iPad 3 retina display

Wednesday, May 9, 2012 | AKRAMUZZAMAN at 11:59 PM |

Eyeballing the iPad 3 retina display

Today, Apple announced the new iPad 3, which has a bunch of new features and improvements over the iPad2. One of the new features is a much higher resolution display: 2048 x 1536 pixels, which they advertise as a "retina" display: ad-speak for pixels so small your eye can’t see them. The display looks smooth and unpixellated.
But is that really the case? I did a little math and found this claim to be true, more or less. But there are some caveats, and they’re interesting.
[By the way: I've done the math here in imperial units, and not metric, because that's the standard the industry uses for pixels and such. Silly, but it's one of the last holdouts you'll see used this way.]

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iBalling the numbers

First, you should really read my post Resolving the iPhone resolution, where I first dissected the "retina display" claim for when the iPhone 4 came out. My conclusion then was that yes, the iPhone 4 display has pixels so small you can’t see them under normal circumstances. But in that post I did a bit of math to prove it.
What I found was that if you hold a device about a foot away from your face and have normal vision, the pixels need to be smaller than 0.0035 inches in size for them to be unresolved; in other words, pixels at this size or smaller give you a "retina display". The iPhone 4 has pixels about 0.0031 inches in size, so it wins.
But what about the new iPad?

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As you probably know by now, the pixels in the new iPad’s Retina display are so small that they almost can’t be seen by the human eye — but as you can see above, the story is very different indeed when you look at it at 80x magnification under a microscope.
What you see above is the LCD displays of the iPad 3 (left) and iPad 2 (right) as photographed by Lukas Mathis, a Swiss software engineer and UI designer. He received his iPad 3 this morning, and like any discerning geek the first thing he did was investigate the beautiful 2048×1536 Retina display — first by eye, and then under the microscope. Then he checked out the screen on his iPad 2 and marveled at the much larger (and quite differently shaped) pixels. Not satisfied, he magnified the display of his iPod Touch, iPhone 4S, Kindle Fire, Google Nexus One, PlayStation Vita, and, and, and — well, let’s just say that Mathis has a rather large number of gadgets (a bunch of them are pictured below).
Various LCD Screen Under a Microscope

What do all of these differences mean? Well, now we’re moving into the arcane realm of LCD and OLED technology. The dark gaps between the pixels (and within the pixels in some cases) are mostly caused by control circuitry (each and every subpixel has a few microscopic copper wires running to it) and the need to make sure that each pixel group is “square” (draw an imaginary square around each group of three subpixels, and you’ll see what I mean). The weird shapes are most likely about controlling the exact amount of light that each subpixel emits. In the case of the PS Vita, with its skinny blue subpixel, it’s safe to assume that the blue light being emitted is twice as strong as red or green; if it was full-width, the resulting image would be very blue.

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