6 ms·

IPhone 4 to have dense IPS display

42 points by mootymoots 16y ago

frou_dh 16y ago
It's nice to see Apple get behind IPS to the extent that you don't even have to dig in to the Tech Specs page to be told that the iPad uses it ( http://www.apple.com/ipad/ http://www.apple.com/ipad/ ) IPS monitors on the desktop are a treat to use, especially if they're calibrated. All TFTs are nowhere near created equal.
- nickpp 16y ago
  Hear hear. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for those awful TN displays so common on laptops... Mine is so bad I can't even look at photos together with somebody else...
- MikeCapone 16y ago
  Absolutely. I'm still waiting for a good, affordable IPS and LED backlit desktop LCD to replace my aging Dell 20", and my hope is that Apple will help push this technology back into the mainstream consciousness as a "thing to have", and that companies will start mass producing them to have a competitive edge.
axod 16y ago
> "The Nexus One's screen uses a "PenTile" grid, reportedly to reduce costs, which packs smaller green pixel components between red and blue elements. This irregular arrangement of subpixel elements results in the Nexus One providing a less accurate display of lines on the screen." Is that really accurate? Our eyes are less sensitive to green than red and blue so it seems like the nexus one grid is logical. Also anecdotally my Nexus One display actually seems clearer and more vibrant than my iPhone 3g. It'd be cool to have a more technical description of how the 2 approaches compare. Edit: I just took pictures of my iPhone 3G, Nexus One, MBP and Samsung LCD TV. It's a close up of the Google logo on each display. The Samsung one is especially interesting. It does make for a very clear bright display actually. http://axod.net/IPhone3G_Google.jpg http://axod.net/IPhone3G_Google.jpg http://axod.net/NexusOne_Google.jpg http://axod.net/NexusOne_Google.jpg http://axod.net/MacBookPro_Google.jpg http://axod.net/MacBookPro_Google.jpg http://axod.net/SamsungTV_Google.jpg http://axod.net/SamsungTV_Google.jpg
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  Eyes are more sensitive to green, that's why Pentile RGBG as in the Nexus One screens have twice as many green pixels as red or blue ones. Also, as anyone who follows the Apple blog scene knows, the author Mr. Dilger is either a callous manipulator who has hit on a lucrative pro-Apple-troll writing style, or is a very scary individual indeed.
  - axod 16y ago
    Oops. Thanks. I knew it was one or the other. The article here seemed to just blindly dismiss it as an "irregular pattern", suggesting it's like that purely for some cost reason - why would it be cheaper to create an irregular pattern rather than a regular one? :/
    - DougBTX 16y ago
      (OT Snark: So, regardless of which way round it is, it's still logical right?)
  - frou_dh 16y ago
    See also night vision goggles?
  - petercooper 16y ago
    Now I'm confused. If eyes are more sensitive to green, wouldn't fewer green elements be needed to have the same effect? :-) (Or is it that they're more sensitive to the degrees of luminosity rather than the luminosity per-se?)
    - gjm11 16y ago
      The green subpixels in a Pentile display are (1) smaller and (2) more numerous. #1 is OK because to get a given perceived brightness you need less actual energy in green than in red or blue. #2 is good because accuracy in green matters more than accuracy in red or (especially) blue. What's not so reasonable is that AIUI these displays' resolution is usually quoted as if there were the same number of pixels as green subpixels, which would only be reasonable if the human eye simply couldn't see details in red and blue at all. Which is almost true for blue, but not for red.
anigbrowl 16y ago
The AMOLED pixel layout on the Nexus one is actually the same as that employed in many professional video codecs, just in case anyone was wondering where it originated. There's a lot of research backing up its viability as a balanced-looking display arrangement.
tumult 16y ago
I love my Nexus One's screen (AMOLED.) Android 2.2 corrected a lot of color calibration problems present when it was released, so the red/warm caste is mostly gone. The colors seem 'cartoonish' at first, since the contrast ratio is so ridiculously high compared to a normal screen. You'll use it for a few days, then look at your iPhone (well, if you're a dork like me, you'll have both) and the iPhone will look washed out and crappy. The dark areas on an AMOLED are especially dark -- it looks like the screen when it's off. In other words, the screen on a Nexus One (and HTC HD2, etc.) looks pretty much the same with a full black screen as it does when it's powered off. Very cool. Here's the downside: it's garbage in daylight. Even if you aren't in direct sun, as soon as you're outside, that vibrant screen turns into an indecipherable grey rectangle. Far worse than a TN or IPS display. Apparently there are upcoming 'Super AMOLED'-type panels that should work better in daylight, but it's not what you'll get on a device right now, so oh well. I spend most of my time in the dark, so the daylight thing doesn't bug me too much. The viewing angle is also very good on an AMOLED screen, better even than IPS. It makes sense that Apple would choose IPS over AMOLED. IPS works in a broader range of conditions. Imagine the howls of anguish if people couldn't use it in daylight. There are lots of Android phones to choose from, so you could always get one without an AMOLED display. But there's only one iPhone. The condescending tone in this article ("made this way to save money" repeated over and over) is retarded. They come off sounding like fanboys. At 250+ dots per inch, you can't see the difference between an irregular grid or a regular grid. Seriously.
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  HTC HD2 and the very similar Evo 4G have a standard screen, not AMOLED. If you happen to be allergic to one or the other then Android's fragmentation lets you choose. Also, don't fall into their rhetorical trap. The irregular grid may well be better, and the difference may well be visible at current iPhone resolution and be positive in AMOLEDs direction. This may, or may not, become less true as the next iPhone doubles height and width, but I'm not going to assume anything based on Appleinsider's take on the matter. I don't think anyone's linked yet to the very in-depth Ars Technica article that looked into this screen technology: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/secrets-of-the-nexus-ones-screen-science-color-and-hacks.ars/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/secrets-of-the-n... spoiler: the 800x480 RGBG screen could be considered equivalent to a 653x392 RGB one, and regarding the iPhone: The Nexus One screen remains better than the iPhone screen for text reproduction because the overall resolution is much higher, even taking into account the factors I describe. So if the iPhone is your measuring stick, the N1 screen really rocks. Overall, the N1 display is beautiful and vivid with dark blacks and incredible photo reproduction. So this screen (and other standard screens with 800x480 pixels such as the Droid he mentions in the article) had leapfrogged the iPhone. A new iPhone will be out soon, that it appears will leapfrog these screens. Welcome to technology.
spot 16y ago
Now that there are 3 different iphone resolutions, are we going to keep hearing about how bad fragmentation is?
- ugh 16y ago
  What’s the third one? The iPad? That’s fragmentation you want – iPhone apps make no sense on that device. Other than that, doubling the horizontal and vertical number of pixels (four times the pixels) is actually quite clever and will probably not lead to any fragmentation. Since the display’s size won’t change in any significant way, old iPhone apps will just look the same on the new device (every pixel will just be displayed four times, no need for ugly interpolation) – everything that’s a vector and not pixels will just look better without any effort on the developers’ part. The old iPhones presumably won’t have any problem with apps that come with higher resolution bitmaps. Since the screen size doesn’t change it also doesn’t make any sense to add any additional elements which would then be too small for older devices – the size of our fingers and the resolution of our eyes is the limiting factor here, not the resolution of the screen. All of this also means that a increase in resolution is no more a big leap forward (i.e. it allows you to display more stuff), it “merely” makes text, videos and photos look much nicer. It’s quite cool that we finally reached that point.
  - DougBTX 16y ago
    Palm did the same trick when they switched from 160x160 screens to 320x320, back in the day.
ZitchDog 16y ago
Looks like Gruber was right on the money again. From April: http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_960_by_640 http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_960_by_640
s3graham 16y ago
320ppi is getting to be pretty sweet. Hook me up with a 30" version, along with one more doubling of ppi and it's going to be amazing.
zokier 16y ago
I don't care about iPhone. But when do I get dense IPS displays for desktops? Feels like we have been stuck to 100 PPI forever. 24" 300 PPI IPS droool

42 points by mootymoots 16y ago

It's nice to see Apple get behind IPS to the extent that you don't even have to dig in to the Tech Specs page to be told that the iPad uses it ( http://www.apple.com/ipad/ http://www.apple.com/ipad/ ) IPS monitors on the desktop are a treat to use, especially if they're calibrated. All TFTs are nowhere near created equal.

nickpp 16y ago
Hear hear. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for those awful TN displays so common on laptops... Mine is so bad I can't even look at photos together with somebody else...
MikeCapone 16y ago
Absolutely. I'm still waiting for a good, affordable IPS and LED backlit desktop LCD to replace my aging Dell 20", and my hope is that Apple will help push this technology back into the mainstream consciousness as a "thing to have", and that companies will start mass producing them to have a competitive edge.

axod 16y ago

> "The Nexus One's screen uses a "PenTile" grid, reportedly to reduce costs, which packs smaller green pixel components between red and blue elements. This irregular arrangement of subpixel elements results in the Nexus One providing a less accurate display of lines on the screen." Is that really accurate? Our eyes are less sensitive to green than red and blue so it seems like the nexus one grid is logical. Also anecdotally my Nexus One display actually seems clearer and more vibrant than my iPhone 3g. It'd be cool to have a more technical description of how the 2 approaches compare. Edit: I just took pictures of my iPhone 3G, Nexus One, MBP and Samsung LCD TV. It's a close up of the Google logo on each display. The Samsung one is especially interesting. It does make for a very clear bright display actually. http://axod.net/IPhone3G_Google.jpg http://axod.net/IPhone3G_Google.jpg http://axod.net/NexusOne_Google.jpg http://axod.net/NexusOne_Google.jpg http://axod.net/MacBookPro_Google.jpg http://axod.net/MacBookPro_Google.jpg http://axod.net/SamsungTV_Google.jpg http://axod.net/SamsungTV_Google.jpg

ZeroGravitas 16y ago
Eyes are more sensitive to green, that's why Pentile RGBG as in the Nexus One screens have twice as many green pixels as red or blue ones. Also, as anyone who follows the Apple blog scene knows, the author Mr. Dilger is either a callous manipulator who has hit on a lucrative pro-Apple-troll writing style, or is a very scary individual indeed.
- axod 16y ago
  Oops. Thanks. I knew it was one or the other. The article here seemed to just blindly dismiss it as an "irregular pattern", suggesting it's like that purely for some cost reason - why would it be cheaper to create an irregular pattern rather than a regular one? :/
  - DougBTX 16y ago
    (OT Snark: So, regardless of which way round it is, it's still logical right?)
- frou_dh 16y ago
  See also night vision goggles?
- petercooper 16y ago
  Now I'm confused. If eyes are more sensitive to green, wouldn't fewer green elements be needed to have the same effect? :-) (Or is it that they're more sensitive to the degrees of luminosity rather than the luminosity per-se?)
  - gjm11 16y ago
    The green subpixels in a Pentile display are (1) smaller and (2) more numerous. #1 is OK because to get a given perceived brightness you need less actual energy in green than in red or blue. #2 is good because accuracy in green matters more than accuracy in red or (especially) blue. What's not so reasonable is that AIUI these displays' resolution is usually quoted as if there were the same number of pixels as green subpixels, which would only be reasonable if the human eye simply couldn't see details in red and blue at all. Which is almost true for blue, but not for red.

anigbrowl 16y ago

The AMOLED pixel layout on the Nexus one is actually the same as that employed in many professional video codecs, just in case anyone was wondering where it originated. There's a lot of research backing up its viability as a balanced-looking display arrangement.

tumult 16y ago

I love my Nexus One's screen (AMOLED.) Android 2.2 corrected a lot of color calibration problems present when it was released, so the red/warm caste is mostly gone. The colors seem 'cartoonish' at first, since the contrast ratio is so ridiculously high compared to a normal screen. You'll use it for a few days, then look at your iPhone (well, if you're a dork like me, you'll have both) and the iPhone will look washed out and crappy. The dark areas on an AMOLED are especially dark -- it looks like the screen when it's off. In other words, the screen on a Nexus One (and HTC HD2, etc.) looks pretty much the same with a full black screen as it does when it's powered off. Very cool. Here's the downside: it's garbage in daylight. Even if you aren't in direct sun, as soon as you're outside, that vibrant screen turns into an indecipherable grey rectangle. Far worse than a TN or IPS display. Apparently there are upcoming 'Super AMOLED'-type panels that should work better in daylight, but it's not what you'll get on a device right now, so oh well. I spend most of my time in the dark, so the daylight thing doesn't bug me too much. The viewing angle is also very good on an AMOLED screen, better even than IPS. It makes sense that Apple would choose IPS over AMOLED. IPS works in a broader range of conditions. Imagine the howls of anguish if people couldn't use it in daylight. There are lots of Android phones to choose from, so you could always get one without an AMOLED display. But there's only one iPhone. The condescending tone in this article ("made this way to save money" repeated over and over) is retarded. They come off sounding like fanboys. At 250+ dots per inch, you can't see the difference between an irregular grid or a regular grid. Seriously.

ZeroGravitas 16y ago
HTC HD2 and the very similar Evo 4G have a standard screen, not AMOLED. If you happen to be allergic to one or the other then Android's fragmentation lets you choose. Also, don't fall into their rhetorical trap. The irregular grid may well be better, and the difference may well be visible at current iPhone resolution and be positive in AMOLEDs direction. This may, or may not, become less true as the next iPhone doubles height and width, but I'm not going to assume anything based on Appleinsider's take on the matter. I don't think anyone's linked yet to the very in-depth Ars Technica article that looked into this screen technology: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/secrets-of-the-nexus-ones-screen-science-color-and-hacks.ars/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/secrets-of-the-n... spoiler: the 800x480 RGBG screen could be considered equivalent to a 653x392 RGB one, and regarding the iPhone: The Nexus One screen remains better than the iPhone screen for text reproduction because the overall resolution is much higher, even taking into account the factors I describe. So if the iPhone is your measuring stick, the N1 screen really rocks. Overall, the N1 display is beautiful and vivid with dark blacks and incredible photo reproduction. So this screen (and other standard screens with 800x480 pixels such as the Droid he mentions in the article) had leapfrogged the iPhone. A new iPhone will be out soon, that it appears will leapfrog these screens. Welcome to technology.

spot 16y ago

Now that there are 3 different iphone resolutions, are we going to keep hearing about how bad fragmentation is?

ugh 16y ago
What’s the third one? The iPad? That’s fragmentation you want – iPhone apps make no sense on that device. Other than that, doubling the horizontal and vertical number of pixels (four times the pixels) is actually quite clever and will probably not lead to any fragmentation. Since the display’s size won’t change in any significant way, old iPhone apps will just look the same on the new device (every pixel will just be displayed four times, no need for ugly interpolation) – everything that’s a vector and not pixels will just look better without any effort on the developers’ part. The old iPhones presumably won’t have any problem with apps that come with higher resolution bitmaps. Since the screen size doesn’t change it also doesn’t make any sense to add any additional elements which would then be too small for older devices – the size of our fingers and the resolution of our eyes is the limiting factor here, not the resolution of the screen. All of this also means that a increase in resolution is no more a big leap forward (i.e. it allows you to display more stuff), it “merely” makes text, videos and photos look much nicer. It’s quite cool that we finally reached that point.
- DougBTX 16y ago
  Palm did the same trick when they switched from 160x160 screens to 320x320, back in the day.

ZitchDog 16y ago

Looks like Gruber was right on the money again. From April: http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_960_by_640 http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_960_by_640

s3graham 16y ago

320ppi is getting to be pretty sweet. Hook me up with a 30" version, along with one more doubling of ppi and it's going to be amazing.

zokier 16y ago

I don't care about iPhone. But when do I get dense IPS displays for desktops? Feels like we have been stuck to 100 PPI forever. 24" 300 PPI IPS droool