Toshiba announces 2560x1600 6.1" display
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
Assuming a 16:10 display a 4096 wide display would be 2560 lines 'tall' and have a total of 31,457,280 pixel elements (r,g,b). Each of those would include a transistor as well so another 31.5M transistors, coming out to driver logic at the edge of the screen. At 498 ppi that would be about an 8" x 5" screen.
To drive that screen at 60hz you would have to push out 31.5M * 60 bytes of pixel data (that is for 8 bits per color, higher fidelity 10 bits per color would be more. At 60hz that is a bandwidth of 1.8 GBps or 18 Gbit/sec. This is faster than the current DVI spec is rated for, although I believe dual-channel can get there.
The yield rate inversely increases the cost per good screen, so a yield rate of 50% doubles the cost, and a more likely yield of 25% quadruples the cost. This can be offset somewhat by bigger glass (more chances to succeed, semiconductor manufacturing is in many ways a game of statistics) but bigger glass may require different factory layouts (they might have to build a factory just for this type of display).
So Nvidia helped make some progress when they announced the Tegra-3 could drive 2560 x 1600 displays. That's more than halfway to your 4K display. And this will be the 'killer' display technology in the next gen 10" tablets.
If the tablets can keep up the ship rate then they will give manufacturers a better feeling about being able to sell enough even higher resolution displays to offset their costs and that is when we'll see something like this demo come out in a larger size.
All of those are a far cry from Toshiba's prototype (495 ppi) or the screen Apple uses in its iPhone and iPod touch (330 ppi).
[1] http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_densi....
"Resolution independence has been "coming soon to Mac OS X" since 2005. The dream of drawing the same interface elements at the same visible size but with more pixels was so close in 2007 that we could taste it. Then Snow Leopard arrived and the Mac's interface scalability features actually regressed. Depressing.
Meanwhile, Mac OS X's sibling operating system waltzed right into a high-resolution UI on its very first try. iOS's secret? Don't try to support arbitrary scale factors, just support one: double resolution. A 50x50-pixel square on a non-retina iPhone screen is exactly the same size as a 100x100-pixel square on a retina display. Graphics that have not been updated for the higher resolution are simply drawn with four-pixel squares in place of each low-resolution pixel. All dimensions are nice, even, integer multiples of each other. This is a perfect fit for physical screens which, of course, have an integer number of pixels. Fractional measurements necessarily require ugly compromises.
Lion has taken the hint from its younger brother. Arbitrary scalability is gone. In its place is a single check box to enable "HiDPI" display modes. (This option is still hidden away in the Quartz Debug application, so it's clearly not an end-user feature. But unlike all previous incarnations of resolution independence, this one actually works.)
After enabling HiDPI, new display modes will become available. In the screenshot above, the 720x450 mode is half native screen dimensions, and the 640x400 mode is half the (non-native) 1280x800 setting. After selecting a HiDPI mode, everything is drawn with twice as many pixels as its non-HiDPI equivalent. Here's a screenshot featuring TextEdit, our usual interface scalability workhorse.
It looks pretty good, right? The only flaws are the bitmap graphics that haven't been updated for HiDPI (look closely at the black triangles in the ruler). Unfortunately, there are a lot of these throughout the operating system and its bundled applications. But unlike in all years past, the framework is finally there for third-party developers and Apple itself to finally get their applications ready for a world in which 300-dpi desktop and laptop displays are more than just expensive curiosities."
[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.a...
(the biggest drawback I guess is that it doesn't really do anything for people wanting a larger interface for readability reasons, having everything four times as large is a hard blow for the real estate when you really wanted 120% or something)
What the author constantly mixes up is that you need four times as many pixels, not twice. And thus we need ~400 DPI to have everything at the same size as today. But yeah, just hope that it becomes mainstream enough to be affordable, OLED to the rescue? Thanks to displayport the interconnect won't be a problem at least.
The same 494.9 DPI would allow for a ~4.5" 1080p display, or ~3" 720p display, both of which seem far more practical for smartphones. For a tablet, the 2560x1600 10.1" screen from Samsung seems sensible, and personally I'd settle for a 10" 1080p display to reduce cost.
(All of this and still no 12" laptop displays with better than 1366x768 or so.)
I've never had a car with a built-in LCD info/nav/etc system to play with them, but I can imagine 6" being a plausible size for some given other standard sizes. Because it's bundled as part of a much, much larger whole than with a phone it's likely able to support a potentially higher price point and it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that a high-end car brand felt a 500DPI screen would be a good differentiating factor from competitor 100DPI screens. 'Read as easily as paper' is a compelling selling point.
Or perhaps the electronics required to produce such dense pixels are still quite large, and whose rectangular dimensions wouldn't allow for displays of the same density without a wide bezel.
6" sounds pretty optimal for e-books i would say. ipad is too big and smartphones are too small. This is also where there is good reason to have such high res.
Possibly. But operating systems have to go to great lengths to display text well, with subpixel antialiased rendering and all sorts of clever tricks to make the most out of the limited resolution. This often doesn't work well, leading to complaints like these:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000041.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html http://www.bennadel.com/blog/981-Antialiased-Text-Is-Not-All...
If we get up to 500 ppi, that's well into inkjet-printer quality text without any antialiasing at all. Text would look rather nice. (Although I may be alone in peering at laser-printed text just to admire how smooth it is.)
The articles you mention don't so much represent cases of "doesn't work well" as "no one solution satisfies everyone"; that problem does indeed go away when you have enough DPI.
(We still have to care about hinting, though, because among other things we want character boxes to overlap to avoid excessive whitespace in strings like "AV" or "Tr".)
6.1" seems more the size of a small tablet than anything fit for a phone. Assuming people hold a tablet about the same distance away from their eyes as a phone, perhaps even farther, what's the point of having an even higher pixel density? Isn't this going to cause more design problems than it provides marketing benefits?
Unlike 3D displays that use active glasses to time-division multiplex the viewing angles for each eye, autostereoscopic displays use parallax barriers or lenticular lenses to multiplex the images inside a single 2D image, reducing the effective resolution per angle/eye.
why is there still no ppi independent OS?
i'd love to have +300ppi with OSX
Perhaps we'll need to standardize on a unit that is independent of screen resolution. But it won't do to convert everything to millimeters, because different devices are also meant to be used from different distances. 2mm on a smartphone is OK. 2mm on a cinema display is virtually invisible.