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Apps like Scrabble are fine since the graphics are very large. Text in the browser, however, is hard to read without a lot of zooming. IPad 3 was fine in this respect.

I just did a test and read a couple of blog posts saved in Pocket, plus a book and a few emails. The text is absolutely good and crisp. No bluriness, not too small (for me at least). Whereas in Safari, it's blurry, and overall not pretty, nor is it easy to read. Looks like both a problem with font size AND font rendering and smoothing.

So it's not a problem with the hardware or the OS. It's a problem with Safari. Again, maybe that's just me.

Gonna try a few alternative browsers.
 
I actually think I am getting adjusted. Maybe it takes a while. For the record, I have only ever had an ipad 2, so it could just be that I have no frame of reference for a retina display in iPad size.
 
No way am I going to send this back just because of small print. I bought it for an e-book reader anyway. It's far easier told in one's hand than a full-size iPad. I can adjust the font size to whatever I want for Kindle books.

With 20/20 vision glasses will not help. Magnifying glass may but Android tablet might be a better solution (Apple does not make magnifying glasses).
 
With 20/20 vision glasses will not help. Magnifying glass may but Android tablet might be a better solution (Apple does not make magnifying glasses).

Apple does make a magnifying glass. ;)

Settings => General => Accessibility ==> Zoom
 
Whereas in Safari, it's blurry, and overall not pretty, nor is it easy to read. Looks like both a problem with font size AND font rendering and smoothing.

So it's not a problem with the hardware or the OS. It's a problem with Safari. Again, maybe that's just me.

Gonna try a few alternative browsers.

I am having the exact same experience. No issues w fuzziness at all except on small text in Safari. And in Safari, once I zoom a little, blurriness totally disappears.
 
50 y/o here. I did go to the store because I was not sure what to get. When I saw the mini I thought " this is the one".

Then I started reading and my eyes was having some problem focusing. After that I played with the ipad 4. Visited the same web page and that was the moment that I realize that the mini will not be for me.

To bad. I really like the mini.
 
I'm sorry, but this seems to me to be a big old troll thread.

Being older than the age of the OP, I find the display to be wonderful and clear and crisp, and my "more ancient" eyes have no problem viewing what's on the screen. In fact I've posted in other threads on here that I'm so impressed that I can view clearly the PDFs for the university course I'm on.

I'm not sure at all what all the people on this thread about talking about, seriously. It's like I bought a completely different device from them, which is why I suggested it's a thread filled with troll comments, please forgive if that's not the case, but if you're all being truthful, we are having entirely different experiences with this device, and I wonder why that is.
 
If you're 45, you may find this humorous...

Posted from my very readable iPad 4
 

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10 days from 45 and my eyes don't like it either. I haven't really had a chance to use it much, but I have a feeling that an iPad 4 would be a better choice for me. I agree that it may be a Safari issue.

BTW I have no problems browsing with my iPhone 5, but on the mini, the text seems way too small.
 
10 days from 45 and my eyes don't like it either. I haven't really had a chance to use it much, but I have a feeling that an iPad 4 would be a better choice for me. I agree that it may be a Safari issue.

BTW I have no problems browsing with my iPhone 5, but on the mini, the text seems way too small.

How do you find it in other apps ? Try the NY Times journal for example, it's free, or an ebook.

If it's ok for you, then you've got the same Safari issue than I have, which can be solved by increasing the font size, using the bookmarklets mentionned in another post.
 
How do you find it in other apps ? Try the NY Times journal for example, it's free, or an ebook.

If it's ok for you, then you've got the same Safari issue than I have, which can be solved by increasing the font size, using the bookmarklets mentionned in another post.

Will try this and report back.
 
At 45 years old, I have 20/20 distance and supposedly 20/20 near, but something is really wrong here. I am having a heck of a time adjusting to the size of the print.

Presbyopia and you're in denial. Ask me how I know. Let's get you in for an appointment :D
 
The bookmarklets solution gets annoying after a while. You have to tap the increase font button every time you visit a new site. Try using Perfect Browser's font override.
 
I'm sorry, but this seems to me to be a big old troll thread.

Being older than the age of the OP, I find the display to be wonderful and clear and crisp, and my "more ancient" eyes have no problem viewing what's on the screen. In fact I've posted in other threads on here that I'm so impressed that I can view clearly the PDFs for the university course I'm on.

I'm not sure at all what all the people on this thread about talking about, seriously. It's like I bought a completely different device from them, which is why I suggested it's a thread filled with troll comments, please forgive if that's not the case, but if you're all being truthful, we are having entirely different experiences with this device, and I wonder why that is.

It helps to agree to talk about the same things. For example, go to cnn.com and view that web site and an article or two in portrait mode. If you look at a word like "still", you will notice that the "i" is rather indistinct, and you will find that the widths of the "l" characters vary. (This latter may be a glitch in Safari; I was rather shocked by it, and I'll be interested to hear from the guy who said he was going to look at other browsers.) Look at several such words on the page, as not all may be affected in exactly the same way, but overall, the text just doesn't look great. If you rotate to landscape mode, you implicitly zoom the page a bit, which helps; the more you zoom, the clearer it gets. To be fair, as I noted in an earlier post in this thread, the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7 are also fairly awful at rendering web pages at their native size, and the solution is the same; rotate to landscape and/or zoom, which you probably need to do anyway in order to touch those tiny links with any accuracy.

While the 7" tablets sport higher resolution at 216 PPI vs the Mini's 163 PPI, they are also smaller, and because web pages are scaled horizontally to fit, they're being asked to display physically smaller text than the iPad Mini, and their 216 PPI resolution just isn't enough to display text clearly at those small font sizes. This reduces their effective resolution for this scenario, and in this scenario, their "normalized" resolution is probably around 180-190 PPI, not that much greater than the Mini's 163 PPI. The bottom line is you need to zoom them just as much as you need to zoom the Mini, actually more, as their screens are only 7" vs the Mini's 7.9".

Example: If I did my calculations right, a 7" 16:10 tablet's screen is 3.7" wide. The 7.85" 4:3 iPad Mini is 4.7" wide. Assuming they're displaying the same web page in the same way, i.e. scaled horizontally to fit, the characters on the 7" tablets are 3.7/4.7 or 79% the size of the Mini's. Just to keep the arithmetic simple, assume a character is 1" wide on the Mini, which then has 163 pixels in which to render it. That same character would be .79" wide on the Kindle/Nexus, and .79"*216 PPI = 170 pixels. So the effective resolution in this scenario is even worse than I estimated! It's basically the same as the Mini's, and the fidelity of the font rendering isn't any better in this scenario; the text is just smaller.

At larger font sizes, like the default in iBooks, the Mini does a perfectly fine job IMO. I think the Mini actually wins overall due to its larger size and squarer aspect ratio. All these tablets require one to go to landscape or zoom to display good-looking text on full-size web pages, and people would do well to keep all these things in mind, because it's not quite so simple as 216 > 163.
 
With 20/20 vision glasses will not help. Magnifying glass may but Android tablet might be a better solution (Apple does not make magnifying glasses).

Err, they might. 20/20 isn't good, it's "normal", with glasses you should expect much better. More to the point, it's only relevant to distant vision, and particularly as we go to 40 and beyond it might well be that near-vision or varifocals are relevant to view screens at the sort of distances you want to use an ipad or ipad mini. And not just the off-the-shelf type either...
 
The is definitely an issue that apple did not properly deal with when choosing to just reuse the 10 inch iPad resolution and apps. Everything is just shrunk to 7.9 from 9.7. This is different from android which offers a resolution independent interface and is also aware of pixel density and screen size. 7 inch tablets will render apps differently than 10 inch tablets. They will increase the font size to adjust to the higher ppi. Apple really made a gigantic mistake when they designed iOS without considering the fact that screen sizes and resolution differ between devices. You never have to deal with black bars or pixel doubling on Android. Unfortunately these problems are very real on iOS and its also what dictated apple from not being able to use a higher resolution screen I'm the mini.

A good example of what I am talking about is to compare the nexus 7 and the Xoom running the same app. They both have the same resolution yet the nexus 7 is aware that its pixel density is 216 vs around 160 in the Xoom. It therefore renders its elements larger as the actual pixels are smaller. This is all handled seemlessly in android. Do not think of it like iOS where developers specifically have to address device resolutions.

This.

I've been saying this all along. You can't just scale down Apps and expect everything to be ok. Hit areas are too small. And there isn't enough pixels to render detailed text at such a small size.

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10 days from 45 and my eyes don't like it either. I haven't really had a chance to use it much, but I have a feeling that an iPad 4 would be a better choice for me. I agree that it may be a Safari issue.

BTW I have no problems browsing with my iPhone 5, but on the mini, the text seems way too small.

There aren't enough pixels to render the text properly on the Mini. It 's Grainville.

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Apple does make a magnifying glass. ;)

Settings => General => Accessibility ==> Zoom

Just put a damn Retina display on to render the text properly.

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I'm sorry, but this seems to me to be a big old troll thread.

Being older than the age of the OP, I find the display to be wonderful and clear and crisp, and my "more ancient" eyes have no problem viewing what's on the screen. In fact I've posted in other threads on here that I'm so impressed that I can view clearly the PDFs for the university course I'm on.

I'm not sure at all what all the people on this thread about talking about, seriously. It's like I bought a completely different device from them, which is why I suggested it's a thread filled with troll comments, please forgive if that's not the case, but if you're all being truthful, we are having entirely different experiences with this device, and I wonder why that is.

Imagine a world where people have different experiences than you. Imagine that. After imagining this, is everyone still a troll?

To actually assert and think that the Retina screen isn't compelling and much better... which is sort of implicit in your posts, if anybody's trolling, it's you.

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And if it was 400 years ago, you'd declare it was black magic, declare the apple store employees were in league with the Devil, and burn them at the stake. What's your point?

His point is that denying the Mini's screen is low res is delusional. Basically people complaining about... people complaining about screen resolution. How could you complain! The Mini screen is great! People are starving in the world stop worrying about this!

Calling people trolls because they perceive the Mini screen to be crap is ridiculous. There's a flood of people right here on the forums returning units because the screen is bad.

If it's good for you then great. But facts are facts. The Mini has very low ppi and this is reality. This explains why text is fuzzy and the screen pixelated. This, in addition to the flood of "Retina" displays on the market now. Screens with ppi that humans can't discern individual pixels on them.
 
Many thanks to Quantus for the recommendation to use Perfect Browser. It has made web browsing wonderful on my new iPad mini. I am getting older and those eyes ain't what they used to be. I have been using reading glasses for a while now.
 
I'm 47 and I'm keeping the mini, I think the size is great and while my eyes are not the best I think using the mini will be fine
 
I bought the black 32g iPad mini today. I wanted the 16g, but BestB was out of those.


At 45 years old, I have 20/20 distance....
....
Anyone else, with tired old eyes, notice the same thing?

Yes I agree.

Font size control has more options on Android , be nice to see those added to iOS and safari, it really needs it on the mini, at least for my eyes.

On the mini the font size bookmarklet works but I'm pressing it all the time, own android you can set the default zoom and min text sizes so it apples it to every page right away.

Not sure I'd return the mini over this , as the size and weight is great.
 
To people who think he is trolling or the display is close to retina....I account that to people who really cannot tell the difference between a good HDTV pushing 1080p and a decent one pushing 720p.

The difference may not be massive, but some people notice it and others do not. For example, my family couldn't notice that difference or even care about HD and think SD is just fine.

Once you have seen a better screen and use it daily in your life it is hard to go back. People saying 5 years ago you would not care....obviously b.c 5 years ago these resolutions (retina) were not around.
 
Yes I agree.

Font size control has more options on Android , be nice to see those added to iOS and safari, it really needs it on the mini, at least for my eyes.

On the mini the font size bookmarklet works but I'm pressing it all the time, own android you can set the default zoom and min text sizes so it apples it to every page right away.

Not sure I'd return the mini over this , as the size and weight is great.
As was recommended earlier, try Perfect Browser from the App Store. It is 99 cents but well worth it to me.
 
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