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iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

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Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#61

Post by happyscrappy »

fidotron wrote: post #8

This fuss about the iPhone screens is, to me at least, hilarious. A good part of my career has been being the "Android guy" in organisations where for better or worse the products would de facto lead on iOS. The number one headache was designers pushing "pixel perfect design" which is doable on Android, but is a pointless headache when your tiny screen is 720p or higher. The fact Apple have a phone coming out for whi…

Android developers have to take what ever comfort they can get, it certainly won't be the money.

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#62

Post by [deleted] »

MCRed wrote: post #23
yodsanklai wrote: post #19

Stupid question, but why the point resolution for the iphone 6+ isn't a perfect divider of the pixel resolutions like it is for the other iphones? Since there is more than one point resolution anyway. And also, how is it different for android devices?

Not a stupid question as you've hit on the major strategic bit of news here that most people, I think, are missing. Displays are cut from larger pieces of display material at a given PPI. So Apple focused on perfecting a 163PPI display material and then tended to use it on multiple products. They'd do the same thing for the retina display material as well (I think at one point the iPhone and iPad used the same displa…

[deleted]

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#63

Post by jjcm »

ianlevesque wrote: post #6

I know it's dangerous to armchair speculate about Apple's moves, but it really seems like they should have held out for a true 3x screen instead of compromising on a 1080p. I certainly would never buy the 6+ after reading about their cheesy resolution hack. It feels rushed and short term.

Normally I'd be right there with you, but at this DPI there shouldn't be any visible scaling artifacts. Normally scaling looks terrible because you're upscaling low res components to a higher res version, but since their source is higher resolution and they're downscaling to an already extremely high DPI screen, you'll probably be hard pressed to find aliasing artifacts without a magnifying glass.

The other reason why I think this might be a good thing is since 1080p is more of a standard than the other resolutions they're playing with, which might help unify things moving forward.

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#64

Post by astrocat »

MCRed wrote: post #25
ianlevesque wrote: post #6

I know it's dangerous to armchair speculate about Apple's moves, but it really seems like they should have held out for a true 3x screen instead of compromising on a 1080p. I certainly would never buy the 6+ after reading about their cheesy resolution hack. It feels rushed and short term.

Do you realize that every Retina Macbook Pro out there uses this "cheesy" resolution "hack"? Tying the size and density of your display to software needs-- especially points that are arbitrary to begin with (as they are based on the original iPhone) seems silly and outdated.

Actually no. Or maybe: yes, but...

My first MPB was one of the "high resolution" ones that ran at 1680x1050 and I loved it. So when I first got my 15" retina MBP was miffed that now it felt like I was running a 1440x900, just with double (well, quadruple) pixel density. So I opened scaling preferences and set it so the retina screen would "emulate" a 1680x1050 display. It was terrible. Blurry and SLOW. Good lord it was slow. And impossible to do any design work on. I went back to normal 2x scale.

So sure, this kind of scaling has been available for a long time but the reality is most people don't scale their MPB retina displays to anything other than 2x.

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#65

Post by femto113 »

joezydeco wrote: post #51
MCRed wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a stupid question as you've hit on the major strategic bit of news here that most people, I think, are missing. Displays are cut from larger pieces of display material at a given PPI. So Apple focused on perfecting a 163PPI display material and then tended to use it on multiple products. They'd do the same thing for the retina display material as well (I think at one point the iPhone and iPad used the same displa…

Do you actually believe that LCD manufacturers screen TFT transistors onto massive pieces of glass (like TV-sized) and then slice them down to phone-sized pieces for assembly?

It's not quite that simple, but essentially "yes". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDoxReEkHe8

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#66

Post by ntaso »

BugBrother wrote: post #54
ntaso wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since there was never an iOS update that did NOT break my app in some way or another, I don't expect resolution hell to work out of the box. Android had to deal with this for years and matured. In iOS, the last release of my iPhone app asked me to upload a gazillion different pixel-perfect icon sizes. I have a small online business. I have neither time nor patience to do this shit myself, but it'd probably take one p…

Just out of curiosity... you need four different iPhones to test? How many different O/S and model variants do you need, to feel safe on Android? Or does your app not do anything complex with the graphics?

Well, the iOS simulator so far wasn't really that good. There were some minor parts that didn't work in the simulator, but they worked on the iPhone. I used to test with two different iPhones: 4 and 5.

My Android-app is a lot less complex. The visually complex part (a custom chart that cannot be done with a default charting library) wasn't implemented in the Android-app.

We're working on a new version. I plan to test it on probably 3-4 devices as well, but with the assumption that Android is far better at handling different screen sizes than iOS currently (because maturity).

So yes, in the end, I'll have to test on 4 different devices for both platforms. With Android, I can mostly borrow devices from friends. Not so with iPhones. I might skip on the large iPhone 6 though. It's just too ugly to care about ;)

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#67

Post by seanmcdirmid »

josho wrote: post #48
MCRed wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the points are rendered in pixel-perfect form and then down sampled on the iPhone 6+, the only potential loss of fidelity is in the downsampling step. Since we're in an age of not even being able to see pixels, there should be no fidelity loss. The image displayed will be rendered at a higher resolution than the display, and thus every pixel on the ultimate display will be "perfect". Back when pixels were big e…

I wonder if Apple's ios7/Yosemite icon designs are a shift in this direction to vectors. E.g. the icons look like they are authored as a vector. But, I wonder if the platform APIs are not yet ready to handle vectors everywhere and seamlessly between pixel/vector formats.

Almost all of these are done as vectors in Illustrator and pre rasterized into pixels (with touch ups in PS if necessary).

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#68

Post by sirn »

bzbarsky wrote: post #47
MCRed wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a stupid question as you've hit on the major strategic bit of news here that most people, I think, are missing. Displays are cut from larger pieces of display material at a given PPI. So Apple focused on perfecting a 163PPI display material and then tended to use it on multiple products. They'd do the same thing for the retina display material as well (I think at one point the iPhone and iPad used the same displa…

That explains the pixel size, but not the point size. Why not make the logical resolution 360x640 with perfect 3x upscale? My best guess is because this would then be smaller than the iphone 6 size (in points) at a larger physical size so everything would look "too big"...

Doing a 360x640 will indeed create a rather awkward situation where iPhone 6 plus have less usable screen space than the iPhone 6 (which is 375x667). Though, my guess is that they want to keep the physical height of elements to be roughly the same across all iPhone family.

This way, all existing buttons that were designed with 44px tapable height in mind or any existing text could have more details in it while not appear larger or smaller than any other iPhones and will have more space to display content. I believe non-mini iPad is the only product in the iOS family that recommended 44px is physically larger than the rest.

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#69

Post by sirn »

femto113 wrote: post #50
bzbarsky wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That explains the pixel size, but not the point size. Why not make the logical resolution 360x640 with perfect 3x upscale? My best guess is because this would then be smaller than the iphone 6 size (in points) at a larger physical size so everything would look "too big"...

I believe this is because Apple wants the logical size to correspond (roughly) with physical size. This is particularly important for user interfaces. A button needs to be sized for the human finger that is tapping it and thus should be the same physical size on each device, which in turn means it should take up a smaller percentage of the logical size of the bigger devices. The only case I know of where they broke t…

To be fair, iPad Mini has the same PPI as the original iPhone (163 PPI) and iPad Mini Retina has the same PPI as the Retina iPhone (326 PPI) so it could be argued that iPad is the only device where everything appears larger than the rest.

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#70

Post by parasubvert »

astrocat wrote: post #64
MCRed wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you realize that every Retina Macbook Pro out there uses this "cheesy" resolution "hack"? Tying the size and density of your display to software needs-- especially points that are arbitrary to begin with (as they are based on the original iPhone) seems silly and outdated.

Actually no. Or maybe: yes, but... My first MPB was one of the "high resolution" ones that ran at 1680x1050 and I loved it. So when I first got my 15" retina MBP was miffed that now it felt like I was running a 1440x900, just with double (well, quadruple) pixel density. So I opened scaling preferences and set it so the retina screen would "emulate" a 1680x1050 display. It was terrible. Blurry and SLOW. Good lord it w…

Eh? I've run my rMBP at 1680x1050 for over two years. It's not blurry or (appreciably) slow, though I'll admit I'm using it more for development work more than heavy design work.
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