This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

S4's PenTile display

Ever since device manufacturers began kicking telephone brandish resolutions into the stratosphere, I've had my doubts near whether this was ultimately to the advantage of the terminate user. The problem is elementary: While different display technologies have different pixel densities and your take a chance of seeing pixels at the same resolution is higher on a larger screen than a smaller i, we've seen resolutions skyrocket even further in recent years. The Sony Xperia XZ Premium has a 4K panel in a v.5-inch phone, for a whopping 807 PPI (pixels per inch). Even Apple tree'due south iPhone X hits 458 PPI these days.

There are several issues with pushing resolutions this high. First, the more pixels yous jam into a phone, the more than ability the phone'southward brandish is going to draw. In that location'south no way around that trouble–more pixels means more than power consumption. 2d, past a certain point, information technology is literally incommunicable for the human eye to resolve boosted detail. Sure, if you accept xx/ten vision, yous'll still encounter pixels on displays where people with 20/20 vision don't, but there's a literal physical limit to how well humans can see. Even if your eyes are physically perfect, our vision is ultimately limited by pupil diffraction. xx/8 is the maximum acuity, fifty-fifty with a theoretically perfect heart. Given this, at that place'southward a signal at which cramming more than pixels into a brandish simply literally cannot matter. Not for me, not for you, and non for Chuck Yeager.

Unless you lot're an actual, literal hawk, you don't need an 807 PPI display. If you are a militarist, touch on screens aren't talon-uniform.

Tertiary, the more than pixels you cram into a given area, the less concrete room is available for the backlight to shine through and illuminate the screen. There are only two solutions for this: Either lower the display brightness or make the backlight even brighter, burning additional power.

A recent editorial at Android Central by Bob Myers, an engineer and brandish designer, makes this indicate well, arguing that what nosotros demand isn't higher pixel density simply fundamentally better displays. At that place are various ways LCDs or OLEDs might be improved that have nothing to do with amend PPI. They include increased colour accuracy (not wider gamuts, which can really be less color accurate), higher contrast ratios to make displays easier to read in sunlight, and more efficient displays, like Precipitous's IGZO, to reduce power consumption at the aforementioned brightness.

Manufacturers and customers have glommed on to high DPI as a mode to communicate the "newness" of a production, but this would scarcely be the starting time time consumer products take inverse the fashion they market place themselves. There was a time when computers were marketed on clock speed. Few applications even took advantage of more than one thread. Yet today, people generally understand that more cores are too useful (to a certain point). In one case upon a time, we marketed storage more by capacity than speed. Today, it's common to encounter consumer laptops emphasize factors like PCIe SSDs of 128-512GB as opposed to voluminous HDDs of 4TB or more.

There's no need to go back to the days of 320×240 3-inch panels. But it's time to allow become of high DPI and cast nearly for something better.

Now read: 25 Best Android Tips