Re: MERGED - IPhone 4
Neuroscientist: iPhone 4's 'Retina display' not bullsh*t
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Battle of the boffins
By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco • Get more from this author
Posted in Mobile, 25th June 2010 21:34 GMT
Updated An America retinal neuroscientist has focused his boffinistic eye on the iPhone 4's
much-touted high-res display, and has come to the conclusion that Apple's claim that the "Retina display's pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels" is true.
"I'd find Apple’s claims stand up to what the human eye can perceive," writes Bryan Jones after an exhaustive analysis of the iPhone 4's 3.5-inch, 960x640 display.
Jones' conclusion contradicts an earlier assertion by DisplayMate Technologies CEO Raymond Soneira, who dismissed Steve Jobs' claims as "marketing puffery".
When introducing the iPhone 4, the Apple CEO said: "It turns out there’s a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch, that when you hold something around to 10 to 12 inches away from your eyes, is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels."
Jones notes that the iPhone 4's sub-pixels may themselves have sub-pixels — but he's "not sure about this"
Soneira said, in effect, "hogwash." Then, after Discover published a rebuttal to his argument, he issued a rebuttal to the rebuttal.
"Examining this issue more closely, the iPhone 4 is actually very far from a retina display — it's a substantial discrepancy and not even close: At 12 inches the 1 dimensional linear ppi shortcoming is 326/477 = 68 percent. But the pixel (area) density for 2 dimensions, which is the actual relevant observable, is that value squared = 0.47, so the iPhone 4 is more than a factor of 2 from being a retina display at the typical 12 inch viewing distance."
Got that? Well, to be frank, it took your humble reporter a few readings to get aboard Soneira's rebuttal2, and he's still having a wee bit of difficulty riding Soneira's train of thought to its terminus.
But Jones, the retinal neuroscientist, understood immediately — one assumes — and rebuffed the arguments of Soneira, the display technologist. "While Dr. Soneira was partially correct with respect to the retina," Jones writes, "Apple's Retina Display adequately represents the resolution at which images fall upon our retina."
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