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Comment by davidcollantes | Hacker News Reader

4.95" 1920x1080 display (445 ppi), it reads. Does those specs make this phone the one with highest DPI ever? It is certainly above retina display, right?

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The ppi race is the new megapixel race.

Who needs pixel perfection 200 ppi beyond what the human eye can perceive? No one. But the show must go on.

Well 1080p is nice in that it is quite widespread standard and as such eg display cloning from your phone to a desktop monitor/tv/projector should be trivial. Also you can play media content without needing to downscale (albeit this is fairly minor advantage).

Just because you can't perceive individual pixels doesn't mean you can't perceive higher quality. Imagine if you wanted to draw a human hair to scale, you would need some small pixels to make that look good.

However in most smartphone use cases, that's probably not an issue.

In that particular use case, what stops you from laying an actual human hair onto your screen? I just had to take one of it, so they go there out of their own volition.

It has come really far when my new phone has a higher pixel ratio than my two-year-old 15 inch laptop

What the human eye can perceive is dependent on the distance between the eye and the screen. Perhaps some people like to hold the screen very close.

Indeed - I'd rather have more battery life.

245 ppi is nowhere near what the human eye can perceive. You can make all kinds of assumptions about view distance and so on, but higher resolution is almost always a better thing when rendering text, rich content, and so on. You kind of sound like the people of the past who said "we'll never need a terabyte of storage" or "256 MB of RAM is enough for anyone" and so on.

There is definitely a need for high ppi screens as new VR devices like the Oculus Rift come out.

Its quite funny how the smartphone revolution will finally make VR devices viable.

Oculus Rift style VR devices need screens with even higher density. I'm glad the show is continuing.

It's insane that this phone has a better screen than a great deal of laptops for sale these days. The laptop manufacturers need to get with the program :-/

Forget laptops; this is where most desktop displays top out! It's ridiculous that some manufacturers literally sell 27" displays with the same number of pixels as this phone's 5" screen.

You can thank marketing, again, for that. "High Definition" came along and it seems the only resolutions people could now think of were 720 and 1080. I had a CRT monitor in 1999 that was doing 1600x1200. I also have a 16:10 monitor right now, which they seem to be moving away from and going to 16:9. Desktops are now caught between the forces of TV and mobile devices.

I was monitor shopping recently and finally decided simply not to upgrade for now after becoming fed up with seeing the "full HD" moniker used all over as if it were the end of display history.

4K, 24", reasonably affordable. When it happens, I won't mind if the desktop display market gets stuck in that rut for awhile.

HTC One, 468 ppi

Unlike the S4, it's IPS. Better colors, not as high contrast ratio.

Much preferred. Glad they're following HTC in making an iPhone-class display.

That's almost identical to the Galaxy S4, 441ppi

Nope. My HTC One, which I love, has a higher DPI. I'm not sure what it matters at that level though. Great will look great.

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