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The Retina War is upon us.

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Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#71

Post by teilo »

ilaksh wrote: post #18
nchlswu wrote: post #17

Does anyone else find the 1x and 2x conventions confusing? I never realized it till I got a bit confused reading the article. Also: I'm a bit surprised at the reverence Dustin Curtis is given for the pixel fitting article.

Its not just confusing, its misleading. The marketing copy is being confused for technical terminology. At 2880 pixels wide, the new MacBook Pro resolution is about 1.5 times as many pixels across the screen as a typical high resolution display at 1900 pixels.

Apple's standard 15" has always been 1440x900. Their hi-rez 15" has been 1680x1050.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#72

Post by pdmccormick »

I welcome the Retina Revolution (and look forward to its progression beyond the Apple world), despite the messy consequences. Three things plague my eyes and psyche:

  1) 1080p as a least common denominator
  2) composite analog video feeds
  3) low bitrate MPEG/JPEG/iDCT compression artefacts
Let the reader understand.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#73

Post by Macha »

hapless wrote: post #36

This is hilarious. Pro tip: not all your users are graphic designers. It may be the case that the author, and everyone he knows, has new "retina" products from Apple. That's wonderful. But it can't be taken to represent a broader userbase. It seems to me that the web's mainstream properties are built for workers in large corporations to fiddle with when they should be working. Most of these people have 1280x1024, 96…

1280x1024? Do you have any data for that? 1366x768 would strike me as the much more likely resolution. The "normal" users I know are split into two groups - those with newish cheap 15" laptops, which are all 1366x768, or those with ancient desktops at 1024x768, or worse, 800x600 because they stumbled on the resolution setting and used it as a way to make things bigger.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#74

Post by Macha »

orta wrote: post #55
Synaesthesia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That should really not be a problem. Websites and apps can detect and load appropriate images for 2x or 1x displays. Same for apps. You design for 2x, and downsample for 1x.

They can, but that's a huge additional bandwidth/size cost for both web and native apps.

Native apps, maybe, since you'd probably have to include both versions in your download. But surely its a bandwidth saving for web apps? You just let the browser download the right size image. Now your low res users get low res icons, while high res users get high res icons. Less bandwidth than just sending everyone the high res icons, or both sets.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#75

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

Swizec wrote: post #54
swombat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak again in 3 years. Today, I am a geek (not really a designer) and 2 out of 3 of my devices have retina displays already (iPhone and iPad). Within much less than 3 years, all my devices will. Within 3 years, there will be no Apple device being sold that doesn't have a Retina display. Will other vendors follow suit? If they don't, they'll be left in the dust, so I imagine they will have to, if they can. It's usual…

Just so you know, a whole bunch of laptops have been coming with "retina" displays for years now. They'd call it a "Full HD" laptop so it doesn't sound as shiny, but it's still a 15 or 17 inch screen with a 1920x1080 resolution.

To put it into better perspective, put the resolutions into google:

(1920 * 1080) / (2880 * 1800) = 0.4

Your 1080p 15" display contains just 40% of the pixels of a single Retina 15" display. They even showed this in the demo. They edited a 1080p video in Final Cut at full resolution and there was plenty of room left for UI elements.

Apple is definitely the first to put a display of this density into a consumer product, or maybe any product.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#76

Post by spaghetti »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #68
spaghetti wrote: post #13

I enjoy the high pixel density displays on small devices like iPhone 4. However the iPad 3's display doesn't really interest me. I just don't hold the device that close to my eyes. Snappy, responsive UIs are the most important thing to me. I'll trade the animations, rounded-corners, gradients, drop shadows and bouncy effects for a more craigslist-like UI. Something that's simple, basic and functional.

I've been using the new iPad for a few months now and I'm always bothereed to back to an iPad 2 for reading. I can just see the pixels on the iPad2 now, I didn't before, but now they bother me. Blast Apple for raising my standards!

Same for me when going back to 2nd gen iPod Touch. What really bugs me about the older iOS devices is the UI lag. It's not a huge deal if you use the device here and there. But where you use it constantly the lag becomes annoying. Hence my general desire to trade UI polish for decreased response time.

Google studied the impact of very small delays on users' search behavior. iirc reducing the search results loading time by 10 ms or so had a noticeable effect. I wonder if something similar could be applied to smart phone UIs? Might be an opportunity for a smart phone OS to substantially differentiate itself from iOS and Android.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#77

Post by inflatablenerd »

Tyrant505 wrote: post #10

"but it won’t be long before Retina Cinema Displays replace their outdated siblings" I was honestly surprised with each retina release by Apple starting with the IPhone4. After the initial “aww” of it had passed, it was easier to wrap your head around its production due to its relatively small screen. Now we have 15” macbook pro’s with retina. Apple released a professional production machine for its retina ecosystem…

Sadly, I think retina iMacs are further away than we'd like to hope. Eizo has a 36 inch 4K monitor for $35,000¹. There's a 31 inch 4K Viewsonic Monitor for an undisclosed price². Even that's only 150dpi. If Apple wants to make a pixel doubled 27 inch iMac for under 10K, I'd be surprised it if they could do it by 2013.

But then again, I thought the retina MacBook Pro was impossible. So perhaps I'm not the best judge of these things.

1. http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/eizo-showcasing-its-35000-4k-lc... 2. http://www.engadget.com/photos/viewsonic-vp3280-led-31-5-inc...

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#78

Post by rorrr »

ScottBurson wrote: post #52
rorrr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search for "Catleap" or "Qnix" on e-bay. 2560x1440px 27" IPS displays at $295 (free shipping). http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Qnix-27-LED-Monitor-Full-HD-2560... http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Qnix-27-LED-Monitor-Full-HD-2560... http://www.ebay.com/itm/27-Inch-New-Potalion-2710QW-2560x144... http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Tempered-Glass-27-Yamakasi-Catle...

But the Retina MBP is already past that resolution on a 15" screen (2880x1800). If "Retina" means 2x the standard resolution, we'd need 24" monitors at 3840x2400 and 27" monitors at 5120x2880. I wonder if even Thunderbolt could drive that.

These screens are insanely expensive, and wouldn't make much sense. Nobody is looking at 27" monitors from such a small distance to distinguish between retina and simply good resolution.

Plus, I don't think there are affordable video cards to drive resolutions like 5120x2880.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#79

Post by gcr »

A nitpick, but this author is absolutely using bicubic wrong. The only case where bicubic filtering appears identical to nearest neighbor is if the entire image has constant color.

Author probably forgot to turn off color indexing or something trivial.

Re: The Retina War is upon us.

#80

Post by SwellJoe »

This change will not be dramatic like this. "Retina Display" is a "very high resolution display". It is not magical. It is not a fundamental technological shift. It is only Apple fanboyism that makes it seem that way.

There have been "very high resolution displays" at the front edge of PC tech for decades, and the Internet has scaled slowly but surely to meet our current middle ground (probably approaching 1080p on desktops and something slightly lower on laptops this year). Most of the people here have been using "very high resolution displays" during most of the development of the web, designers in particular. PCs will, of course, reach the resolution of Apple's Retina Display; they'll have to in order to stay competitive. But, it'll happen gradually. Most people don't choose computers based on display resolution. I bought a new laptop a couple months ago, and went to Fry's (after buying online failed three times, and needing to get something quickly)...I bought the only 15" laptop they had with a 1080p display. Literally, it was the display model and they didn't have any others in stock. Consumers buy cheap or buy a brand name. But, educated consumers will keep pushing things forward, slowly but surely.

So, yes, in three years, we'll mostly all be looking at "Retina Displays", but we'll just call them "displays". And we will have evolved the web slowly in that direction, just like we've been doing for decades.

Proof:

http://web.archive.org/web/19970404064352/http://www.apple.c...

Note that on a modern display, these graphics are tiny, and the site itself only takes up about a 5th of the page (if that much). We've "gone Retina" maybe three or four times since 1997, we just didn't have Apple telling us that doubling display resolution was an epochal shift in computing technology and a legion of fans to carry forth the message.

Final point: The shift from CRT to LCD was much more dramatic than this shift, and we all made it through. Scaremongering is pointless.

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