11 ms·

A Proposal for a High Resolution Display (2009)

60 points by jevinskie 10y ago

grabcocque 10y ago
Isn't that Pentile?
- justinsaccount 10y ago
  Without the rotation, yeah.. pentile is basically green red green blue green red green blue green What I don't understand about this proposal is why the rotated grid has 4 different colored squares.
  - patrickyeon 10y ago
    The author talks about using two different greens in the 5th paragraph. It creates a wider colour gamut.
    - mark-r 10y ago
      The real question is if the second green is physically realizable with cost-effective chemistry. Given that all real-world sources will start with 3-color RGB, it's questionable whether the improvement would be worth the cost. The Sony F828 camera with its RGBE sensor had the same problem in reverse, there was no advantage to having a 4th primary when everything had to be down-converted to the lowest common denominator.
      - jacobolus 10y ago
        Sony sensor press release: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/200307/03-029E/ http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/200307/03-02... I’d love to see some better multispectral cameras and displays. If you can get the content and hardware working together, you can get substantially better results than current tech. Of course, as you say, there’s a big chicken–egg problem.
    - puetzk 10y ago
      You can't, of course, see the additional colors that would be enabled by looking at his picture of the gamut, because your current monitor can't produce them :-)
  - Scene_Cast2 10y ago
    With rotation it's "Diamond Pentile" (the current popular layout on OLED smartphones). One difference though - pentile doesn't do extended gamut, at least not the way he proposes.
trevyn 10y ago
(2009)
userbinator 10y ago
Digital cameras have used LCDs with non-square pixels for years, but the problem is that with such an arrangement, you can't get sharp text (or any other fine horizontal/vertical line detail) without things looking blurry or unusually jagged vertically/horizontally. Photography is (mostly) fine because the content is largely smooth gradients. The red and blue pixels can be used for sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which can improve percieved resolution and rendering accuracy further. Subpixel AA just makes my eyes water and I feel dizzy after a few minutes, probably because there are no real edges to focus on. I'm probably in the minority, but not the only one who prefers pixel-sharp text.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  By rotating the grid 45 degrees, the OP mitigates the problem with fine horizontal / vertical line detail.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    Can you explain that? My intuitive sense is that that would make fine orthogonal detail worse.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  If your antialiasing is making things look fuzzy, then you are either positioning yourself too close to the display, or your display has too low resolution. When you’re talking about digital camera LCDs, do you mean the display on the back of the camera? Those are mostly awful, I just ignore them. :-)
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    It can also be a display gamma issue, which will be worse at some angles on TN displays. But beyond that, disabling antialiasing and using a pixel font (like Terminus) gives an effectively higher perceived resolution than one would expect from modeling a display as a collection of point samples.
  - frankling_ 10y ago
jacobolus 10y ago
The ideal would be to use hexagonal pixels for camera sensors, displays, and printer dither/halftone patterns, the same way human retinas arrange their cone cells. :-) Cf. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hexagonal+image+processing https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hexagonal+image+process... Since we have so much variety in screen shapes and resolutions today, most of the time we’re resampling images on the fly to rotate/scale them into their position on screen anyway, so the pixel data representing an image in a file isn’t getting directly sent to the same on-screen grid. Thus for most of what we display on screen, there’s no inherent need to stick to the same grid shape used for storage, and a hexagonal pixel grid would in practice look better for the same number of pixels (hexagonal grids are particularly good for representing curved shapes and reducing moiré artifacts). For that matter, there’s no inherent need to store square grids of pixels in our image formats; we could use hexagonal-pixel files and easily resample them for display on arbitrary display grids. The only thing stopping us is technical fluency with rectangular grids, and cultural/historical inertia. (Think of the iPhone 6+, where software can’t even address the native screen pixels, and literally everything gets rendered to one size grid and then resampled for a different display grid.) Beyond that, people really need to stop using the extremely misleading CIE 1931 (x, y) chromaticity diagram when comparing color gamuts. The CIE 1976 (u', v') UCS diagram is much more uniform, and just as easy to plot (it’s just a simple linear transformation of the (x, y) diagram). We’ve known the problems with the (x, y) diagram for >50 years now, there’s really no excuse for its continuing ubiquity. For making diagrams of pixel grids, it would also be better to show less intensely colored RGB pixels, so that the G’ pixel doesn’t so look obviously less intense.
- ssalazar 10y ago
  > (Think of the iPhone 6+, where software can’t even address the native screen pixels, and literally everything gets rendered to one size grid and then resampled for a different display grid.) This isn't really how this works. If everything was being upsampled, youd see obvious jaggies and upsampling artifacts. The only reason iOS can do this reasonably well is because the actual resolution is exactly 2x or 3x the resolution presented to the software. The actual rendering takes place at native resolution; graphics assets are produced in the native resolution. Upsampled rendering/assets look very obviously bad. > The only thing stopping us is technical fluency with rectangular grids, and cultural/historical inertia. These are factors, but theres also not much evidence that resampling from arbitrary virtual to physical resolutions will actually look good.
mikejmoffitt 10y ago
This kind of display is poor at representing hard, orthagonal edges, which drive much of our user interfaces, lots of text rendering, and pixel art.
- Retra 10y ago
  The depends on the real resolution, doesn't it?
  - mikejmoffitt 10y ago
    Increasing resolution makes it _better_, but the same resolution with square RGB arrangements will do a better job for the aforementioned contexts.
Someone 10y ago
I think this mostly would be a marginal gain, especially given that there would be a lot of catching up to do in the manufacturing space, except for the wider color gamut, but it is interesting to think about possible improvements. Here are some ideas: - "Note that red and blue pixels need to be twice as intensive as green" Is there a necessity for pixels to be rectangular? If not, I would go and shop in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_convex_uniform_tilings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_convex_uniform_tilin... to look for a way to have fewer, but larger red and blue pixels. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snub_square_tiling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snub_square_tiling using green triangles looks like a decent candidate to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elongated_triangular_tiling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elongated_triangular_tiling also seems reasonable. In practice, the ideal pattern would depend on the relative brightness of the colours in the light source used. (I guess it would be easier to just make the familiar rectangular pattern with 4 stripes RGBG and/or with variable widths of the color bands at a slightly higher resolution than to experiment with these) - If you are making a display where each pixel directly emits light (as opposed to a LCD display, where a pixel can be controlled to let through light from the backlight) and pixels can be made transparent for colors they do not emit, layer the pixels.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  There’s no inherent reason display pixels (or sensor pixels) must be any particular shape. For an amusing idea w/r/t sensor pixel shapes, check out this paper: http://www.cis.pku.edu.cn/faculty/vision/zlin/Publications/2015-TIP-Penrose.pdf http://www.cis.pku.edu.cn/faculty/vision/zlin/Publications/2...
- geon 10y ago
  How about penrose tiling?
sethish 10y ago
OLPC did the color swizzling back in 2006 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:PixelLayoutDiagonal.png http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:PixelLayoutDiagonal.png
- geon 10y ago
  So they throw away 2/3 of the graphics memory?
zbuf 10y ago
A nice idea. The trouble is our reliance on expecting displays to reproduce frequencies (aka. crispness) that is beyond the Nyquist frequency of the display. So with the proposed bayer pattern, we can no longer represent horizontal and vertical lines which are common in text and widgets with the sharpness we expect (unlike photographs, where we don't expect these) We should be looking to satisfy Nyquist with a high enough resolution display and an optical low-pass filter between the display and the eye. Then things will all fall in to place...

60 points by jevinskie 10y ago

grabcocque 10y ago

Isn't that Pentile?

justinsaccount 10y ago
Without the rotation, yeah.. pentile is basically green red green blue green red green blue green What I don't understand about this proposal is why the rotated grid has 4 different colored squares.
- patrickyeon 10y ago
  The author talks about using two different greens in the 5th paragraph. It creates a wider colour gamut.
  - mark-r 10y ago
    The real question is if the second green is physically realizable with cost-effective chemistry. Given that all real-world sources will start with 3-color RGB, it's questionable whether the improvement would be worth the cost. The Sony F828 camera with its RGBE sensor had the same problem in reverse, there was no advantage to having a 4th primary when everything had to be down-converted to the lowest common denominator.
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      Sony sensor press release: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/200307/03-029E/ http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/200307/03-02... I’d love to see some better multispectral cameras and displays. If you can get the content and hardware working together, you can get substantially better results than current tech. Of course, as you say, there’s a big chicken–egg problem.
  - puetzk 10y ago
    You can't, of course, see the additional colors that would be enabled by looking at his picture of the gamut, because your current monitor can't produce them :-)
- Scene_Cast2 10y ago
  With rotation it's "Diamond Pentile" (the current popular layout on OLED smartphones). One difference though - pentile doesn't do extended gamut, at least not the way he proposes.

trevyn 10y ago

(2009)

userbinator 10y ago

Digital cameras have used LCDs with non-square pixels for years, but the problem is that with such an arrangement, you can't get sharp text (or any other fine horizontal/vertical line detail) without things looking blurry or unusually jagged vertically/horizontally. Photography is (mostly) fine because the content is largely smooth gradients. The red and blue pixels can be used for sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which can improve percieved resolution and rendering accuracy further. Subpixel AA just makes my eyes water and I feel dizzy after a few minutes, probably because there are no real edges to focus on. I'm probably in the minority, but not the only one who prefers pixel-sharp text.

bryanlarsen 10y ago
By rotating the grid 45 degrees, the OP mitigates the problem with fine horizontal / vertical line detail.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  Can you explain that? My intuitive sense is that that would make fine orthogonal detail worse.
jacobolus 10y ago
If your antialiasing is making things look fuzzy, then you are either positioning yourself too close to the display, or your display has too low resolution. When you’re talking about digital camera LCDs, do you mean the display on the back of the camera? Those are mostly awful, I just ignore them. :-)
- nitrogen 10y ago
  It can also be a display gamma issue, which will be worse at some angles on TN displays. But beyond that, disabling antialiasing and using a pixel font (like Terminus) gives an effectively higher perceived resolution than one would expect from modeling a display as a collection of point samples.
- frankling_ 10y ago

jacobolus 10y ago

The ideal would be to use hexagonal pixels for camera sensors, displays, and printer dither/halftone patterns, the same way human retinas arrange their cone cells. :-) Cf. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hexagonal+image+processing https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hexagonal+image+process... Since we have so much variety in screen shapes and resolutions today, most of the time we’re resampling images on the fly to rotate/scale them into their position on screen anyway, so the pixel data representing an image in a file isn’t getting directly sent to the same on-screen grid. Thus for most of what we display on screen, there’s no inherent need to stick to the same grid shape used for storage, and a hexagonal pixel grid would in practice look better for the same number of pixels (hexagonal grids are particularly good for representing curved shapes and reducing moiré artifacts). For that matter, there’s no inherent need to store square grids of pixels in our image formats; we could use hexagonal-pixel files and easily resample them for display on arbitrary display grids. The only thing stopping us is technical fluency with rectangular grids, and cultural/historical inertia. (Think of the iPhone 6+, where software can’t even address the native screen pixels, and literally everything gets rendered to one size grid and then resampled for a different display grid.) Beyond that, people really need to stop using the extremely misleading CIE 1931 (x, y) chromaticity diagram when comparing color gamuts. The CIE 1976 (u', v') UCS diagram is much more uniform, and just as easy to plot (it’s just a simple linear transformation of the (x, y) diagram). We’ve known the problems with the (x, y) diagram for >50 years now, there’s really no excuse for its continuing ubiquity. For making diagrams of pixel grids, it would also be better to show less intensely colored RGB pixels, so that the G’ pixel doesn’t so look obviously less intense.

ssalazar 10y ago
> (Think of the iPhone 6+, where software can’t even address the native screen pixels, and literally everything gets rendered to one size grid and then resampled for a different display grid.) This isn't really how this works. If everything was being upsampled, youd see obvious jaggies and upsampling artifacts. The only reason iOS can do this reasonably well is because the actual resolution is exactly 2x or 3x the resolution presented to the software. The actual rendering takes place at native resolution; graphics assets are produced in the native resolution. Upsampled rendering/assets look very obviously bad. > The only thing stopping us is technical fluency with rectangular grids, and cultural/historical inertia. These are factors, but theres also not much evidence that resampling from arbitrary virtual to physical resolutions will actually look good.

mikejmoffitt 10y ago

This kind of display is poor at representing hard, orthagonal edges, which drive much of our user interfaces, lots of text rendering, and pixel art.

Retra 10y ago
The depends on the real resolution, doesn't it?
- mikejmoffitt 10y ago
  Increasing resolution makes it _better_, but the same resolution with square RGB arrangements will do a better job for the aforementioned contexts.

Someone 10y ago

I think this mostly would be a marginal gain, especially given that there would be a lot of catching up to do in the manufacturing space, except for the wider color gamut, but it is interesting to think about possible improvements. Here are some ideas: - "Note that red and blue pixels need to be twice as intensive as green" Is there a necessity for pixels to be rectangular? If not, I would go and shop in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_convex_uniform_tilings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_convex_uniform_tilin... to look for a way to have fewer, but larger red and blue pixels. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snub_square_tiling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snub_square_tiling using green triangles looks like a decent candidate to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elongated_triangular_tiling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elongated_triangular_tiling also seems reasonable. In practice, the ideal pattern would depend on the relative brightness of the colours in the light source used. (I guess it would be easier to just make the familiar rectangular pattern with 4 stripes RGBG and/or with variable widths of the color bands at a slightly higher resolution than to experiment with these) - If you are making a display where each pixel directly emits light (as opposed to a LCD display, where a pixel can be controlled to let through light from the backlight) and pixels can be made transparent for colors they do not emit, layer the pixels.

jacobolus 10y ago
There’s no inherent reason display pixels (or sensor pixels) must be any particular shape. For an amusing idea w/r/t sensor pixel shapes, check out this paper: http://www.cis.pku.edu.cn/faculty/vision/zlin/Publications/2015-TIP-Penrose.pdf http://www.cis.pku.edu.cn/faculty/vision/zlin/Publications/2...
geon 10y ago
How about penrose tiling?

sethish 10y ago

OLPC did the color swizzling back in 2006 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:PixelLayoutDiagonal.png http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:PixelLayoutDiagonal.png

geon 10y ago
So they throw away 2/3 of the graphics memory?

zbuf 10y ago

A nice idea. The trouble is our reliance on expecting displays to reproduce frequencies (aka. crispness) that is beyond the Nyquist frequency of the display. So with the proposed bayer pattern, we can no longer represent horizontal and vertical lines which are common in text and widgets with the sharpness we expect (unlike photographs, where we don't expect these) We should be looking to satisfy Nyquist with a high enough resolution display and an optical low-pass filter between the display and the eye. Then things will all fall in to place...