How sharp is the iPhone 4's screen? High Res 4 vs 3GS images

http://scobleizer.com/2010/06/13/how-sharp-is-the-iphone-4-0s-screen/#

by petekalo • 16 years ago

103 98 16 years ago

scobleizer.com

not shabby.

lyime• 16 years ago

here is a quick screenshot comparison http://grab.by/4UDZ

moxiemk1• 16 years ago

The improvement in the sharpness of the NYTimes logo is astounding. Call me a fanboy, but this kind of improvement in resolution is exciting.

Also, imagine a 30inch panel at this ppi... one positively quivers.

jbrennan2• 16 years ago

As a 30 inch Cinema Display owner, I did the math on it the other day, I think it's about 8000x5200 pixels at 326 ppi. I would pay whatever the cost for that.

kylec• 16 years ago

Any idea where I can get an actual (home+power) screenshot from the device?

sophiebits• 16 years ago

Here's a shot from the 3GS:

http://images.apple.com/iphone/features/images/retina-resolu... (pixel-doubled)

http://i.imgur.com/j2yAN.jpg (normal size for the curious)

And the same from the 4, with actual size pixels:

http://images.apple.com/iphone/features/images/retina-resolu...

And here's another screenshot, of Mail this time:

http://images.apple.com/iphone/features/images/retina-galler...

Groxx2• 16 years ago

Photos of the real thing == impressive. That's quite an improvement.

houseabsolute2• 16 years ago

Setting a new standard, that's for sure. Thank god you can't patent a simple increase in the number of pixels on a screen.

killedbydeath• 16 years ago

Looks more like an incremental arms race, just like with camera resolutions:

iPhone 3GS: 480 x 320 (~ 1 year ago) Motorola Droid: 800 x 480 (~7 months ago) iPhone 4: 960 x 640

MaysonL2• 16 years ago

The questions that I want to know the answers to:

1. Will the next iterations of the iPad and MacBook(s) have this sort of display (perhaps as an option), or will it be the iteration after that?

2. How much will they cost?

baddox• 16 years ago

Display technology usually increases in cost exponentially with screen size.

MaysonL2• 16 years ago

True, but it also decreases exponentially over time.

rimantas2• 16 years ago

I'd be happy for a while if Apple follows the trend it set with iPad and iPhone 4 and starts shipping notebooks with IPS screen even if resolution is the same as it is now.

yardie• 16 years ago

I'd also be happy with this. Considering that Apple used to ship all their Powerbooks with IPS displays, but the market decided that TN would rule the day.

Now the only places to find them are extremely highend workstation laptops (aka. heavy, desktop portables)

cheald6• 16 years ago

1. Not likely on the iPad, because in order to get 326 PPI on a 9.7" diagonal device, you have to pack 2530 x 1898 pixels onto it, which is 610% increase over the currently shipping specs. That kind of display takes a lot of power to drive, and would perform extremely poorly compared to a similar device at 1024x768.

The iPad already reportedly falls pretty flat under conditions that tax the GPU's fillrate. Sextupling the amount of work that the GPU has to do likely wouldn't do the device any favors for performance or battery life, both of which are key marketing points.

Googling seems to indicate that the iPad has an A4 Mali GPU, which has a fillrate of about 100M pix/sec (by comparison, my desktop's Radeon 4850 has a fillrate of ~24 billion pix/sec). Each paint operation paints a certain number of pixels, and you'll do several of those per frame. At 1024x768 (786,432 pixels), the maximum fillrate-limited FPS to paint a one-pass single-color surface is about 127 FPS. Now, increase that to 2530x1898 (4801940 pixels) and your max FPS for the same operation drops to about 21 FPS - and that's just for painting a single color. Actually doing anything useful would utterly destroy the device. To compensate, they'd have to put in a beefier (more power-hungry) GPU. It's quite possible to build a device that would perform well at those specs, but it would be very expensive, and very difficult to fit into Apple's typical sexy form factors with any appreciable battery life.

(It's been a few years since I've done high-performance graphics work, so if I'm off here, someone please correct me.)

simonsquiff2• 16 years ago

I think it's more likely that the iPad will do a similar x2 increase in resolution, i.e. go from 1024x768 to 2048x1536...

You don't need the same level of DPI on the iPad and it would just take too much grunt to push the same DPI as the iPhone on that screen.

zokier2• 16 years ago

iPad is partially marketed as a reading device, so larger resolutions are warranted. And doubling the resolution is quite clever trick as it makes scaling legacy apps much, much easier

saint-loup2• 16 years ago

By comparison, the 3GS display, with the grid of pixels so visible, almost has a kind of retro, low-tech beauty.

DTrejo• 16 years ago

I took of picture of your pixels so you can see pixels in your pixels.

Please forgive me.

rglullis2• 16 years ago

It amazes me how the Reality Distortion Field is strong. The Droid came with a 265 ppi screen and very few people cared (maybe http://xkcd.com/662 ). I googled around and could not find people taking pictures to compare the Droid screen with the iPhone 3GS screen.

(Also, I'd love to find reviews of critics about the "squared, industrial" design on the Droid and their opinions on the "squared, industrial" designed iPhone. But I digress.)

If anything, this seems to be how there's a void of real game-changing things on the iPhone 4, and yet bloggers and the writers who depend on Apple hype are working much harder to find anything to sell.

bmalicoat2• 16 years ago

I think the main reasons this is getting more press is because the resolution is over the ~300 ppi barrier that makes most eyes unable to resolve pixels.

The square design of the iPhone 4 is functional (try balancing a 3GS on its side to do a video call...), so whether you like the design or not it is a necessity.

ergo985• 16 years ago

>I think the main reasons this is getting more press is because the resolution is over the ~300 ppi barrier that makes most eyes unable to resolve pixels.

Ugh. Tell me you don't actually believe that?

The resolution of the iPhone 4 was predetermined to simply pixel-double existing iPhone applications (no sloppy scaling or black-bordered apps for the legacy stockpile). It is only marginally denser than several Android phones, and is a big ball of WGAF wrapped in ridiculous market speak.

It's great that they increased the resolution to be more competitive with most other high end smartphones, but the retina stuff is such a stretch of nonsense.

Tichy3• 16 years ago

Which is probably just clever marketing by Apple. Doesn't it always depend on how far away from your eyes you hold the phone?

tumult3• 16 years ago

The panel used on the Droid is of the TN kind, so the viewing angle is nowhere near as good as the iPhone 4 -- the perspective difference between your left and right eye is also enough to make the screen appear different to each, which makes it harder to look at and resolve detail. The iPhones up until 4 are all like this, too, which is one of the reasons why the difference between them is so striking.

The Droid is a cheap plastic gizmo. Two of my friends have had theirs slowly break from everyday use. If you have to baby your gadget, it will never really break into the mainstream and make a difference.

(I still like AMOLED more.)

rglullis2• 16 years ago

I never noticed the difference in perspective you are talking about, but still: what about the screen from the Nexus One? Same resolution as the Droid, ~250 ppi and AMOLED. Yeah, one can find "Oh, shiny!" articles about it, but no one wanted to turn that into a absolutely remarkable feature.

As for the Droid quality: I bought mine in November and it's still going. Dropped it a couple of times (what caused a tiny crack on the corner, can't even see it if I don't point it out) and the keyboard "right-alt" key forces me sometimes to press it twice. I wouldn't say that the phone will outlive me, but it is far from being a "cheap plastic gizmo".

ZeroGravitas7• 16 years ago

I note elsewhere in the thread that high pixel density is something I feel Apple was forced into by their business model, then marketed very strongly as a must-have feature.

I've felt the same about their one-piece aluminium enclosures and their new unbreakable glass designs.

Again, durability is great, if it came for free then I'd take it, but you're going further and telling me that all the cameras, gameboys, walkmen, cell phones, PDAs, netbooks etc. that I ever owned were never "mainstream" because of some Apple marketing that doesn't even apply to the 100 million plus portable devices they themselves sold over the last few years. It just doesn't add up. There's nothing inherently wrong with plastic or rubber devices, Apple just doesn't like the associations. They'd rather have titanium that flakes off than plastic that didn't.

karzeem• 16 years ago

Another thing is that the number of pixels increases as the square of the ppi, so a 326 ppi screen has 51% more pixels than a 265 ppi screen. That's a bigger difference than a person might think from just comparing ppi.

ugh3• 16 years ago

Droid and Nexus were widely praised for their displays, the displays were mentioned whenever anyone wrote anything about the phones.

Seeing how the iPhone now has a substantially higher resolution and a ISP screen, it getting praise seems to me to be pretty normal.

zmmmmm• 16 years ago

The difference between a Nexus and a 3gs is way bigger than between a iphone 4 and a nexus. I remember telling lots of iPhone folks how much difference it made to have such high resolution on the N1 and they all said "meh ... it's good enough, who cares to have more?" Now it seems to be the only thing that matters ...

Tichy3• 16 years ago

What amuses me is that before the iPhone 4, iPhone users insisted that the iPhone resolution is perfect and no higher resolution was necessary. Now suddenly they would never ever consider buying a phone with less resolution.

Yaggo• 16 years ago

Since when have users known what they want? (Have to admit, I'm exactly one of those.)

ugh3• 16 years ago

Uhm, source? Many have called the old screen great but that’s not the same as saying that improvement is impossible or undesirable.

dieterrams4• 16 years ago

What amuses me is how threatened people can get by a photo of a phone, that they have to start insulting people for their appreciation of it.

dieterrams4• 16 years ago

> (Also, I'd love to find reviews of critics about the "squared, industrial" design on the Droid and their opinions on the "squared, industrial" designed iPhone. But I digress.)

I think you might be confusing an industrial look with industrial design. The latter is a practice, not a style.

The Droid has a more squared, industrial look. iPhone 4 has a more squared industrial design relative to its predecessors, but not so much an industrial look.

zokier2• 16 years ago

Well, you wouldn't happen to have a comparable picture of the droid at hand?

teilo3• 16 years ago

It would be nice if he had taken it straight on, or at least with a narrow enough aperture to capture the whole screen in the DOF. What's the point of the picture if most of the screen is out of focus?

tumult3• 16 years ago

I think the narrow DOF helps give laypeople a better sense of perspective and size. I'd rather see a high resolution showing of both head-on, but a shot like this does have a strong emotional aspect to it.

In other words, I guess it's just a more powerful photo.

potatolicious• 16 years ago

The room is also pretty dark - a shallow DOF would've been required to get the shot in the first place.

teilo3• 16 years ago

I'm a photographer, so I understand the point of the shot as it is, emotional draw and all, but if the point of his article is to show the resolution, it's the wrong shot to use.

rodh257• 16 years ago

would be interesting to compare to the Samsung Galaxy S (android phone) which has a 4" super amoled screen, Samsung claims theirs is better as contrast ratios etc are more important than the extra few pixels, but then again, of course they would say that.

ZeroGravitas7• 16 years ago

This suffers the same issue as Apple's demo site that shows the iPhone 3GS screens blown up 2x to compare against the iPhone 4 screenshots.

My eye doesn't have a zoom. I see things at their actual size and even holding my phone right up to my eye I can't get it as large as those images. Details that I can't see without artificial zoom are the same as details that I can't see period.

Clearly, higher resolutions up to some point are better for display purposes, but there's tradeoffs involved. I believe smaller pixels means less light gets through, it's more work for your processors which means less battery life etc.

Everyone knows why Apple doubled ppi and quadrupled pixel count. The benefits of this system over, say, Androids flexibility should be apparent. But there are also limitations that mean the iPad is unlikely to increase its DPI for years unless it follows Android's lead. Certainly not a clear win.

fh3• 16 years ago

I don't understand your point. The iPad has a 130 dpi display, if anything, it should be easier to double that than it was to double the iPhone 3GS's 160 dpi. (I know that making larger displays at that resolution is harder and more expensive, but that won't be an issue forever.)

ZeroGravitas7• 16 years ago

You've grasped my point better than you realize. As you say the larger screen size and number of pixels outweighs the smaller pixel density.

This does change over time but that's also my point, more heterogeneous rivals can re-purpose various display sizes as required and as time passes they'll get higher res screens before the iPad, just like various iPhone rivals did.

They've also marketed themselves into a corner since even if they double the 130dpi screen they'll not reach their "magical" figure of 300dpi, and they've now introduced pixel density as a marketable commodity in one market, when they're at a disadvantage in another.

dieterrams4• 16 years ago

> My eye doesn't have a zoom. I see things at their actual size and even holding my phone right up to my eye I can't get it as large as those images. Details that I can't see without artificial zoom are the same as details that I can't see period.

They're zoomed because it's the only way to demonstrate the difference when the display you're looking at almost certainly has a lower PPI. It's no different from having to zoom in on a print sample to show how clear a printer's text is on a monitor.

> Clearly, higher resolutions up to some point are better for display purposes, but there's tradeoffs involved. I believe smaller pixels means less light gets through, it's more work for your processors which means less battery life, etc.

Which makes it all the more impressive that iPhone 4 has four times the contrast ratio and better battery life than previous iPhones, with the speed of an iPad, in a physically smaller space. Given that everything has been improved, it's clearly not much of a tradeoff.

FYI, iOS is perfectly capable of running applications designed for other resolutions. It's not for lack of 'flexibility' on the operating system's part that Apple chose not to utilize intermediate resolutions for its hardware.

It's also a little strange to see Android phones' variety of resolutions being described as some sort of path that Android has trailblazed. For one thing, the operating system has nothing to do with it, and for another, that sort of thing has been standard practice for a long time now, whether you're considering computers in general or even just mobile handsets.

ZeroGravitas7• 16 years ago

Your definition of trade-off seems broken. If I can make a car much bigger, or make it much more fuel efficient because I've got a new lightweight alloy body then that's still a trade-off even if I decide to make it a little bit bigger and a little bit more fuel efficient.

I personally think they've been forced to overshoot on screen density in return for platform homogeneity, the much lesser discussed cousin of the ever popular "fragmentation" and this will cost them money, performance and battery life. They are of course making lemonade from this particular lemon via marketing in an attempt to counteract the benefit that rivals will receive by choosing the screen with the best balance of quality/price/battery at any particular point in time for their devices.

Follow the pattern: processor speed: no comment (i.e. the same as everyone else, soon to be lower as new models are released), memory: no comment (i.e. half the flagship rivals, same as the rest), screen density: let's shout this metric from the rooftops because as any longtime Apple follower (like myself) knows, it's only "about the total experience" when you can't actually beat them on the raw figures. If you happen to be forced to use a spec that by your own marketing is higher than actually necessary or visible most of the time, then that figure becomes vitally important since no-one even wants to match it because they want to focus on the "total experience" rather than chase your metric.

How sharp is the iPhone 4's screen? High Res 4 vs 3GS images

Related Stories