Do you have both machines or are you just looking at above pictures? The difference in contrast can be explained by display calibration (or lack thereoff). And BTW, that landscape looks more detailed on the RMBP (look at the clouds). Its just very difficult to judge via screen photos, they introduce too much visual noise.
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Screen Shots: rMBP vs MBP
- Thread starter PaulAtkinson
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Do you have both machines or are you just looking at above pictures? The difference in contrast can be explained by display calibration (or lack thereoff). And BTW, that landscape looks more detailed on the RMBP (look at the clouds). Its just very difficult to judge via screen photos, they introduce too much visual noise.
I put a 15'' MBP (1440x900) next to a retina MBP ('best for retina') to compare identical images (Safari). The difference was very noticeable, plumage and fur is less detailed due to upscaling and as long as Photoshop is not updated it is very likely that one would oversharpen images when processing RAW/TIFF files. I use i1 Display Pro to calibrate, it is not a contrast issue. I'd love to get a rMBP once all the upscale issues are sorted out.
It's a timeframe I thought was logical based on the situation. And the full screen feature is a luxury, not something as serious as how pixellated MS office looks on the rMBP. I was just giving him my personal insight on the matter, which is what a forum is for. Obviously nobody in this forum has any clue about the exact date they are releasing the Retina update, so with your logic no one should have even replied.
I don't understand what you are talking about.
If you display an image in Safari or in a retina-enabled application, at 'best for retina', you will see pixel-wise exactly what you would see by having a native 2880x1800.
There is no upscaling at all, just downscaling, if the image is bigger than that.
Remember that retina-enabled application can use 1:1 pixel display because they are aware of the real 2880x1800 resolution.
If you take a 2880x1800 picture and display it full-screen on a retina-enabled application, you will see exactly one pixel of the image for one pixel of the screen, a perfect 1 to 1 mapping.
A different thing would be on the 'scaled' resolution such as 1920x1200, where it renders at 3840x2400 (again, with NO upscaling if the image is big enough to have more than 3840x2400 pixels) and then downscale it to 2880x1800, but it should still be on-par or better than just displaying it with direct down-scale at 1920x1200.
It all depends on the quality of the downscaling algorithm: the one used by OS X to downscale 3840x2400 to 2880x1800 VS the one used by the program to directly scale the image to 1920x1200. The quality could be better or worse, depends on the implementation, but usually DOWNscaling is a easy enough task that most implementation do things in a very high quality approach with very little if any at all difference in quality.
If instead you were meaning with non retina-enabled application, then yes, the upscaling + downscaling could be worse than just a plain native 1440x900.
Then you have 3 possible solutions:
A) Uncheck the 'Open in HiDPI mode' hack to force the application to render in normal mode and use 1:1 pixel mapping, at the cost of having a very tiny user interface & icons
B) Wait for the application retina update, if it ever comes
C) Find an alternative application which is retina-ready
A is always a possibility, C most of the time it doesn't apply or has serious limitations, for B it's all a matter of time. How much, we cannot really tell.
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Anandtech has a good explanation how the retina display works: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-macbook-pro-handles-scaling
This is not entirely correct. Take a 100x100 image. On a non-retina MBP, it will be displayed as a 100x100 pixel area of the screen. Now, on a retina MBP the same image will be displayed as 200x200 pixels (to retain the same physical size). So, the original 100x100 image needs to be upscaled. A HiDPI-aware website can detect that the client is running a HiDPI mode and provide 200x200 image variant accordingly. There will be a difference between viewing a 100x100 image (stretched to 200x200) or an already 'retinized' 200x200 image.
This Apple dev page does a good job in explaining this: http://tinyurl.com/co8667v
Another problem is that OS X does not seem to do just upscaling of 'non-retinized' images, but also apply a gaussian blur on the upscaled picture before rendering it to the screen.