A Proposal for a High Resolution Display (2009)
bernd-paysan.de
bernd-paysan.de
Since we have so much variety in screen shapes and resolutions today, most of the time we’re resampling images on the fly to rotate/scale them into their position on screen anyway, so the pixel data representing an image in a file isn’t getting directly sent to the same on-screen grid. Thus for most of what we display on screen, there’s no inherent need to stick to the same grid shape used for storage, and a hexagonal pixel grid would in practice look better for the same number of pixels (hexagonal grids are particularly good for representing curved shapes and reducing moiré artifacts). For that matter, there’s no inherent need to store square grids of pixels in our image formats; we could use hexagonal-pixel files and easily resample them for display on arbitrary display grids. The only thing stopping us is technical fluency with rectangular grids, and cultural/historical inertia.
(Think of the iPhone 6+, where software can’t even address the native screen pixels, and literally everything gets rendered to one size grid and then resampled for a different display grid.)
Beyond that, people really need to stop using the extremely misleading CIE 1931 (x, y) chromaticity diagram when comparing color gamuts. The CIE 1976 (u', v') UCS diagram is much more uniform, and just as easy to plot (it’s just a simple linear transformation of the (x, y) diagram). We’ve known the problems with the (x, y) diagram for >50 years now, there’s really no excuse for its continuing ubiquity.
For making diagrams of pixel grids, it would also be better to show less intensely colored RGB pixels, so that the G’ pixel doesn’t so look obviously less intense.
This isn't really how this works. If everything was being upsampled, youd see obvious jaggies and upsampling artifacts. The only reason iOS can do this reasonably well is because the actual resolution is exactly 2x or 3x the resolution presented to the software. The actual rendering takes place at native resolution; graphics assets are produced in the native resolution. Upsampled rendering/assets look very obviously bad.
> The only thing stopping us is technical fluency with rectangular grids, and cultural/historical inertia.
These are factors, but theres also not much evidence that resampling from arbitrary virtual to physical resolutions will actually look good.
On the iPhone 6+, this is not accurate. Most apps are rendered to a 1242 × 2208 pixel resolution (3× the “logical” 414 × 736 resolution) and then downsampled to the screen’s physical 1080 × 1920 resolution afterward.
On OS X, the default behavior for “retina” displays is to render everything precisely to screen pixels at 2x the “logical” size, but users can alternatively select a different virtual display size, whereupon all content will be resampled for display.
> theres also not much evidence that resampling from arbitrary virtual to physical resolutions will actually look good
Every photographic or video image you look at on your computer or phone has been resampled to different pixel grids several times in the course of its production, and is typically resampled one final time when rendered to screen. There is thus lots of evidence that we can relatively seamlessly resample just about everything, and only dedicated pixel peepers will care strongly.
As for non-photographic content like line art, maps, text, rendered video game output, etc., we could just render these directly to a different grid.
Still though, the point remains that most apps use the setting with resampling and most users don’t seem to obviously mind.
The red and blue pixels can be used for sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which can improve percieved resolution and rendering accuracy further.
Subpixel AA just makes my eyes water and I feel dizzy after a few minutes, probably because there are no real edges to focus on. I'm probably in the minority, but not the only one who prefers pixel-sharp text.
When you’re talking about digital camera LCDs, do you mean the display on the back of the camera? Those are mostly awful, I just ignore them. :-)
But beyond that, disabling antialiasing and using a pixel font (like Terminus) gives an effectively higher perceived resolution than one would expect from modeling a display as a collection of point samples.
As far as I am aware, I have yet to see non-antialiased fonts rendered on a high-ppi screen, but it would be interesting to see to what degree antialiasing is still necessary on such screens.
These look much better than the 1920×1080 ones.
- "Note that red and blue pixels need to be twice as intensive as green" Is there a necessity for pixels to be rectangular? If not, I would go and shop in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_convex_uniform_tilin... to look for a way to have fewer, but larger red and blue pixels.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snub_square_tiling using green triangles looks like a decent candidate to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elongated_triangular_tiling also seems reasonable. In practice, the ideal pattern would depend on the relative brightness of the colours in the light source used.
(I guess it would be easier to just make the familiar rectangular pattern with 4 stripes RGBG and/or with variable widths of the color bands at a slightly higher resolution than to experiment with these)
- If you are making a display where each pixel directly emits light (as opposed to a LCD display, where a pixel can be controlled to let through light from the backlight) and pixels can be made transparent for colors they do not emit, layer the pixels.
For an amusing idea w/r/t sensor pixel shapes, check out this paper: http://www.cis.pku.edu.cn/faculty/vision/zlin/Publications/2...
The trouble is our reliance on expecting displays to reproduce frequencies (aka. crispness) that is beyond the Nyquist frequency of the display.
So with the proposed bayer pattern, we can no longer represent horizontal and vertical lines which are common in text and widgets with the sharpness we expect (unlike photographs, where we don't expect these)
We should be looking to satisfy Nyquist with a high enough resolution display and an optical low-pass filter between the display and the eye. Then things will all fall in to place...
green red green blue green red green blue green
What I don't understand about this proposal is why the rotated grid has 4 different colored squares.
I’d love to see some better multispectral cameras and displays. If you can get the content and hardware working together, you can get substantially better results than current tech. Of course, as you say, there’s a big chicken–egg problem.