After reading you drone on and on about this test, I decided to give it a shot for s@#ts and grins. Here is a pic of my iPhone 11 with that hi resolution photo that you insist on using.Yes, I zoomed in and back out as directed. As you can clearly see, your sample pic of whatever phone that is is waaaay worse than my iPhone 11. As a matter of fact, I think it looks just fine on my phone but I'm sure you'll disagree. Sorry this doesn't fit your agenda. By the way, the photo of my screen was taken with an iPhone 8 Plus.
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I'll admit that I made a mistake using that image as a test, as I did that with an iPhone 5S with an even lower resolution display and the image isn't even equivalent to 12MP like what an iPhone 11 captures. SMFH
No matter, my point still stands because you cannot argue facts: A lower resolution screen cannot display all pixels of a higher res content, that much is obvious. And once a content exceeds a certain threshold, then the pixels begin to scrunch up and look ugly AF. When software decides to smooth everything out, then it ain't showing all the detail, it's losing it. And it's not always where software smoothes images out when viewed in full, as I've seen when viewing comics and illustrations on Safari, Behance, File Hub, etc.
And I just tested it on my iPhone 6S, seems like Photos/Safari is smoothing regardless if you follow my method and sometimes it doesn't.
This photo worked for my iPhone 6S, zoom in and out in Photos app and you can see how AWFUL the lines are, but it's still smoothing for me. If you view it in any other third-party app like I have on File Hub or Documents, then there is no smoothing effect at all and its even worse.
Here is an illustration when viewed in full resolution, zoom all the way out then it should look awful.
I've been talking about viewing content in full resolution, not software tricks to make it look fine in Apple's first party apps.
Viewing 4K videos in portrait is also noticeable that the pixels aren't enough on the iPhone. If you really wanna understand what I'm talking about then view 4 to 12 MP photos in full resolution, probably not the Photos app.
Also quit with the "agenda" BS too lol, you make it sound like I have some ulterior motive. I don't, I simply want the best, which is making improvements, how could anyone argue against that, like who doesn't want a better display? So to me, it seems like the people who try so hard to defend this is the one with the sheepish agenda, and those who don't care what they spent $900 for.