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Displays Cellphones Technology

Sharp Announces 4K Smartphone Display 152

Posted by Soulskill from the more-pixels-than-you-know-what-to-do-with dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Japanese electronics giant Sharp has announced production of 5.5" displays with 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution. They'll hit the market next year. The display will have a pixel density of 806 PPI. It's not known yet which smartphone makers will build devices with these screens. The displays cost significantly more than a more typical 1080p or 1440p display, so they'll probably only make it into high-end phones. On the other hand, this will help to drive down prices for lower-resolution displays, so it could indirectly benefit everybody.
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Sharp Announces 4K Smartphone Display More

Sharp Announces 4K Smartphone Display

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  • I'm dumbfounded.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      I'm not. FINALLY we have a phone suitable for tapping into the vast amounts of money that audiophiles appear willing to spend in the endless hunt for the delusion of a little more on-paper improvement in quality. This has nothing to do with practicalities, the vendors know full well that there are plenty of people out there who will spend whatever it takes to have the best, regardless of whether they actually get any benefit from it or not. If they can create the products with enough margin to turn a pro

      • Re:What in the actual fuck! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @03:32AM (#49468471) Journal
        The curious quirk, in this case, is that you probably won't even be able to get a 'theoretically better; but not perceptably so and definitely not worth the price' product; you'll almost inevitably get a worse one.

        Any phone/tablet SoC with claims to being remotely high end is already some mixture of thermally constrained and deliberately crippled to save the device's battery life. If you demand their full performance, they'll throttle within minutes; and if they somehow had the thermal headroom to avoid that, they'd flatten the battery in a some egregiously short time.

        Assuming reasonably equal tech(ie. not a 1920x1080 phone from two years ago against a phone from next year with this screen) the higher resolution device will have worse battery life(or a visibly larger battery) and be at a greater risk of annoying frame rate/responsiveness issues in any applications that try to do complex GPU work at native resolution. Some amount of this is accepted, since visible giant eyeball-slashing pixels suck; but the returns on graphical prettiness diminish, while the power and thermal costs just keep on scaling...

        At least audiophile nonsense is generally good at what it does, if you ignore the price tag and the nonsense; this will be actively worse than a similar device based on a slightly less ambitious screen.
        • This was a big issue when I was looking at tablets a year or so back. There were a few models with 2560x1440 resolution, but most of the reviews were not great, as games and other graphic intensive activities didn't run smoothly. Meanwhile, the tablets that stuck to 1080p were much smoother when used with the same processor. I imagine a 4K phone would suffer from the same problem. Trying to display so many pixels is going to be taxing on the processor, and draining the battery. On a 5.5 inch screen, nobod
        • These will look much better than current displays when in a head mounted display. Even a Samsung S6 has very visible pixels when used for VR. A 4K display would look a lot better. Phone-based VR is surprisingly good, even without Gear VR. With Gear VR it's even better.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ranton ( 36917 )

      Stop wasting our time with this crap and give us a goddamn 4k 17" laptop! Or anything better than standard HD. Just 1 extra vertical pixel would at least show progress.

  • Will probably be used for VR applications. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @01:29AM (#49468159)

    Small high res screens like this are in high demand for the occulus rift and its competitors. Provided it has a low latency and reasonable refresh rate we should see it in a HMD device soon.

    • Re:Will probably be used for VR applications. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by should_be_linear ( 779431 ) on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @01:37AM (#49468191)
      nobody in display industry cares about Oculus Rift. For each Oculus Rift there is million phones sold. World is not Slashdot dot org.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The problem is that phones don't need it. You can sell them for a while anyway though.

      • This is true; but if you've bothered to produce a small, very high resolution, display anyway; you'd have to really not care in order to be unwilling to sell some of the product you already make to somebody willing to buy it.

        That likely excludes 'quantity: 1' orders from random hobbyists; but if you can hit the minimum order quantity, your money is a lot more important than your intended application.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          Physiology will limit oculus rift and all others. Sure they'll get a grab early on but main stream response to the impact of using one over any extended period will hugely limit acceptance, especially as yet another device. With phones, lighter weight, longer life batteries, durability and more voice features are going to be the new goals. Marketing at exclusivity will inevitably fail, as common sense always eventually prevails over fads.

          • Re:Will probably be used for VR applications. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by GuB-42 ( 2483988 ) on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @05:40AM (#49468741)

            Physiology will limit oculus rift and all others. Sure they'll get a grab early on but main stream response to the impact of using one over any extended period will hugely limit acceptance, especially as yet another device. With phones, lighter weight, longer life batteries, durability and more voice features are going to be the new goals. Marketing at exclusivity will inevitably fail, as common sense always eventually prevails over fads.

            Common sense prevails over fads, really ?
            With phones, we pretty much passed the "common sense" barrier. The smartphone is now becoming more and more of a fashion accessory, driven mostly by aesthetics. Just look at the new Galaxy S6 : less durable, worse battery life, but better looking than the previous model.
            At least, with VR, there is potential for more than just slight incremental improvements.

            • I really wonder how long people will continue this trend. Currently, I see a lot of people with not a lot of money buying high end phones like the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S# phones. These phones are quite expensive, and the cheaper ones are getting to the point where they are actually quite good. Why spend $700 for a phone when a $200 phone will do everything you need. You could get a new one more than 3 times as often at that price. So if you usually get a new phone every 2 years, then you could get a n
              • One nice phone is a lot more useful to one person than 3 crappy ones. The experience of using an S6 is much better than a $200 phone. The cheap phone will be annoyingly slow. Maybe you're OK with a crappy phone, but many of us want something less frustrating.

                • Not NEARLY as true as it used to be.

                  Moto G is smooth-feeling and about $200. For the lower price, you lose screen resolution and camera quality and storage, acceptable tradeoffs for saving FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.

                  Hell, the OnePlusOne is $350 (fuck the 16gb version) and comparable to the Galaxy S5/Note 3 in performance. My sister-in-law has one and loves it, and she's directly comparing it to my Note 3.

                  • The Moto G is exactly the one I had in mind. These phones offer great value for your money. Especially when you consider that a lot of the high end phones like the Samsung Galaxy S6 and iPhone don't even have an SD Card slot. Your $700 phone now just became even more expensive if you want more than the base amount of storage. With the slow or non-existent roll-out of updates on Android phones, buying a new phone ever year is probably a much better plan if you want to stay up to date on the operating syst

                    • The Moto G is a bit slow. It may be a 1.3GHz quad core CPU, but those at Cortex A7 cores, not more powerful A15, 17 or Krait. etc, that do more than twice the instructions per cycle.
                      Having four cores is also a bit overkill. Your app will pause because it's written poorly and performing long running tasks in the UI thread, consuming only a single core. You'll still be able to swipe down from the top of the screen though, and that will be nice and responsive.

                      I'm lucky I have the dual sim version though, since

              • I'm only going to be carrying one phone. I'm going to use it a lot. This means that making it nicer to use is worth something to me, and $1/day is very reasonable for making my day that much easier. It's cheaper than getting a fancy coffee every day, another thing that people seem to like to spend a disproportionate amount of money on.

                Why would I want to get a new phone every eight months (with corresponding expense and slight hassle)? What would that do for me? My current phone is a lot older than

          • Marketing at exclusivity will inevitably fail, as common sense always eventually prevails over fads.

            DeBeers would like a word.

      • nobody in display industry cares about Oculus Rift. For each Oculus Rift there is million phones sold. World is not Slashdot dot org.

        Exactly. But that is why this is such a brilliant development. Developing a new display line is expensive, and most companies can probably not justify the investment in the 'hope' that VR becomes a viable market. However, it is reasonably likely that the marketing goons can drum up a mega-pixel war on high end smart phone screens and move the tech along that way. The net result will be cheap high dpi screens that can be used in VR, and that is a great outcome for the world of Slashdot dot org.

        So yes you're

      • Two decades ago, nobody thought the "portable phones" market would ever overtake the laptops market.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          No one thinks that now. It's like saying "The corn market has overtaken the office furniture market!" They don't compete in the same space.

          • Twenty years ago, a phone was a phone, and you used it to make phone calls. A laptop was a computer, and did computery things. Nowadays, you can use a phone to read your email, surf the web, and play some fairly sophisticated games, all of which would have required something like a laptop in 1995. They didn't compete in the same space. They do now.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by narcc ( 412956 )

              No one buys a mobile phone to replace a laptop. They're fundamentally different.

              • Some people buy a mobile phone instead of a laptop, or get a phone and stop using the laptop. It depends on what their specific needs are, among other things. There's lots of things people used to do on desktops and laptops that work OK on phones, and lots of people didn't and don't do anything more.

        • Two decades ago, nobody thought the "portable phones" market would ever overtake the laptops market.

          That's misleading. Two decades ago a phone was just a phone, and people back then would assume that's what was meant.

          Today's smartphones are effectively portable computers and communications devices that happen to include a phone as part of their functionality- the "smartphone" name is more a legacy of the direction they evolved from (i.e. the phone market) than a reflection of what they are now. If the concept had been invented out of the blue in a world of traditional "dumb" phones (mobile or otherwise)

          • But the same thing could happen to VR one day. We've got a limited view of what VR is and what it can do right now. What happens within a decade or two might be so different that you'll be writing a similar comment about VR.

            • But the same thing could happen to VR one day. We've got a limited view of what VR is and what it can do right now. What happens within a decade or two might be so different that you'll be writing a similar comment about VR.

              You're missing the point I was making. It's not that people 20 years ago would have had a limited idea of what the "phone" could do.

              It's that a lot of what we now associate with the smart-"phone" was never really a consequence of the phone- or the phone functionality- itself. Rather, it's a result of the fact that they were driven by *computers* that allowed the introduction of useful but secondary functionality (like calculators, snake, et al) of ever-increasing sophistication. It's the evolution of that

              • But smartphone or advanced PDA, the question remains the same. When most people think about "VR" they think about displays in front of their eyes, blocking their outside view. Closed-view is fine to give us a stereoscopic view of what we think of as "videogames" right now but future VR isn't going to look like today's 3D-rendered-on-a-2D-display systems.

                I think Microsoft is on the right path for VR, with their augmented reality demo.

                • Perhaps they will, but that wasn't what was under dispute, it was the comparison with the unforeseen development of the "phone" twenty years ago that I found misleading.

        • Two decades ago, if you said there was a product available, with more processing power than your current laptop that has a 24/7 internet connection, can fit in your pocket, has a 1080p display and the battery lasts all day, they'd tell you you were smoking crack, that their Intel Pentium is amazing, especially compared to their own 486, and an 800x600 14" screen is perfect, why would you need anything more on a portable device? TV only comes at 480 or 576 lines of resolution anyway.

          • And that's why I think VR's future is hard to imagine in 2015. The current technology is only beginning to achieve decent capabilities.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drkim ( 1559875 )

        nobody in display industry cares about Oculus Rift. For each Oculus Rift there is million phones sold. World is not Slashdot dot org.

        I'm sure you're right.
        "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
        Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

    • I get that, but why put it in a phone? Gorilla makes great glass, but you don't see them making phones just to show it off, ya know? Are they hoping Google will market this thing next to Cardboard [google.com]?

      I just don't get it.

  • As heard before ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Golden_Rider ( 137548 ) on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @01:33AM (#49468169)

    "Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades!"

  • "Fuck Everything, We're Doing 4K"... (reference [theonion.com])
    • Reminds me of the DSLR cameras megapixels race. The 5 D mark III has a resolution of 50 MP. Not only that makes huge file sizes, it takes ages to move or process a bunch of them, but the focus shift and (most) lenses intrinsic resolution cannot cope with such high definition (in other terms, a lot of 2-adjacent pixels are identical).

    • "Fuck Everything, We're Doing 4K"

      Or simply... "4K Everything".

  • The displays cost significantly more than a more typical 1080p or 1440p display, so they'll probably only make it into high-end phones.

    It's not just the monetary cost that you have to consider. How much power does it take to drive these displays? High end phones might have more room in the profit margin to account for the higher monetary cost, but they are still subject to the same power constraints as cheaper phones.

    • Well, if you have a taste for brutal irony, newer revisions of the eDP spec include the option to use lossy compression(but it's, um, 'visually lossless', we swear!) to reduce the amount of data you need to send to the screen, and the power costs of the link... Where better than the suckers overpaying for resolution to introduce such a feature?

  • What?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @01:41AM (#49468207)

    Not 8K?

    Well, if that's all they can do, I'll make do.

    I expect my smartwatch to have 16K by 2020 though. And my monitor to have 640k. That's all. 640k ought to be enough for anybody.

  • Nice, so where's the processor to match? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    As a gamedev, that's quite dumb. The GPU isn't up to that level yet, and I doubt that your eyes can tell much of a difference between it and 1080p. Even on a top-end mobile processors the speed difference between 720p and 1080p is staggering. The sad thing is, even if you render at a lower res and scale it up you still have to fill all those damn pixels. Fill rate is a bitch.

    Now, for things other than games? Meh, maybe. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying more pixels is bad, just that pixel fill rate

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rioki ( 1328185 )

      I think the comment for VR headsets is spot on. Granted there are more smartphones than VR headsets, but on smartphones few will be ready to take the price hike the display will cause. I think they are targeting high end smart phones and VR headsets. Basically for people with too much disposable income...

  • Everytime they mention 4K and i see 3840 it makes me itch... some clever folks at the display producing companies are just like the ones in the HDD business making up the term gibibyte. (and yes, I know 3840 is 2x1920, but still..)

    • "640K should be enough for everybody."

      • Bill Gates never said that [wired.com], btw.

        • Pfft, why ruin a perfectly good meme with facts?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megol ( 3135005 )

      It wasn't HDD manufacturers "making up" those prefixes, in fact they tend to like the older non-binary prefixes or (in some cases) mixing binary and decimal prefixes into a mess.

  • While the picture and the quality are amazing, only a small fraction of televisions are sold are 4K,

    The 4K content online is only experimental.

    For televisions there are not too many 4k capable blue players.

    Yet 100 times smaller cellphone has a need for 4K....

    Let's fuckin hope that apple is nearly done testing their 8K, or was it 16K phones, just to show who is the boss here.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by itzly ( 3699663 )

      Yet 100 times smaller cellphone has a need for 4K....

      5.5 inch phone is only 18 times smaller than a 100 inch TV, and watching your phone from 5 inch away is about equivalent to watching the big TV at 8 feet. So, 4K on a phone is in the same ballpark as 4K on a big screen TV.

  • A 4K display on a phone... (Score:5, Funny)

    by havana9 ( 101033 ) on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @02:51AM (#49468401)
    ... surely will look sharp.
  • You probably could tell the difference looking close up (A person with 20/20 vision at 4 inches - the closest a healthy adult can focus - can see up to 876 PPI) , but [techdissected.com]:

    If the average reading distance is 1 foot (12 inches = 305 mm), p @0.4 arc minute is 35.5 microns or about 720 ppi/dpi. p @1 arc minute is 89 microns or about 300 dpi/ppi. This is why magazines are printed at 300 dpi – it’s good enough for most people. Fine art printers aim for 720, and that’s the best it need be. Very few people stick their heads closer than 1 foot away from a painting or photograph.”

    • I was one of the biggest advocates for FullHD displays on smartphones. I could and can easily tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on a 4-5" smartphone screen, and the legibility of small text is greatly improvied on 1080p screens of that size. However, at 1080p, it's most definitely good enough, even for my picky eyes.

      There comes a point when text simply becomes too small to read, even if the pixel denisty is still high enough to read it.

      As for video/images... I'd happily stick with 720p on a phone f

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by robi5 ( 1261542 )

        What does it even mean, you were one of the biggest advocates? Was there some ranking of the global population and you were in the top 100, or something? Or maybe you have a website where you promoted this idea long before it was foreseen, or wrote regularly to mobile manufacturers, or were involved in R&D? Just curious.

        Also because I'd expect a big advocate to know about font size being a different thing to pixel size. Even casual and moderate advocates of hi res screens knew about it and informed the

        • Oh sorry, I just meant that I spent a lot of time in forums and on Slashdot arguing with other neckbeards who, even back then, considered 1080p superfluous :D

          Of course font size is different from pixel size - what I'm saying is that when there are enough pixels to smoothly render a font at a size that's unreadable for someone with perfect vision, it's highly unlikely you'll gain anything by upping the pixel density even further.

          And why would you want to "upscale" visual elements from older designs intended

          • Re:You probably could tell looking close up (Score:5, Insightful)

            by robi5 ( 1261542 ) on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @04:59AM (#49468655)

            I like resolution independence. So the long term future is bright, however that long term future is bound to include screens that have print quality resolition (600-2400dpi) and beyond. But during transitional times, it's nice for compatibility if applications etc. that were designed for lower resolution screens look OK.

            For example, there's no way you can upscale a 640x480 screen to 1024x768 such a way that it looks as good as it would look with 640x480, and you don't want to leave black bars either. These are pretty low resolutions and the artifacts of rescaling are very obvious.

            However there's decent content made with things like 720p, FHD and slightly higher resolutions that may suffer from similar rescaling artifacts if shown on a higher pixel count screen which is "just retina enough".

            This is one reason I support resolutions beyond what's obviously discernable with the naked eye, e.g. into the print press resolution territory.

            Another reason is that while visual acuity starts to fail to discern pixels at "retina" resolutions (around 300dpi), it's more of an entry point. Art, business and scientific visualisations, electronic press publications do benefit from higher resolutions. Not to mention that a lot of us have better eyesight than 20/20 and not everybody keep their devices at the 12" distance all the time.

            Additional reasons:
            - mobile devices "prime" the economically viable display technology for VR and AR stuff - way higher resolution there is essential
            - larger screens tend to eventually follow DPI standards set by mobile, e.g. the iMac 5k is almost at the iPhone 4 level, in terms of DPI
            - very high resolutions force the developer community to finally steer away from obsolete units and concepts like the pixel (useful at low level HW etc. only)

            The increase to resolution is milking a known process in electronics, called scaling or miniaturisation.

            Having said all these, the new areas of improvement should be here:
            - viewing angle and independence of color from angle
            - color gamut
            - contrast, white level, black level
            - calibration
            - latency and blur
            - integration (scanner, fingerprint reader, camera, touch, physical objects)
            - plasticity and cost (eventually replace paper)
            - directional projection for individual eyes with no 3D glasses (2 streams, or ideally, shared viewing)

            So it's a long way before we can render a surface like the radiance of a butterfly wing...

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

              Exactly, that's why even on a 1920x1080 5.5" screen text looks shit if it isn't anti-aliased, preferably with sub-pixel rendering.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by CODiNE ( 27417 )

              I'd love a laptop screen I can use outside in direct sunlight.

              • It will reduce battery life.

                If a screen is built with a semi-reflective layer between the backlight and the layer of pixels, it can be illuminated from the front as well.
                The down-side is higher manufacturing costs and a brighter backlight is required - that draws more power.

            • It depends though. If you mean moving from 640x480 to 1024x768 where the pixels cannot be resolved by the naked eye (aka retina), then you can scale it up smoothly provided the graphics are in vector format. The normal issue is that the graphics are not in vector format, and are usually optimised to make use of pixel boundaries to improve the resolution (i.e. a sharp edge looks infinitely sharp because it is placed at a pixel boundary). When interpolated the underlying lack of image quality becomes apparent

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        Aliasing of fonts on a 1080p screen makes text look grey, 4k allows larger fonts to be used with a smaller proportion of the pixels being grey. The result is nicer blacker fonts and more intricate fonts can be used.

        Many non-aliased fonts look dreadful - blocky and very badly proportioned, again they would look far better scaled on a higher resolution screen.

        Simply shrinking the text with the screen is not the right thing to do.

  • Wow, so much effort put into the resolution, and almost none put into the latency of the device. How sad.

  • Why? (Score:2, Troll)

    by robi5 ( 1261542 )

    I don't see the point.

  • FAR more relevant... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ... would be use for VR headsets. 4k is NOT needed on a phone. on a headset? definitely far more useful.

  • Seriously, what is the point of having such high resolution on a small display?

  • The only good use I can see for it is to put a big bright light behind it, add some lenses, and project it on a wall.

  • How the video industry works (Score:3)

    by goodmanj ( 234846 ) on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @06:52AM (#49468975)

    The video industry is the greatest planned obsolescence racket since the invention of the light bulb.

    First you sell them a TV.
    Then you sell them cable to watch on the TV.
    Then you sell them a videotape player.
    Then you sell them all their media on videotape.
    Then you sell them a DVD player.
    Then you sell them all their media on DVD.
    Then you sell them a HDTV with a resolution just slightly higher than the DVD.
    Then you sell them a Blu-Ray player so they can use that higher resolution.
    Then you sell them all their media on Blu-Ray.
    Then you sell them a 3d tv.
    Then you sell them a 3d blu-ray player.
    Then you sell them all their media on 3d blu-ray.
    Then you sell them a 4k TV.
    Then you sell them a 4k video player.
    Then you sell them all their media for 4k.

    And so on. The moment there's not a Next Big Thing You Have to Have, the whole industry goes belly up.

    • And so on. The moment there's not a Next Big Thing You Have to Have, the whole industry goes belly up.

      Actually, at that point the only thing left that they can improve would be the quality of the actual content. So yeah, they may very well go belly up.

      • Actually, at that point the only thing left that they can improve would be the quality of the actual content

        Yeah, I said that when blu-ray first came out, but they still managed to get millions of people to shell out for crappy 3d and impossible-to-see 4k.

    • Eh. Buy tech (and content) from a couple years ago and you'll enjoy fantastic quality at a fraction of the cost*

      *also works for video games.

  • Over 100 comments now, and not one person has mentioned how lifelike and delicious those downscaled chestnuts look. Honestly, it's like nobody bothers to click on TFA anymore.

    I'm always amused by cultural differences like this though... you would never see chestnuts used as screen porn in the US. Actual porn, maybe, but not chestnuts.

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