Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

The iPad 3 is widely expected to feature a retina display, but aren't we forgettin...

T

ThatsMeRight

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Sep 12, 2009
2,406
497
The iPad 3 is widely expected to feature a retina display, but aren't we forgetting something?

The iPad 3 is rumoured to feature a so called 'retina display'. A 9.7" display with an amazingly high resolution of 2048*1536: these are four times as many pixels.

The thing is, as beautiful as such a display might be, isn't such a high resolution actually a disadvantage?

I mean, if I want to watch Full HD movies on the iPad 3, than there won't be enough pixels to fill up the whole screen. If I want to watch a movie full screen, the movie will be resized... this will cause a pixelated image!

I sincerely hope Apple has had a good thought about this. I'd rather see a 1920*1440 (4:3) resolution or something like that, than a 2048*1536 if the latter means that video content will look terrible. With a 1920*1440, they would still achieve 247 pixels per inch (against 2048*1536's 264 ppi). That's only 17 pixels per inch less!
 
I seriously doubt Apple will release the new iPad and say "OMG, we forgot about videos!! How could we have been so stupid??"

I am not smart enough to figure out all of the various scenarios of resolutions and pixels
But I am willing to bet Apple is
 
MacDawg said:
I seriously doubt Apple will release the new iPad and say "OMG, we forgot about videos!! How could we have been so stupid??"

I am not smart enough to figure out all of the various scenarios of resolutions and pixels
But I am willing to bet Apple is
Click to expand...
It's just... all the video content out there is Full HD at the highest quality. And if the rumours are correct, the resolution of the iPad 3's display is higher than of Full HD movies. This means one things: either the device only plays movies at their true resolution which means HUGE bars above, below, to the left and to the right of such a movie. Ór the iPad 3 will be upscaling movies, which means movies will look worse (upscaled movies always look worse).
 
ThatsMeRight said:
It's just... all the video content out there is Full HD at the highest quality. And if the rumours are correct, the resolution of the iPad 3's display is higher than of Full HD movies. This means one things: either the device only plays movies at their true resolution which means HUGE bars above, below, to the left and to the right of such a movie. Ór the iPad 3 will be upscaling movies, which means movies will look worse (upscaled movies always look worse).
Click to expand...

Or, as MacDawg pointed out, something else?? They are in the business of making stuff. Someone's considered this aspect of hi-res displays somewhere in the development process.
 
fertilized-egg said:
No, movies will look just fine upscaled.
Click to expand...
They never do. Have you ever seen a 40 inch Full HD television and a 40 inch 720p side-by-side? I have. Both these TV's were running the same 720p content. I garantuee you, the 720p looked much and much better.

Have you ever seen an iPhone 3GS (480*320 res) and iPhone 4 (960*640 res) side by side? Both playing the exact same video with a resolution of 480*320? I garantuee you, in terms of sharpness the iPhone 3GS looked much better (not in contrast or black levels, however, but that's not because of the resolution).

Sure, it does look "just fine", but it's far from ideal.
 
I am sure smart people in Apple will have that figured out. I just can't picture an engineer saying something like "Oh lollipops! Resolution is too high. We would have to go back to original iPad resolution" for some reason.

I believe there would be few very high resolution Android tablets coming out before iPad 3, so you can always see how they have it setup.

As for movies being pixelated, I do not think it will happen. Remember, image is being "blown up" for a big screen TVs. Here, image will be blown up for resolution and shrunk down for size. So that should take care of blockiness and pixelation.
 
ThatsMeRight said:
They never do. Have you ever seen a 40 inch Full HD television and a 40 inch 720p side-by-side? ...
Click to expand...

Yes(although it was 50", not a 40 TV") and with the proper upsampling algorithm they looked just fine and the other full HD actually looked better, but that could've just been the difference in the TV.

Many of the content we get nowadays already go over the iPad 1/2 resolution, which means the movies have to be downscaled. With UI elements like icons non-even scaling can be wonky, but with pictures and movies, upscaling isn't really a problem.
 
i have no doubts that the software will be up to par in making sure everything looks 'right' or 'good' on it even with the higher resolution.
 
ThatsMeRight said:
The iPad 3 is widely expected to feature a retina display, but aren't we forgetting something?
Click to expand...
No, we're not. You're forgetting about something called scaling.

ThatsMeRight said:
upscaled movies always look worse
Click to expand...
You're confusing "I've only experienced crappy upscaling" with "upscaled always looks worse" (i.e. you don't seem to understand the difference between coincidental and causal). What equipment was used for scaling in your TV example? As stated above, not all upscaling equipment is the same.
 
Last edited:
takeshi74 said:
No, we're not. You're forgetting about something called scaling.


You're confusing "I've only experienced crappy upscaling" with "upscaled always looks worse" (i.e. you don't seem to understand the difference between coincidental and causal). What equipment was used for scaling in your TV example? As stated above, not all upscaling equipment is the same.
Click to expand...
Scaling looks always worse than viewing content with a certain resolution on a display with that same resolution.

If you scale up, the CPU just makes up pixels that aren't there - just to fill the screen. And again, I also compared the 3GS to the 4: I assume Apple is using the same scaling techniques in it's iPad.
 
Even that slight difference would make it significantly harder to rescale existing apps.

ThatsMeRight said:
They never do. Have you ever seen a 40 inch Full HD television and a 40 inch 720p side-by-side? I have. Both these TV's were running the same 720p content. I garantuee you, the 720p looked much and much better.
Click to expand...

Most TVs have crappy rescaling engines.
 
There is a large difference between 720p vs 1080p and the difference between the iPad 2 screen vs retina.

The iPad 3 will have exactly twice as many pixels in both directions as the iPad 2, so imagine each pixel on the iPad 2 is now divided into 4 smaller pixels. Displaying lower resolution content will have exactly the same effect on either screen as there is no extra interpolation of pixels.

720p to 1080p is not an exact doubling of horizontal and vertical resolution, hence to fill the screen you need guessed pixels in between to reach the required resolution.

TLDR: don't worry it will be fine.
 
ThatsMeRight said:
The iPad 3 is widely expected to feature a retina display, but aren't we forgetting something?

The iPad 3 is rumoured to feature a so called 'retina display'. A 9.7" display with an amazingly high resolution of 2048*1536: these are four times as many pixels.
Click to expand...

2048*1536
Lol....yeah, right?
Good one, gave me giggles
 
Ok, you guys are seriously overreacting.

1. If scaling a video is really that bad for you (you're probably already doing it on your ipad already btw), just don't scale it and just lose that half inch of screen width. Yeah, it's only half an inch. Quit wanking.

2. You guys are saying upscaling content from 720p to 1080p can look horrendous. I can't say I wholeheartedly agree, but I get your point. This however is a total different case. Upscaling from 720p to 1080p means an 125% increase in pixel count. Of course you can see the difference. Upscaling 1080p to this new ipad resolution is a mere 13.7% in resolution. See the difference? It won't be that bad, if they provide a decent video scaler (which they probably will). If you don"t agree: see 1.

And btw: stop whining about resolution independence. They haven't even achieved it. They just double the pixel count. That's plain cheating.
 
CapnJackGig said:
No, they won't. Perhaps to you they will.

And there is no magic method to make it work well. You'll either need to watch movies with black bars around all sides or simply accept inferior video quality.
Click to expand...

Black bars have nothing to do with resolution itself but with the aspect ratio. The argument made by the OP is that when the display doesn't do 1:1 mapping display to the video, the rescaling will lower the quality of image displayed but there are many methods for upsampling many of them will make the images look just fine on a higher density display.
 
DVDs look fine on hd TVs and they're upscaled quite significantly. :confused:

Not sure what the problem is tbh. Just get apple tv and stream the movies to your tv if you think they look awful on the iPad, problem solved.
 
matttye said:
DVDs look fine on hd TVs and they're upscaled quite significantly. :confused:
Click to expand...

Define "fine." My BR player upconverts, but 480p content still looks like crap on my 50" PDP compared to HD content.

In any case I really think this is all a non-issue on a tablet-sized screen.


Jare said:
You forgot the "g" at the end of your title homeslice.
Click to expand...

Or... it's possible the forum truncates thread titles and adds an ellipsis after a certain character count brohan. :rolleyes:
 
MacDawg said:
I seriously doubt Apple will release the new iPad and say "OMG, we forgot about videos!! How could we have been so stupid??"

I am not smart enough to figure out all of the various scenarios of resolutions and pixels
But I am willing to bet Apple is
Click to expand...

Lol, well said. I agree - I'm sure Apple will take these things into consideration.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back