Steve Jobs announced during his keynote address at WWDC 2010 that his engineers have packed close to four times more pixels on the new iPhone 4 display as compared to iPhone 3GS. He claimed that the pixel density on the new iPhone - at 336 pixels per inch - was the highest among smartphones today. Jobs further added:
"It turns out there’s a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch, that when you hold something around to 10 to 12 inches away from your eyes, is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels."
Jobs' assertion that the resolution on the iPhone 4 display was higher than what the human eye can resolve has since then been severely challenged. According to Dr. Raymond Soneira from DisplayMate Technologies, the iPhone has significantly lower resolution than the human retina when held at a distance of 12 inches from the eye. He believed that Steve Jobs' claims are overly exaggerated.
However, according to Phil Plait, an astronomer who calibrates the cameras of Hubble Space telescope who writes for the Discover Magazine, Dr. Soneira's claims do not hold true for the vast majority of users.
He begins by giving a very nice explanation of what resolution means:
Imagine you see a vehicle coming toward you on the highway from miles away. Is it a motorcycle with one headlight, or a car with two? As the vehicle approaches, the light splits into two, and you see it’s the headlights from a car. But when it was miles away, your eye couldn’t tell if it was one light or two. That’s because at that distance your eye couldn’t resolve the two headlights into two distinct sources of light. The ability to see two sources very close together is called resolution.
He goes on to explain that Soneira's argument is applicable only to people with perfect vision. A perfect vision is characterized by a resolution of 0.6 arcmin. However technically, this number may not be applicable since a 20/20 vision is accorded to people with a retina resolution as high as 1 arcmin. Plait writes:
"Something 12 inches away means your eye can resolve dots that are bigger than
12 inches / 5730 = 0.0021 inches
If I use 1 arcminute instead, the scale factor is smaller, about 3438. So let’s convert that to inches to see how small a pixel the human eye can resolve at a distance of one foot:
12 inches / 3438 = 0.0035 inches
Aha! This means that to a more average eye, pixels smaller than this are unresolved. Since the iPhone’s pixels are 0.0031 inches on a side, it works! Jobs is actually correct."
Plait concludes:
"Let me make this clear: if you have perfect eyesight, then at one foot away the iPhone 4’s pixels are resolved. The picture will look pixellated. If you have average eyesight, the picture will look just fine."
But he believes that most people don't have perfect eyesight. Plait's arguments make a lot of sense since it gives a practical perspective of Apple's retina display argument. Despite the lingering debate, the superiority of the iPhone 4 display over rival products cannot be questioned.
What do you think?
[via Discover Magazine]
i think people have too much time on their hans. honestly…WGF!!!!!!
Omg that's just to much to take in. Let's just say the display and text is just much clearer.
lol I agree with TEE and Franky, the display is amazing better then any phone on the planet and once again apple has brought it to us with the iPhone 4 as yet another generation of iPhones are destined to crush the market once again
agree….others can not compete with them so they just find loop hole instead of beating it….guys…your technology is getting far behind!!!!! just create a better one & smarter… or else your done
Too much grammar in Iphone. Iphone as become the talk of the day.
who cares!!!!!!! im still gonna get the iphone 4 lol
nice I still wish they could have made the display bigger and keep the casing as small as the 3g, just make better use of it, like taking it all the way to the edge of the case. Sadly the evo 4g is just a smidgen bigger but the display takes up more space on the face. would be nice to have seen a 4.0 display with this awesome resolution.
regardless i cant wait to mess with this in person instead of just reading about it =(
I agree with you. I love the new iPhone 4 case though. I just wish the screen took up as much space on the front as possible. To me, the screen kinda looks too small for the face of the phone. No biggie though, I'm still pre-ordering this baby as soon as I can on Monday!
HTC EVO 4g FTW Iphone who!!!
I love my nokia 1100 the best phone in the planet
+1
iPhone is NOT a complete phone, it lags a basic phone feature like call recording, get the basics right first, then boast about other addon features
Someone should tell Mr. Phil Plait that some people can see better at close distances and some at long distances so his calculations mean ZILCH/NADA/NIHT/NULL/VOID and YES according to my doctor I will be able to see the pixels of the new phone even from 30cm …
you obviously have never had an iphone is has that and much more get your facts strait buddy
Really? Perhaps you could give me some help then since you appear to get your facts straight…
How do you manage to get call recording on an iPhone (and I don't mean a telephone service that's good for all phone or a service only available in some country)?
Since when was 'call recording' a basic phone feature?
NONE of my phones had call recording.
– and I've had Nokias, Blackberrys, Palm, Sony Ericsson, and Motorollas.
So, no, call recording is NOT a basic phone feature.
Just like a decent web browser is lacking on Nokias — you know, one that's actually usable.
I wish I had the time to hate on the iPhone all day like you do.