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> "A million more pixels than the iPad 3/4" I know it's something of a running joke that people like to see escalating numbers on spec sheets, regardless of wh

by roc 14y ago

> "A million more pixels than the iPad 3/4" I know it's something of a running joke that people like to see escalating numbers on spec sheets, regardless of what they mean in objective reality. But in this particular case it strikes me as particularly silly. The entire trumped-up definition of the "Retina" classification is based on the idea that the human eye literally can not distinguish individual pixels beyond a given threshold (at a given distance). Striving to go beyond that limit is... quite an interesting endeavor. Not only does it sound particularly pointless, but actually self-defeating as it would seemingly only add busywork to the GPU. * For most people, natch. I'm sure the discussions of devices at "higher than retina" resolutions will fill up with people claiming better than 20/20 vision, or uniquely short arms, or whatever.

Evbn 14y ago
It turns out that Steve Jobs was not in fact an opthamalogist.
anonymouz 14y ago
> For most people, natch. I'm sure the discussions of devices at "higher than retina" resolutions will fill up with people claiming better than 20/20 vision, or uniquely short arms, or whatever. I wonder, will we soon see a group of "visiophiles" (visual-philes? videophiles?) emerge to take their rightful place besides the audiophiles?
ChuckMcM 14y ago
So there is an interesting bit you're overlooking perhaps, which is 'gamut'. The additional pixel density can be exploited to provide "pixels" which have more subtle variations in color. In color printing the printer is capable of some number of dots per inch, but there is another number (sometimes called the 'screen resolution' as a kick back to the silkscreen printing process) where the color gamut peaks (the maximum number of different colors the printer can print). Generally screen gamut in 'sub-retina' displays is fixed by the ability of the electronics to modulate the component colors, but with additional pixels you can 'squeeze out' more colors by using a group of four, or nine, pixels that are colored to simulate a single pixel. Not a huge deal yet, but no doubt it will become one with '4x' and '8x' oversampled displays.

by roc 14y ago

Evbn 14y ago

It turns out that Steve Jobs was not in fact an opthamalogist.

anonymouz 14y ago

> For most people, natch. I'm sure the discussions of devices at "higher than retina" resolutions will fill up with people claiming better than 20/20 vision, or uniquely short arms, or whatever. I wonder, will we soon see a group of "visiophiles" (visual-philes? videophiles?) emerge to take their rightful place besides the audiophiles?

ChuckMcM 14y ago

So there is an interesting bit you're overlooking perhaps, which is 'gamut'. The additional pixel density can be exploited to provide "pixels" which have more subtle variations in color. In color printing the printer is capable of some number of dots per inch, but there is another number (sometimes called the 'screen resolution' as a kick back to the silkscreen printing process) where the color gamut peaks (the maximum number of different colors the printer can print). Generally screen gamut in 'sub-retina' displays is fixed by the ability of the electronics to modulate the component colors, but with additional pixels you can 'squeeze out' more colors by using a group of four, or nine, pixels that are colored to simulate a single pixel. Not a huge deal yet, but no doubt it will become one with '4x' and '8x' oversampled displays.