Sharp to show OLED 'retina' display for laptops
3840 x 2160 screen, anyone?
Fancy a 3840 x 2160 display in your next 13in laptop? Form an orderly queue outside Sharp's offices then, and loudly demand it turns its latest prototype panel into shipping product.
The 13.5in screen contains just under 8.3 million white OLED pixels filtered for RGB colour. Its dimensions yield a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch - just what the iPhone 4S' "retina" display currently offers.
Since a laptop screen typically sits further away from your eyeballs than a smartphone display, the Sharp screen, which uses the company's IGZO (Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide) thin-film transistor tech, is more than capable of presenting pixels too small to be distinguished one from the other.
Speaking of mobile devices, Sharp will next week be showing off a 6.1in IGZO LCD for handsets or small tablets that has a pixel density of 498ppi. The resolution is 2560 x 1600.
Sharp will be demo'ing the screens at the annual Society for Information Display (SID) shindig. It will also be showing a 326ppi, 540 x 960 bendy 3.4in OLED and a 5in 720p LCD for smartphones. ®
COMMENTS
Enough with the 'Retina' bollocks already!
'Retina' is just a bullshit buzzword that some coke-addled Apple marketing twunt slapped on a >300 DPI display.
Want 300DPI
I'm sure there was study done by IBM years ago that showed that most people need a resolution of about 300dpi to be able to comfortably read text for an extended period. Most printers, even silly cheap ones do more than that, yet screens have been stuck in the miserable 96dpi for ever.
While there will be some changes required - I, for one welcome our high resolution overlords.
actually it'll be the ratiotards that'll continue complaining. 16:9 widescreen is a silly aspect ratio for producing A4 portrait documents.
Re: Should've gone to screensavers
1920x1080 is quite simply too small.
My previous laptop had 1200 vertical pixels, and I really notice the missing screen space in many applications.
Higher screen resolution also lets you make writing easier to read - compare this text drawn with 5x7 pixels to the text on your current monitor.
Now make the dots smaller while keeping the text the same physical size (using more dots) - again, it becomes nicer to read.
When we look at a 1080p movie, the upscaling of movie pixel to screen pixel again affords the possibility of nicer pixels - when in motion you can estimate what the 'missing' pixels would have been, increasing the effective resolution and making for a nicer movie experience.
Secondly, if the film is instead digitised at a higher resolution we'll get the real detail in the film - maybe even as high as the digital projectors used in the cinema.
Movie houses aren't going to sell those discs/licences until enough people have these 'above-HD' resolution screens for it to be worthwhile.
It's nice to see someone pushing laptop screens in the right direction.
