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Could someone explain me how the iPad 3 retina display would work?

DenisAuermann

DenisAuermann

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 16, 2012
111
0
San Salvador, El Salvador
Hi, I'm a new in this forum (decided to join after noticing some people with very interesting insights here) and this is my first post.

I have always thought about getting an iPad and now that is pretty much confirmed that the iPad 3 will have retina display i will definitively get one but some questions have risen and i would appreciate if someone shed some light into it.

I only own an iPod touch and iPhone 4s whenever I play an hd video or flick tru some hi-res photos, they look amazing bc of retina display. Now i know an HD video is not playing in native HD since those displays are only 960x640 so even though the video is not in native HD it still looks great bc of retina in such a small display, since the iPad display would be 2048x1536 an hd movie (let's say 720p) would play at a full resolution on the iPad 3 display, But since Apple would pack 4 times as many pixels compared to the current iPad in that same area, wouldn't that make the movie look bad? I mean the movie resolution has not switched. It's still 1280x720 running on a 2048x1536 display but there would be way more pixels in that same space than lets suppose the same movie playing on an iPad 2 , so would the pixels stretch?

I really have no clue, i know that the answer must be simple. Can anyone help me understand this?
 
By and large, stretching a lower-resolution video to fit a higher-resolution display (much as watching a 720p video on a 27" iMac is,) looks a lot better than watching a higher-resolution video on a lower-resolution display (such as watching a 720p video on a 3rd generation iPod touch.)

It is always better to have EXTRA display pixels than NOT ENOUGH display pixels.

Yes, it's always better to have more pixels in the source, too, but being able to display everything-and-then-some looks better than not-displaying-everything.

1080p pictures look better on the high-res (1680x1050) 15" MacBook Pro than they do on the original 1152x768 Titanium 15" PowerBook G4. (The old G4 can't play a video at that resolution, so I had to settle for a still.)
 
What AF said

smaller pixels help a lot. HD even on a non HD screen can look great if the pixels are small enough to maintain clarity.

The hard part is scaling content up to a higher resolution but that's opposite of what's happening here.
 
It would look the same.

Say you had a small black square that used one pixel on the iPad/iPad 2. On an iPad 3 it would be 4 pixels but the square would be the same size. So you wouldn't lose any clarity.
 
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