Does the Retina screen mean better viewing for PDF/Comics?

[rirawin]

Does the Retina screen mean that reading comics on comiczeal and PDFs better, or do they need to be optimized?

 

[Mjmar]

The size of PDFs vary, but yes the retina screen will make some look much better because it will be able to capture more detail. If the comics you're talking about are coming from an app they'll probably need to update the app to support the retina screen.

 

[jman240]

I think it depends on the original page resolution. They may look blurry just like non retina apps did on the iPhone until they are updated. I could definitely be wrong and the iPad could handle older apps / content in an entirely different way.

Keep in mind that the rumored resolution will be higher than 1080P but not by much (2048x1538) where as a TV or monitor is (1920x1080). Rarely does lower res content really look that bad when up-scaled so I'm betting this wont be a huge issue. For comparison the current iPad is (1024x768).

The effect may be like zooming in on the comic but not loosing any of the page off screen. Definitely something I'll be waiting to see in action before I buy.

 

[MacAttacka]

Well the pixel mapping is exactly 1:4 so it will look either exactly as good as it does on the original ipads or a whole lot better. Nothing should look in any way worse on the retina. I have 30+GB of comics that I found myself zooming all over on iPad 2 but they should look pin sharp on the retina although the screen itself is higher than the original scan resolution.

 

[MaloCS]

Does a standard, old school television program look great on a brand new high definition television?

In order to get the most out of a retina display ALL of the graphics/content must be designed and formatted to take advantage of the higher resolution. Otherwise, it's like watching "I Love Lucy" upscaled on a 1080p flatscreen.

I've noticed that all of the graphics in the mobile web sites I've designed for non retina displays look somewhat fuzzy on the better retina screen. There is a noticeable increase in saturation and contrast but that doesn't mask the fuzziness I'm can't stop focusing on. Conversely, the text generated by iOS looks AMAZING and is so much easier to read.

Below is an example of what I'm referring to. On the left is an image formatted for a non retina iPhone screen at 320x480 ppi. On the right is the same image formatted for a retina iPhone screen at 640x960 ppi. As you can see there is quite a bit of pixelation between the non retina screen and the retina screen, (especially around the edges of lines or where two different colors meet). The image formatted for the retina screen looks great while the image formatted for the non retina screen looks pretty bad, just like watching "I Love Lucy" on a HD television would look bad. (These images were grabbed directly from the iPhone 4s via the screen capture function. I did scale them down in Photoshop for demonstration purposes.)

In addition to the visual quality the non retina image weighs in at 129 KB while the retina image tips the scales at 443 KB (saved in photoshop at 95% jpeg compression). That's a huge file size difference especially when taking into account AT&T's practice of throttling unlimited data users on their 3G network.

So, the answer to your question all depends on if the content is formatted for the retina display. If it is then the retina display will definitely show it's superiority. If the content was formatted for a non retina screen it will look bad. I.E. BluRay disks look great on an HD television but DVD disks, although adequate, are not at the same quality; just like the two images above illustrate.

 

[unobtainium]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Does a standard, old school television program look great on a brand new high definition television?

In order to get the most out of a retina display ALL of the graphics/content must be designed and formatted to take advantage of the higher resolution. Otherwise, it's like watching "I Love Lucy" upscaled on a 1080p flatscreen.

I've noticed that all of the graphics in the mobile web sites I've designed for non retina displays look somewhat fuzzy on the better retina screen. There is a noticeable increase in saturation and contrast but that doesn't mask the fuzziness I'm can't stop focusing on. Conversely, the text generated by iOS looks AMAZING and is so much easier to read.

Below is an example of what I'm referring to. On the left is an image formatted for a non retina iPhone screen at 320x480 ppi. On the right is the same image formatted for a retina iPhone screen at 640x960 ppi. As you can see there is quite a bit of pixelation between the non retina screen and the retina screen, (especially around the edges of lines or where two different colors meet). The image formatted for the retina screen looks great while the image formatted for the non retina screen looks pretty bad, just like watching "I Love Lucy" on a HD television would look bad. (These images were grabbed directly from the iPhone 4s via the screen capture function. I did scale them down in Photoshop for demonstration purposes.)

In addition to the visual quality the non retina image weighs in at 129 KB while the retina image tips the scales at 443 KB (saved in photoshop at 95% jpeg compression). That's a huge file size difference especially when taking into account AT&T's practice of throttling unlimited data users on their 3G network.

So, the answer to your question all depends on if the content is formatted for the retina display. If it is then the retina display will definitely show it's superiority. If the content was formatted for a non retina screen it will look bad. I.E. BluRay disks look great on an HD television but DVD disks, although adequate, are not at the same quality; just like the two images above illustrate.

This is what I've always noticed with SD content on HD screens. Thanks for the demo.*

*though it's slightly NSFW

 

[redman042]

Does the Retina screen mean that reading comics on comiczeal and PDFs better, or do they need to be optimized?

Text in any app will be radically better on the retina display from Day 1, since iOS renders all text natively. This is what we all saw when the iPhone 4 first came out. The only exception is text generated as an image, and this is generally rare.

PDFs typically include a lot of text, so that will immediately look better, and any vector graphics in the PDF will also take full advantage of the retina screen. Most bitmap images are embedded in PDFs are at printer resolutions (300 ppi or so), so those should take full advantage too.

The only exception I can think of for PDFs is if you are using a 3rd party reader app that has its own rendering engine, like GoodReader. They may have to update their engine. GoodReader is often updated so I have no doubt they will get right on this. You can use iBooks or the native viewer in the interim.

I don't know anything about Comiczeal.

IMO the biggest advantage for the retina display will be MUCH sharper text. We'll fully realize that benefit from Day 1. The second biggest benefit is a much "smoother" image. You won't see the "screen door effect" and this will also be fully realized on Day 1. The third benefit is sharper graphics. This will take more time, and I don't know if all apps (like 3D games) will ever take full advantage due to the memory and CPU intensity involved. But they don't necessarily need to.

 

[Scarpad]

right it will all come down to what the comics were scanned at. Legal ways of getting the comics like comixology might have to up their scanning methods to appeal to higher rez screens. Illegal sources may not bother.

 

[Nightprowler]

Does a standard, old school television program look great on a brand new high definition television?

Depends on the up-scaling algorithms of the TV or A/V Receiver you push them through. If you take this into consideration you can get some pretty respectable looking SD content on your HDTV.

how the new iPad will handle up-scaling remains to be seen.

 

[maclook]

Marvel had a free comic in the iBook store for a limited time so I snagged it for viewing on the iPad 3 once I get it. I can only imagine how great it'll look.