Toshiba demos monster hi-res tablet display
Packin' in the pixels
Toshiba has raised the bar for LCD quality, revealing a 6.1in panel with a pixel density of 498 pixels per inch.
Even Apple's "retina display" iPhone 4S screen only manages 326ppi. At a viewing distance of 27cm, Apple claimed, and with that pixel density, the eye can't detect individual pixels.
Some users claim they can, but they certainly won't with Toshiba's screen, which crams in 53 per cent more pixel's than Apple's does.
The Toshiba panel has a resolution of 2560 x 1600 and a 1000:1 contrast ratio. It can show 16.7m different colours. With the viewing angle at 176° in both directions, the display would seem perfect for deployment in a tablet.
The company suggests that while this current model is geared up for 2D images, it could support 3D in the not too distant future and has plenty of vertical lines to handle such, while still keeping resolution higher than that found in current LCD panels.
There's no word from Toshiba when this ultra-high density screen will make it into products you can buy. ®
COMMENTS
So...
Apple - What's currently available? Oh!, that's all it can do, but that should be good enough if given the right marketing spin.
Toshiba - What's currently available? Oh!, Ok then lets invest and build something better.
I might cry!
A display even the most devoted Microsoft OS dev would have to admit it might not be worth deploying ClearType to.
All hail a future free of blurry (anti-aliased) text!
27 inches
The Dell Ultrasharp 2711 has 27 inches of glorious goodness. It has a resolution of 2560 x 1440 (WQHD) and Adobe RGB colourspace.
IMHO it is the best monitor anywhere near it's price.
I believe that the new £1m Apple cinema display uses the same panel, but they use cheapo lighting so it only manages sRGB, and put a mirror on the front of it; such a shame :( MBPs drive the Dells very nicely though as they have displayport input :)
However, I agree that it would be VERY VERY nice to get some high-res panels into decent monitors.
Holographic screens
The next step would be screens with pixels in the order of magnitude of the wavelength of light. Then you could build holographic screens. That would be a great leap forward in display perfection.
Yes, but, the thing is...
Higher resolutions = fewer artificial features in the resulting image. The test image shown in the article demonstrates why this is something we should avoid. Intersecting lines and fine-detail will look bad on low resolution displays unless you blur the image.
Sadly, that is what we have had to put up with for many, many years. To make the image more 'real', anti-aliasing and bi-cubic interpolation are image processing algorithms used so often that virtually every image on every screen you encounter is using one or the other.
They both introduce blurriness that fools our eyes/brain into thinking there is far more detail in the image than is really there, with the unfortunate side-effect of subconsciously *not* fooling our very clever auto-focus ability, resulting (eventually) in eye-strain due to the constant attempts our eyes are making to focus on an image that is essentially impossible to focus on.
Apple's Retina display goes a long way toward display perfection - but it's still probably an order of magnitude behind being a display capable of showing images in enough detail that anti-aliasing and interpolation are no longer required.
