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| Dispelling the 'Retina' myth |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-08-11 14:31:12 |
| "I decided to write this post after having too many heated discussions with many users across many blogs. After hearing repeatedly; 'The iPad will have a better display' or 'It sucks because it's not Retina' I figured it was time to break the argument down and dispel the 'Retina' myth." Fantastic post at The Verge. |
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| RE[4]: I understand the argument, but its messed up. |
| By _txf_ on 2012-08-12 14:29:31 |
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> Just get a Surface with a keyboard cover. Always mobile, optionally productive. MS has yet to let people use the keyboards. Only time will tell, just how productive one can be on those... |
 - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Comment by kaiwai |
| By kaiwai on 2012-08-12 17:04:15 |
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> Im must be in the other category as i can tell a retina display from a few paces. For me Retina is all about text, web pages, documents and PDF's look a lot better as does a lot of the elements of the UI. I don't have a retina laptop but when playing with one i could see the difference straight away. I do own an iPad 3 and again i can really see the difference when looking through web pages and large PDF's it's a real pleasure to use one of these with the only device which displays text as well being a kindle (or any kind of ebook read). I guess for me, my laptop is sitting at 1680x1050 on a 15inch screen so the results I guess aren't as dramatic than if I was running a MacBook Pro without the High Resolution BTO. I have admit though I don't really spend much time worrying about the shapes/curves/etc of the text but instead quickly read, get what I want and move on. Btw, the original post wasn't dismissing the idea of higher resolution but the obsession with Retina as if it were some sort of cure all to life's problems. Higher resolution is nice but lets not get all obsessive about it - as if it were the ultimate thing in existence that you must have or the major differentiating factor when compared to a list of other things to consider when purchasing a computer. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Some People Just Want To Watch Apple Burn |
| By tony on 2012-08-12 17:08:08 |
|
> > That article is full of sour grapes, picking and choosing on stats to be overly pedantic. Trying to disprove the obvious (that new iPad screens/MacBookProR screens look amazing). And yes, some of it is the color, but a lot of it is the DPI. Hardly. The author does not dispute the fact tha the retina displays aren't good, just superfluous. If you had actually read the article the author posits that the retina displays benefit more from the better contrast and color gamut, more than the 400% more pixels. What's more the iPad 3 has 70% more battery capacity than the ipad2 but has 10~20% less battery life. If apple hadn't gotten lazy by not making a proper scalable UI then they could have easily gone 1080p. Instead they're adding invisible pixels at a massive battery life cost. Just because our conclusions are different, doesn't mean I didn't read the article. In the article, they made a big deal out of VA, trying to say a much lower resolution display is also "retina". They also dismissed the high DPI as a reason the display is gorgeous, instead saying it was the better colors. Part of their argument is that high DPI isn't worth it. I disagree. And pretty soon, when most non-Apple tablets and displays have high DPI, that argument will magically disappear. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: by age 45 |
| By unoengborg on 2012-08-12 18:53:06 |
| Then they need better glasses. I am past 50 and I have no problem distinguish between e.g. iPad2 and the new iPad if I look at it at close range. E.g. when reading in bed. Fonts look sharper and you get more true font forms. It makes a big difference. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: Some People Just Want To Watch Apple Burn |
| By _txf_ on 2012-08-12 19:26:21 |
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> Just because our conclusions are different, doesn't mean I didn't read the article. In the article, they made a big deal out of VA, trying to say a much lower resolution display is also "retina". They also dismissed the high DPI as a reason the display is gorgeous, instead saying it was the better colors. Of course it is. If you look at it further away, then your eyes cannot distinguish the pixels. The author makes a very well reasoned case that at the average reading distance people hold their tablets the extra pixels beyond 1080p do not make the slightest difference. He does however state that there is a Huge difference between the ipad2 and ipad3. This is not only because of colour gamut, but because the ipad2 is not "retina" at the average reading distance. > Part of their argument is that high DPI isn't worth it. I disagree. And pretty soon, when most non-Apple tablets and displays have high DPI, that argument will magically disappear. If you read many recent high end phone review they always mention the pixel density of the various displays. They also mention that on high end phones that the differences are fairly indestiguishable despite the variations in dpi. So expanding beyond a certain dpi is stupid. Apply probably only chose the resolution it did in the ipad3 because they backed themselves into a corner, not because 2048x1536 is massively better than say 1200 x 1020 at 10". |
| - Score: 3 |
| -1 Troll, -1 Flamebait |
| By progormre on 2012-08-13 00:35:48 |
| Well that was a ridiculous read not worthy of a rebuttal. |
| - Score: -1 |
| RE: Don't underestimate the human vison system |
| By unclefester on 2012-08-13 01:12:19 |
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> Our visual system heavily compresses information in an analog system, then our brain reconstitutes it. Given the overlap, we do a fair bit of superresolution processing while we're at it, so individual photons aren't the lower limit. Nope. Our eyes are like low resolution pinhole cameras being waved around randomly.Our visual cortex makes up a picture by creatively interpolating about 99% of the image. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[2]: Don't underestimate the human vison system |
| By izomiac on 2012-08-13 01:59:07 |
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I'm not sure how you disagree. I was speaking of how ganglia primarily transmits differences between photoceptors down the optic nerve (e.g. only one of three reporting to that ganglion sees light). There's also some motion processing in the retina. It's more the lateral geniculate nuclei in the thalamus that "interpolates" data from the optic tract and transcodes it for the cortex (IMHO it's more akin to lossy compression, but there's decentralized single processing as well). The cortex is where all signals merge and we get additional postprocessing. I'm not sure if it's the frontal or occipital lobe's cortex that give rise to optical illusions, hysteric blindness, and the various forms of blindsight, which are the more obvious examples of "interpolation" going wrong. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[3]: Don't underestimate the human vison system |
| By unclefester on 2012-08-13 08:01:50 |
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The image from the lens is inverted and then must pass through the blood vessels of the retina before being converted to an elctrical signal. This produces a a massively distorted image which must be rectified via postprocessing in the visual cortex. In theory the eye has at least 16MP (and possibly >500MP) resolution but only the central 2 degrees of vision has accurate colour resolution. Our vison is essentially a low resolution continuous "scan and pan" movie which is comprehensively filtered, upscaled and interpolated to produce a "meaningful" (if largely inaccurate) visual narrrative. A crude analogy is getting a drunk with a handheld VCR camera to film Lawrence of Arabia. Then postprocessing the raw VCR video using a massively powerful computer to convert the images to a 70mm wide-format film. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: Don't underestimate the human vison system |
| By ndrw on 2012-08-14 04:50:53 |
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For the most part we can assume that ~300dpi of full grayscale pixels in a handheld device is more than enough for all except synthetic use cases. You're right that there are no simple metrics for evaluating our senses. For example, we are unable to detect lack of light for ten milliseconds but anyone would easily see a sudden burst of light, even if it took only one millisecond. Same with the resolution, you could argue that "sufficient" resolution is one when you can't see a single fully-on white pixel on a black background. That could indeed require a higher resolution but frankly speaking who cares, especially that a good solution already exists (just dim the pixel). Besides, resolution is only one of things to improve (true, it was long neglected). Refresh rates, contrast, and color reproduction are still lagging quite a bit, and there are many tradeoffs involved there too (resolution vs contrast or refresh rate etc.). |
| - Score: 2 |
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