7 ms·

Toshiba announces 2560x1600 6.1" display

68 points by shalmanese 15y ago

pixie_ 15y ago
Can we squish it down to 1" so I can have my VR goggles now. I've been waiting 15 years.
- wisty 15y ago
  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.
JoshTriplett 15y ago
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.)
- eftpotrm 15y ago
  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.
- nazgulnarsil 15y ago
  two 3 inch displays at 720p would finally allow for some decent video glasses.
icki 15y ago
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.
- Too 15y ago
  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.
yahelc 15y ago
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.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  The photos in this article do the best job I've seen; they show close-up images of text at various DPIs, demonstrating the visibility of the pixels at lower DPIs. (It would have helped to have an image of the same text to view directly at normal size rather than zoomed in.)
- hammock 15y ago
  Yeah, Sharp acknowledged this limitation when they introduced their four-color Quattron TVs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4DK1Yx4R6k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4DK1Yx4R6k
  - wmf 15y ago
    But AFAIK, profiling of the Quattron shows that it's no better than RGB LCDs.
6ren 15y ago
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.
- capnrefsmmat 15y ago
  > (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/articles/fog0000000041.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-All-That.htm http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-All... 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.)
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    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".)
    - panic 15y ago
      That's kerning, not hinting. Hinting changes the glyphs themselves to lie more regularly on a pixel grid.
aheilbut 15y ago
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?
- windsurfer 15y ago
  It would probably be very thick, heavy, expensive, and have a high rate of failure.
  - aheilbut 15y ago
    IBM made the T220/T221 (22.1in, 3840×2400) from 2001-2005. It's definitely possible.
    - windsurfer 15y ago
      And it was $8,400 at release, and consumed 150w of power. It was also thick and heavy. Therefore, like I said, it would be very thick, heavy, expensive if produced even today.
      - ori_b 15y ago
        Technology and processing have both improved significantly since then.
    - JoshTriplett 15y ago
      Among other things, those monitors only refresh at 41 Hz, making them primarily useful for static images.
- electromagnetic 15y ago
  That's what I'm wondering. I don't really care about these small displays with huge resolutions because I don't find a huge benefit beyond a slightly better picture. I remember going from 320x240 to 800x600 on a 15" and my mind was blown. That's because my icons went from taking 1/4 of the screen to actually being an 'icon'.
kijin 15y ago
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.
- wmf 15y ago
  This was solved five years ago: http://www.webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/ http://www.webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/ Summary: px is a logical unit and 1 px = 2 (or more) pixels on high-DPI displays. Em is also a logical unit, although I think there are problems with em-based layout.
- ori_b 15y ago
  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).
pace 15y ago
the real question is: why is there still no ppi independent OS? i'd love to have +300ppi with OSX
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  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.
  - toyg 15y ago
    Last I checked, KDE 4 already supports SVG pretty much everywhere, making it work with high-resolution screens without problems (in theory).
artursapek 15y ago
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?
- alt_ 15y ago
  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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopic_display

68 points by shalmanese 15y ago

pixie_ 15y ago

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

wisty 15y ago
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.

JoshTriplett 15y ago

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.)

eftpotrm 15y ago
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.
nazgulnarsil 15y ago
two 3 inch displays at 720p would finally allow for some decent video glasses.

icki 15y ago

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.

Too 15y ago
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.

yahelc 15y ago

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.

JoshTriplett 15y ago
The photos in this article do the best job I've seen; they show close-up images of text at various DPIs, demonstrating the visibility of the pixels at lower DPIs. (It would have helped to have an image of the same text to view directly at normal size rather than zoomed in.)
hammock 15y ago
Yeah, Sharp acknowledged this limitation when they introduced their four-color Quattron TVs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4DK1Yx4R6k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4DK1Yx4R6k
- wmf 15y ago
  But AFAIK, profiling of the Quattron shows that it's no better than RGB LCDs.

6ren 15y ago

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.

capnrefsmmat 15y ago
> (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/articles/fog0000000041.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-All-That.htm http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-All... 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.)
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  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".)
  - panic 15y ago
    That's kerning, not hinting. Hinting changes the glyphs themselves to lie more regularly on a pixel grid.

aheilbut 15y ago

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?

windsurfer 15y ago
It would probably be very thick, heavy, expensive, and have a high rate of failure.
- aheilbut 15y ago
  IBM made the T220/T221 (22.1in, 3840×2400) from 2001-2005. It's definitely possible.
  - windsurfer 15y ago
    And it was $8,400 at release, and consumed 150w of power. It was also thick and heavy. Therefore, like I said, it would be very thick, heavy, expensive if produced even today.
    - ori_b 15y ago
      Technology and processing have both improved significantly since then.
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    Among other things, those monitors only refresh at 41 Hz, making them primarily useful for static images.
electromagnetic 15y ago
That's what I'm wondering. I don't really care about these small displays with huge resolutions because I don't find a huge benefit beyond a slightly better picture. I remember going from 320x240 to 800x600 on a 15" and my mind was blown. That's because my icons went from taking 1/4 of the screen to actually being an 'icon'.

kijin 15y ago

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.

wmf 15y ago
This was solved five years ago: http://www.webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/ http://www.webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/ Summary: px is a logical unit and 1 px = 2 (or more) pixels on high-DPI displays. Em is also a logical unit, although I think there are problems with em-based layout.
ori_b 15y ago
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).

pace 15y ago

the real question is: why is there still no ppi independent OS? i'd love to have +300ppi with OSX

InclinedPlane 15y ago
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.
- toyg 15y ago
  Last I checked, KDE 4 already supports SVG pretty much everywhere, making it work with high-resolution screens without problems (in theory).

artursapek 15y ago

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?

alt_ 15y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopic_display