Why the iPad 3 Retina display changes everything | Hacker News Reader

Why the iPad 3 Retina display changes everything

extremetech.com

9 pointsevo_921 comments

Changes everything, eh? No hyperbole here.

Let's get this straight: it will make a fantastic looking device look even better.

I thought Gizmodo's example graphic was particularly telling yesterday, because it's exactly the kind of image that springs to mind when I think of my iPad.

http://gizmodo.com/5890999/witness-the-amazing-difference-be...

So the cutesy games my kids play on it will now be even clearer. Wow - total game changer.

'This changes everything' was the iPhone 4 tagline (the first device that introduced a Retina display).

Is this really a 'retina' display? I was under the impression that 300 PPI has been the border.

If not, then surely the original Droid (285 ppi) was the first retina display device? I guess it's just hyperbole so I shouldn't be so picky.

The whole Retina display thing is a) subjective, and b) down to the distance you hold the device. The '300 PPI = Retina resolution' was for a device held 12 inches away (or something like that). The iPad is held further away, so the resolution required for 'Retina resolution' is lower.

It isn't subjective. Apple precisely defined it.

There is some fuzziness in the 'retina' term. See http://www.tuaw.com/2012/03/01/retina-display-macs-ipads-and...

That is a great article that even gives you a formula for calculating it, which by the way was featured on one of apples slides during the presentation. Retina is a function of "normal" distance from face and "normal" eyesight. Those are the only two degrees of freedom.

I am not sure why the author chose to guess his own numbers to see if they compare with Apples, I would instead take the formula and the fact that iPhone 4 is definitely Retina and figure out the appropriate Retina value.

FYI, this has now been confirmed at the Apple event. Seems the GPU has been bumped up to a quad-core (from dual) to cope with the extra pixels.

> You can find desktop monitors in the 20-inch range that sport resolutions of 2560×1600

really?

edit: on a related note, does anyone know where and when I could get monitors like this 20" 4k2k monitor http://www2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/prModelD...

I've only really seem them sold to equipment vendors as modules (or displays); sometimes to radiology vendors. The monitor I personally want is a Barco 10MP (http://www.barco.com/en/product/2195/specs), 30" 4096 x 2560), but I think it's about $12k.

Until then, get the old version of the 4k2k from Amazon?

Viewsonic VP2290B-2 (discontinued) 22" 4k2k TFT. Basically an IBM T221.

http://www.amazon.com/Viewsonic-VP2290B-2-22-2-LCD-Monitor/d...

Medical displays have one problem: they are in many cases grayscale only. So is that Barco too. And I thought that those T22x displays were almost unusably slow (both refresh rate and response time wise), and needed special purpose hardware to drive them (instead of eg displayport). And there is the problem of being discontinued.

there is also no way this ipad will have great gaming perf at that resolution.

you would have to run games at a less than native resolution then upscale it to fit the screen which looks really bad.

Graphics perfomence on this machine will take a very large nosedive overall if you use fullscreen apps at that native resolution. Mobile Gpus simply arnt up to the task of filling that resolution at a good enough rate for anything other than simple graphics.

The solution is to render games at 1024x768, the same resolution as the ipad 2. Scaling it up to 2048x1536 is trivial if you just treat every pixel as four pixels on the display and will look just as good/bad as the ipad 2 does.

Can't believe this article got upvoted, there is no information about anything in it.

TLDR; iPad 3 has a resolution of 2048x1536.

Same here, reading the title I was already sure this was some kind of bad mashed up article. I guess extremetech got a lot of "friends".

Give me a break with supercharging photoshop on ipad..

It kind of does not change anything, maybe it makes a big change in games for antialiasing, but that's it. It remains ti be seen if it will really improve reading on the device

Anyway..

I'm not really convinced that upscaling will look "really bad" with algorithms optimized for high resolutions. Besides, consumers have already been conditioned to accept upscaling artifacts with the current gen gaming consoles.

* citation needed

It changed everything in a sense that Apple pushed display technology to a new level so the others now could benefit(better notebook panels, displays).

>Unless Apple has somehow reinvented backlight or lithium-ion battery tech, there’s no way the iPad HD will be comparable to the iPad 2 in terms of weight, cost, or longevity.

Huh? How does increasing the resolution of the LCD increase the demands on the backlight?

It needs to produce smaller photons.

Very funny. Ha. Ha.

They claim battery will last the same 10h or 9h with 4g on.

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