The World's Smallest Full HD Display 243
An anonymous reader writes "Ever heard of Ortustech? Probably not. But you have heard of Casio, right? Ortustech is a joint venture between Casio Computer and Toppan Printing to develop small and medium sized displays. Today, the company is announcing a doozy with its 4.8-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel HAST (Hyper Amorphous Silicon TFT) LCD with 160-degree viewing angle, 16.8 million colors, and a pixel density of 458ppi. Amazing when you compare that to the lauded 326ppi of iPhone 4's Retina display."
Too small.... (Score:5, Insightful)
4.8" ?? How about giving me 24" or 32" at the same res?
FFS, for so long now we haven't been going up in DPI on screens. We just got to a certain point and after that we just went "OOoohhh HD" or basically, "OOOhhhh shiny!"
WTF happened?
HD is the new digital (Score:1, Insightful)
For those old enough to remember, back when consumer CDs came out in the early 80s, everything was "digital". Even analog speakers were digital! Now, everything is HD. So, my 56" 1080p TV is just as HD as a 3" display on a phone. Whats funny is that my 56" display is more than adequate at normal viewing distances, phones and smaller computer monitors are still a ways away from "HD" stuff like approaching print resolution. Thats in the 600-800 ppi range.
Re:Too small.... (Score:0, Insightful)
4.8" ?? How about giving me 24" or 32" at the same res?
FFS, for so long now we haven't been going up in DPI on screens. We just got to a certain point and after that we just went "OOoohhh HD" or basically, "OOOhhhh shiny!"
WTF happened?
We more-or-less reached the limit of human visual acuity at normal viewing distances in normal viewing conditions?
What's the point of making a 32" screen with pixels so small you can only see them if your nose is pressed up against the glass?
Re:Usable by humans (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually yes. I can see some pixel borders on 326 DPI display that iDevices have when I'm looking really close up. Also I can clearly see differences in line widths so there is clearly room for some improvement, as technology has still not surpassed the limits of humans.
Re:Usable by humans (Score:3, Insightful)
> Can you tell the difference?
There will always be someone who will claim to be able to tell the difference, and as long as that someone is as crazy as the average audiophile you'll see companies trying to develop 1200 dpi displays that you can wear on your wrist.
Re:Too small.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too small.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What about "normal-sized" HD screens? (Score:3, Insightful)
These displays are basically integrated circuits. That means that the cost increases a lot faster than the size, unless you are willing to accept stuck pixels. The denser you make the pixels, the lower the yield. For small displays, the error rate may mean that you are throwing 20% of them away (or selling them cheaply to people who don't care about the quality). When you double the size of the display, your errors per unit area remain constant, but the area of display that you have to throw away for a single error doubles. For large screen displays, you are likely to be throwing away almost all of them, while making tiny displays with the same process would have you only discarding a few percent.
It's worth noting that IBM made a 225DPI 22" (I think, may have been 23") display back around 2000 (it predated dual-link DVI, so you needed to drive it from two DVI ports). I used one briefly, and it was amazing - text looked crisp even without antialiasing enabled. They sold them for $20,000, so very few people could afford them. They couldn't get the yields high enough to bring the price down, so eventually they discontinued them.
Re:Too small.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the data rate that's a problem.
Let's imagine 458dpi on a relatively "modest" screen that's 20in by 11.7in. That makes a display resolution of 9160 by 5358.
To update that screen at 60 frames per second would require a data rate of 6.9 *terabits* per second to the actual panel. Now you can say, "compress the data before sending it to the screen", but that would just increase the processing power needed, and at the end of the day, something still has to feed the raw panel the data at 6.9 terabits per second.
Big screens aren't getting higher DPI because (a) it's not needed (generally, you're looking at a big screen from a few feet away, and 100 dpi is more than enough) and (b) it would be fantastically expensive to do it and (c) no one has developed a standard to shift data from the computer to the display at the kinds of data rates that would be required to drive such a display.
Re:Too small.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Small screens are great but... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, because the data rates get too high. If you had a 450-odd DPI display, 20in x 11.7in, you'd need a data rate of about 65 gigabits per second at 60 Hz refresh rate going to the raw panel. This is more than ten times the data rate of DisplayPort. A completely new standard for connecting monitors would be needed and there would be significant challenges to overcome to make it work.
Re:Small screens are great but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just to really drive this point home, NeXTStep had working device independence with Display Postscript. How did Apple manage to lose it in Display PDF?
You're two orders of magnitude off (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm...
9160 * 5358 * 60 * 24 = 70410355200
That's 70,410,355,200 with commas, about 70 Gb/s (8 GB/s). That's about one order of magnitude faster than the current HDMI spec. It's technically feasible now, and will be easy to do in about 4 years.
By then, many digital cameras will have many tens of megapixels, so the resolution of the screen won't be unused.
What kind of applications would benefit from such uber-high def? One idea: I'm looking forward to the day we will be able to use commodity cameras and displays to get digital microscopy good enough to replace having to stare down an eyepiece. Imaging also being able to show other scientists what you're doing without having to switch seats, refocus, etc. Bring it on.
(And no, current HD is about 2-3 times too rough to do the really fine observations I need on a daily basis.)
Re:Thats it? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a waste for a cell phone, but for a monitor for an HDTV shoot this will be quite useful. When you're shooting, you need to see what you're actually shooting, not a scaled down version, since the scaling can have all sorts of unexpected effects.
Re:Thats it? (Score:2, Insightful)
And to avoid scaling artifacts.
Re:From the TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Infamous is when you're more than famous!
-- Ned Nederlander
Re:You're two orders of magnitude off (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too small.... (Score:3, Insightful)
1080p is "enough" because the mass market of people use their computers as mobile Internet + video machines. And for little else. These are the same people coming from setting 1600x1200 monitors to 1024x768 because the text is "too small".
Re:Too small.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I only looked at the Dell because it's exactly the resolution and size I'm looking for and...
It's almost 2 grand.
GP's point still stands. I recently threw out a 13" CRT that did 1600x1200 with no problems whatsoever; it was 10 years old. For those of you who can't figure it out, that's a 10.667% lower pixel count, but 72.144 more pixels per inch, linearly than the 27" iMac (1080p) in front of me right now. The mac is 81.702dpi, the CRT was 153.846dpi. Why can't I have that dpi on this screen? Fuck, I'll settle for 150, so... 23.5" wide screen would be 3525 pixels wide. Make it 1983 pixels tall (maybe 1984) for 16:9 or 2203 (or 2204) for 16:10 and I'll be ecstatic about it. Even better, give me a roughly 160dip display (163.404dpi to simply double the resolution of my current screen -- funny because it's literally not found anywhere) at 3840x2160, so 1080p can scale cleanly on it, while still giving me 4x the screen real-estate, and I'll buy 2; I've always wanted 8 displays.
why can't someone make a better flat panel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of working on handheld devices with resolution better than the eye can see, why not improve the current state of flat panel displays?
I'm still using an old 19 inch tube because it supports 1600X1200 and my work requires a display at least 1200 pixels tall. Try buying that in a flat panel. In 16X9, it works out to be about 2140 pixels wide. But no matter what size flat panel you get these days, their maximum resolution is 1080P, 1920X1080, which is too damned short. In this case, the HDTV standards have messed us up, because of the perception that 1080P is all anyone could ever need.
I'm not talking about showing video at a higher resolution, I just want to get some work done.