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iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

paintcodeapp.com

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Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#71

Post by bennyg »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #67
josho wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Absolutely. No designer worth their salt is starting with PS for these app icons.

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#72

Post by astrocat »

parasubvert wrote: post #70
astrocat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess YMMV... I also had to get my screen replaced because it was one of the small number of screens that had severe burn-in issues.

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#73

Post by joezydeco »

femto113 wrote: post #65
joezydeco wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In that video, the larger parent substrate glass is still partitioned into smaller segments for lithography and processing.

I was referring more to the concept that the entire substrate is built as a huge 163 dpi display and then it's a matter of customer preference how the glass is cut.

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#74

Post by mpweiher »

MCRed wrote: post #16
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…

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…

> 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.

Are we sure that this is how it's implemented? They could just as well have the frame buffer be 1080p and adjust the device matrix of the rendering engine(s).

> but we should have moved to SVG or some vector format as a native format in iOS several years ago.

Like PDF?

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#75

Post by mpweiher »

pfranz wrote: post #32
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 think the reason raster icons have stuck around so long is the proportions of icons need to change as the scale gets really small to keep them recognizable (I think formats like svg has support for this now). Any vector icons also need to be rasterized before drawing to the screen which can take up memory and make things less speedy. Vector icons were the new hot well before the original iPhone was released. Here's…

> Any vector icons also need to be rasterized before drawing to the screen which can take up memory and make things less speedy.

Well...any raster format needs to be read from disk, decoded and drawn, though there are special optimizations for the drawing step.

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#76

Post by nailer »

mrb wrote: post #27
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…

"there should be no fidelity loss" Heh. Yes there will be, most notably on webpages, for example those with box borders defined as "1px solid" lines. The lines will look fuzzy and unequal. Check the last image at http://www.paintcodeapp.com/content/news/2014-09-11_iphone-6... : it shows a "1 CSS pixel" line rendered as 2 black lines + 2 grey lines (one of the greys is very, very light). Some lines will not be interpo…

Why wouldn't a 1px CSS line, shown with 3 pixels on iPhone 6+ per, downsampled to HD (per the article) still look OK?

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#77

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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?

There were rumours of display manufacturing problems holding up the "bigger" iPhone 6. So I wouldn't be surprised to see a minor bump up to an actual 3x pixel size in the next revision.

(This would also give them back a minor marketing advantage that they had briefly when they introduced Retina, as I'd guess most mainstream Android's will stick at 1080p)

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#78

Post by ianlevesque »

rayiner wrote: post #18
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.

I think it's actually pretty clever. Developers clearly have trouble writing apps to support arbitrary scale factors. Resolution independence was supposed to be a feature of Windows since Vista was codenamed "Longhorn" (before 2004), and Windows is still a mess on higher-DPI screens 10 years later. Making it so developers only have to think about 1x and 2x and 3x makes the task easier. Also, look at it this way: with…

1x 2x 3x is great as developer, but downscaling the result to save a few bucks on the display panel? Not so much.

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#79

Post by dingdingdang »

sriku wrote: post #46

They did it! This nice page explaining the resolution differences etc. made me want to click the "paintcode" link at the bottom of the page. This is hard to pull off well, and I think they did it.

Exactly this, the article succeeds in making this seem so incredibly backwards that you NEED their particular commercial third party tool to survive as a developer ;) (hey, maybe its even true, I haven't the faintest)

Re: iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

#80

Post by runeks »

nailer wrote: post #76
mrb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"there should be no fidelity loss" Heh. Yes there will be, most notably on webpages, for example those with box borders defined as "1px solid" lines. The lines will look fuzzy and unequal. Check the last image at http://www.paintcodeapp.com/content/news/2014-09-11_iphone-6... : it shows a "1 CSS pixel" line rendered as 2 black lines + 2 grey lines (one of the greys is very, very light). Some lines will not be interpo…

Why wouldn't a 1px CSS line, shown with 3 pixels on iPhone 6+ per, downsampled to HD (per the article) still look OK?

FWIW, here's how a 1 pixel line looks on my Nexus 5 (4.95" 1080p display): http://i.imgur.com/RmRHpit.png

Here's the web page with the 1 pixel line: http://jsfiddle.net/k0xep8pL/embedded/result/

On my PC, the line is just a single pixel. On my Nexus 5 -- as you can see -- it's actually three lines, which are (from top to bottom): grey (RGB=134), black (RGB=0), grey (RGB=156).

The impression I get, when looking at it on my phone, is a solid black line. Bear in mind, that the width of the display is 61 millimeters, which means that these three pixels take up only 0.17 millimeters on the screen.

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