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."
Re:Enough already (Score:4, Informative)
We will also need new video interfaces for a "4000x2000" display. A Dual-Link DVI or a DisplayPort interface can only drive up to 2560x1600. Dual-Link DisplayPort ?
rip the description from engadget, AC (Score:4, Informative)
The AC could of at least given a pointer to where the description was taken from
http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/25/ortustech-unveils-worlds-smallest-full-hd-display-puts-retina/ [engadget.com]
Re:Thats it? (Score:5, Informative)
The spec sheet is in Japanese, not Chinese.
It claims that the thing is 14 grams, that it supports 260,000 colors, at brightness of 300 cd/m^2 it uses 10 mA per hour @ 3V and that it can operate from -20 to +70C, and RoHC compliant.
Need any other info?
Re:Usable by humans (Score:4, Informative)
The Retina theoretical limit is based on a 'standard' viewing distance for phone displays. If you wanted HD glasses (using a far focal point) you would need much higher res. Did not RTFA, but perhaps that is the sort of target for this.
Either that or it's just geeky dick wagging. :)
Re:Too late! (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure how this works exactly, but there might be some benefit to the sharpness of these displays, even if your eyesight isn't great.
Re:Usable by humans (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure many will correct me if I'm wrong, but the basic gist of devices like the Retina display is to match or slightly exceed the theoretical limit of an eye's ability to resolve details at a normal usage distance. This is an argument directly related to the Nyquist theorem: to capture a signal, scan at a resolution at least twice your desired sensitivity. The Compact Disc chose 44050 Hz sampling rate because our ears generally cannot hear anything over 22000 Hz.
What the Nyquist theorem misses is that the mind is not just taking a single sample, but a time series of many samples. A good listener or an observant viewer can see qualitative differences in a square wave and a smoother sine wave, even near the limits of resolution. In the visual realm, there's a good example. As you move an image across different photoreceptors, the brain will synthesize additional resolution. Our eyeballs do this all the time: tiny involuntary movements called Nystagmus help our neural edge-detectors gather more data to aid in perception. You can experiment with this using a video editor and one of those "pixelating" filters: move an object behind a coarse pixelating filter, and you can easily determine more about the original object shape than you could with a fixed image. Nystagmus beats Nyquist, if you will.
I think there's plenty of room for higher resolution sampling: music is often sampled at 48000 KHz nowadays, and I think handheld displays will benefit from 400+ or even 500+ DPI easily.
Re:Small screens are great but... (Score:5, Informative)
The OS doesn't mention DPI, but it still "knows" it. For example, a font of a certain point-size is, by definition, a certain size in other units. If I correctly recall high-school typing class, 10 points is 10 characters per inch wide and 6 lines per inch high.
Changing to a larger monitor of the same resolution should cause the same point-size to display with fewer pixels, as each pixel is now bigger.
Windows and X11 both allow you to set your monitor's DPI so that this stuff looks right. OS/X has some variable DPI stuff in the back end, but Steve won't let them expose it because they can't get it working right.
I had an unbelievably annoying experience in this regard last year. My Mac Mini with a 1280x1024 17" screen was working fine, but I needed a faster box and wanted a bigger screen. I went out and bought a 28" iMac..... only to discover that while the screen size increased, the resolution increase outpaced the physical size of the screen -- the net effect was that the writing on many dialogue boxes etc was so small that I couldn't read it. (My eyes suck, sue me)
To add insult to injury, there is also no official way on Leopard to alter the system fonts (like "Large Fonts" in Windows). Fortunately, I found some 3rd party software out there on the 'net that let me tweak the right prefs, and I now have a readable display.
But the DPI is still wrong.
Incidentally, I asked around in a bunch of mac forums and IRC channel. You know what the popular answer is among the fanbois? "Lower your resolution".
WTF?! That's stupidest answer ever! Yes, it DOES make the fonts bigger (actually illustrating the problem), but Christ almighty, especially when we're talking LCDs, what a moronic suggestion!
Re:Too small.... (Score:5, Informative)
IBM made a much higher resolution display in 2001:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors [wikipedia.org]
This is a 22", 3840x2400 display. I still wonder why that kind of technology never caught on. I know the IBM displays (and the Viewsonics) were expensive, starting at $17000 or so (the VS was "only" $9000 new), but I had hoped that there might be economies of scale eventually. Sadly, these panels haven't been manufactured for about 5 years. Every once in a while there's a rumor that someone is making a new model, but it never seems to happen.
I'm also wondering just what happened for (almost) everyone to decide that 1080 is enough vertical pixels.
Not the same device! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Enough already (Score:3, Informative)
HDMI 1.4 can do 4096x2160 at 24p, which is great for film, but not so good for computer displays, which you will probably want at 60 fps. Displayport can do 3840x2160 at 60p incidentally, and probably higher than that I would bet. I wonder what the next revision of the HDMI spec will bump HDMI up to...
Re:Usable by humans (Score:3, Informative)
What the Nyquist theorem misses is that the mind is not just taking a single sample, but a time series of many samples. A good listener or an observant viewer can see qualitative differences in a square wave and a smoother sine wave, even near the limits of resolution.
No. This fundamentally misunderstands the Nyquist theorem.
If you low pass filter a signal and then sample it at at least twice the frequency of the highest frequency passed by the low pass filter then you can _exactly_ reconstruct the original low pass filtered signal by low pass filtering the digital signal generated from the samples.
Of course, CDs do not permit storing the samples at infinite precision so the theoretically perfect reconstruction does not occur but that's not due to the finite sampling frequency and the ear just isn't sensitive enough to changes in amplitude for the quantization of the samples to matter in normal circumstances.
Higher sampling frequencies allow the low pass filtering to be moved into the digital domain. Ideally we want a brick wall low pass filter but building a filter like this in the analogue domain is hard. Simple filters with a nice flat pass band have a relatively gentle 6 or 12dB/octave cutoff. Simple filters with a sharp cutoff introduce lots of non-linearity in the pass band.
Tim.
Re:Usable by humans (Score:3, Informative)
The nystagmus is a smooth pursuing movement... I don't know how it applies here, since the visual acuity, (spatial resolving capacity) is never measured in terms of the retina alone but as a property of the whole human visual system. Once we're beyond that, we're beyond that.
Re:Too small.... (Score:3, Informative)
Nice. That's what you need to have small fonts that scale smoothly without blotchy in-betweens. I don't much like squinting at small, fuzzy fonts. If 150 DPI is visually acceptable, why have I not seen a 150 DPI laser printer since the early 1990s? I suspect on the screen with some good AA that 200 DPI would permit smooth scaling of smaller font sizes.
It won't happen for large screens until the marginal cost of the extra pixel density is relatively insignificant, about five years I'd guess after 30" desktop screens become relatively normal, at which point the same number of pixels might become available in higher density screens a size or two less overwhelming.
I've never thought that 1080 was enough vertical pixels for programming. Both of my panels tilt, but then I figured out that this kind of buggers up the clear-type support. The first time I tried it my video card didn't have the horsepower to run transposed. It was SLOW. Haven't tried it with my new Evergreen card, but I'd assume the Linux drivers remain too broken to make a go of it. An open source driver that might work great someday beats a closed source driver that already does, in my peculiar world view.
I think the 6000 series will have multiple DP outlets.
One DP provides "17.28 Gbit/s of video bandwidth, enough for supporting 4 simultaneous 1080p60 displays or 2560 × 1600 × 30 bit @120 Hz" according to the bathroom wall of all knowledge.
The problem is not with the video cards, although it seems kind of obscene to make the electrons wiggle so much.
Re:Small screens are great but... (Score:2, Informative)
That seems incredibly dumb. Especially since apple advertises the fact that they sell 100ppi displays and higher (or at least used to) so that means their own cinema displays are out of wack. I'm a big fan of OSX, but you'd think for "The Desktop Publishing OS" they'd get that right.
You might want to try the command line though. I think there's something like: defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor SomeFloatingPointNumber that would help out. Netbook hackintosh users use it to make things fit on the screen without changing resolution. You have to kill finder and restart it for it to take effect. This may be the feature that went "missing" when they switched from NeXTStep.
Re:Usable by humans (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)