

Google is looking to one-up that iPad's Retina display



Source: The Next Web

Comments     Threshold


That's great and all, but...
By teng029 on 10/21/2012 2:09:21 PM , Rating: 4
what abou actual apps that are optimized for that type of a display? as it stands, most Android tablet apps are just stretched phone apps. the hardware specs can only do so much unless Google's developers start optimizing apps for large screens.

RE: That's great and all, but...

RE: That's great and all, but...
RE: That's great and all, but...
RE: That's great and all, but...

RE: That's great and all, but...
RE: That's great and all, but...

RE: That's great and all, but...


RE: That's great and all, but...


RE: That's great and all, but...
By TakinYourPoints on 10/21/2012 4:52:20 PM , Rating: 3
It'll happen once people start buying Android tablets. Developers have little reason to design tablet apps for Android since so few are out there. The Android app market isn't that profitable even on the smartphone side, so there's even less incentive to put resources into tablets. If sales pick up and it starts making money then you'll see more tablet apps, its that simple. Chicken and the egg issue here.

RE: That's great and all, but...
By NellyFromMA on 10/22/2012 1:02:49 PM , Rating: 1
Stop making points. All valid points cease to exist in the face of Android

RE: That's great and all, but...
By StevoLincolnite on 10/22/2012 7:33:17 AM , Rating: 2
I would love a 24" screen (Or 3) with double that Resolution... WHY hasn't it happened yet!? Obviously the Technology is readily available.

RE: That's great and all, but...
By mcnabney on 10/22/2012 10:29:30 AM , Rating: 2
4K displays have been out for over a decade.

The industry just wants to milk every generation for as long as it can.

RE: That's great and all, but...




RE: That's great and all, but...

RE: That's great and all, but...

RE: That's great and all, but...
By someguy123 on 10/22/2012 5:38:14 PM , Rating: 2
Where did this insane conspiracy come from anyway? Why are people on a PPI bandwagon these days?

Try actually running gpu demanding (or even a web browser) software on something like a T220 back when it was released. Hell if 4k became the standard on desktop PCs right at this moment I'm sure we'd see endless complaints from people trying to play video games at 4K, who will inevitably point the finger at developers for not "optimizing" enough on a 8 million pixel screen.

RE: That's great and all, but...
By icrf on 10/23/2012 12:47:35 PM , Rating: 2
Higher PPI means more clarity (to a point, as Apple's "retina" marketing makes clear). Yes, current commodity hardware is lacking to do realtime 3D rendering or video decoding at resolutions that high, but the vast majority of what people stare at on their phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops is text, not movies or games. We have plenty computing power to drive extremely high resolution text.

RE: That's great and all, but...
By someguy123 on 10/23/2012 6:07:26 PM , Rating: 2
Significantly higher density means more clarity better text rendering, but the difference is greatly exaggerated, with the exception of moving from very low density for phones to the current standard of around 200ppi or so. At that point pixel edges become significantly less clear and you get decent text rendering.

Having a relatively low PPI standard is not arbitrary. try running apple's macbook retina and watch as it struggles to even browse youtube, dropping to 15~30fps frequently. that macbook actually has superior hardware to the "average" computer spent staring at text and charts. It's going to be a long time before your average computer has something comparable to an i7. The response times would also likely be worse overall considering more pixels for the panel to handle. We started seeing HD adoption in the late 90s for broadcast and nowadays hardware is still mostly just good enough for 1080p.

RE: That's great and all, but...
By FormulaRedline on 10/22/2012 10:59:08 AM , Rating: 2
I'm with you on wanting the higher res monitors, but there's a couple of issues here. First is likely the yield, or the amount of screens you can actually use out of the screens you attempt to make (i.e. all the elements are mechanically aligned, all electrical connections are sound, no dead pixels, etc).

If you have a screen with 4x the number of pixels as your old screen, it also about 4x as likely to fail. Imagine you have a 99% yield for the original screen (or 1% failure). If you simplify the equation and say that all you have to to do is make 4 screens and these will magically join together, then the chance any large screen will be good is 99% to the fourth power. So 99%^4 is approximately 96%, or a 4% failure rate. Not only have you quadrupled your failure rate, but you've quadrupled the amount of materials lost when you do fail. This makes increasing resolution exponential more difficult and expensive.

That being said, the industry is obviously making progress and we'll get there eventually.

Second, even if you were willing to pay the high prices that low yield would currently drive, you still don't have any easy way to drive the display. Current cabling standards don't have the bandwidth. Though this is again not really a technological limitation. We can obviously do it...we just need a standard so people can manufacture the new cables.

In other words, it's a commercial issue rather than a technological one, but advancements in manufacturing technology would help drive the prices down and make it more commercially viable. While you and I would pay for these displays today, the potential market will have to expand past us early adopters to make it a profitable decision.

Kudos to Apple and Google for working with the display manufacturers to help drive the market toward this end!

RE: That's great and all, but...

RE: That's great and all, but...
By Moishe on 10/23/2012 11:31:07 AM , Rating: 1
It is fairly annoying that screens are 1920x1080 until you get to the 30".

1080 is reasonable about up to 20". Now we have cheap 23", 24", and 27" screens, but if you want a decent resolution, the cost triples.

