heavily pixellated, and the other one is smooth in comparison - at the resolution of the slide display. Given the size of the old pixels, the new pixels should be easily visible but aren't.
Of course it could be a misleading screen-grab and the slide was not purporting to show old iPhone resolution next to new iPhone resolution here. Maybe it's 'old' compared to 'perfect'.
(I should point out, my participation in this crucial discussion is dependent entirely on the slowness of my compiler).
Actually, I just realized... for the effect of what they're claiming (pixels smaller than you can see), this is a perfect comparison. Blocks to none. Sure, they're achieving it by bending the rules, but I got the impression that 300dpi played second fiddle to "your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels."[1]
The side-by-side hover-loupe (under "In a word, resolutionary") is very very good at demonstrating the difference.
The loupe uses the image below. You can open them and verify that no cheating has been used. The 3GS image has 2*2 pixel blocks all over.
The images don't have subpixel antialiasing (as they have to be viewable on all kinds of monitors), so I expect them to look a tiny bit better IRL.
A truly great difference if your iPhone was the size of an iPad.
Put them both on the screen and stand far enough back to equalize them with the size of an iPhone held up at a reasonable reading distance. They will both be equally unreadable.
I was a bit of a skeptic about HD - but I suspect it all comes down to the quality of the production. I was watching the BBC "Wonders of the Solar System" last night and it looked awesome in HD.
It is very, very, very easy to put yourself in a situation where 1080 is useless. The cutoff for where your 1080 40" TV might as well be a 720 TV is 7 to 8 feet; further away than that and you can't tell the difference between 1080 and 720. At about 12 feet you've lost HD entirely. Many people have setups that fail these criteria. And this is a continuum, not a sharp cutoff, so if you're on the far side you may be able to tell a difference but not think it's worth it.
Now, all that said, well-upsampled DVDs are much closer to BluRay than people selling BluRay would like to admit. It isn't the same, but I couldn't call it "night and day", certainly.
All true, but worth a brief addition: these viewing distance / screen size / resolution models all assume average adult vision, so if you are one of the folks both lucky and unlucky enough to have above-average vision (or below, for that matter) you should take that into account.
As but one example, the parent's example transition at 7 to 8 feet would occur around 10 feet for me. Above-average vision is great on paper but translates into more expensive displays positioned farther away. :(
Hi-Def content has a higher resolution, but if you have average vision with an average size TV and you sit the average distance from the screen then you can't possibly see any difference.
When you're in the TV shop where they've carefully arranged the TVs so you can't stand more than a few feet back then there will be obvious differences.
Here's a nice graph to check whether you should be able to see a difference:
One interesting wrinkle is that if you're at the right distance for HD, then you're too close for any SD content you have and vice versa so unless you only watch one resolution then you either put up with the SD or the HD looking worse than it should.
I can see a difference between bluray and dvd but to be honest upconverted dvds are of nice enough quality I can't justify buying hi def most of the time.
To me, the refresh rate makes a much bigger difference than the resolution. Most people I know look at me like I'm crazy when I say "I don't really care for HD"
I didn't say I can't tell the difference. All I meant was at the end of the day, if I watch a soccer game (for example) in "standard" definition versus HD, I still watch the same game without any loss of useful information whatsoever. Why does HD make my life better?
It was not the high-quality of the "a" on the right that was exaggerated, it was the low quality of the one on the left.
The "a" on the right is fine, it is there to represent the kind of image in which you no longer are able to detect pixillation, going above of the supposed 300dpi limit, like what would happen on the iPhone4. On the other hand, presenting on the left an "a" with half the quality of the one on the right would probably be too difficult for people to spot the difference.
If they were fair on that slide, it probably would be interesting to analyze if people would really notice the difference or if they would just pretend they did (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperors_New_Clothes). Sure thing, it would not have that much of an impact, at least until all of those people get the chance of having the new iPhone in their hands.
Adding to that the fact that their clever semantics is making it sound better than it is (claiming '4x more pixels' - which is true, but it's just 2x the resolution)...
It's the best mobile device screen out there, hands down. They really don't need to do that.
I was wondering about that. It did look like the "after" image was just someone using the font at full resolution, rather than being properly scaled down.
Is 300 really the max of the eye, I wonder how that is calculated. For instance, if you had a 1 pixel line at about a 15 degree angle, does that mean you would see no aliasing effects?
This is a bit of sensationalist non-news, isn't it? I mean, we all know how exactly every single computer software/hardware manufacturer always use "resolution-less" photographs in their ads on computer screens, cellphone screens and so on.
I think when you're specifically comparing resolutions, and you make one resolutionless and the other not... well, I'm sorry but it's not quite the same.
