Display Nirvana

The iPhone 4 with its "Retina Display" is one of the highest resolution displays ever in a consumer device. Breaking the 300ppi threshold (and handily) has delivered us a screen with such tiny pixels that for most manner of speaking they're imperceptible. Let that sink in for a moment. I don't mean imperceptible like they're just a lot smaller, I mean that unless you hold the device a few inches away and squint hard, you can't even tell they're there. Like how you can't see individual ink dots on prints from a good inkjet printer or on high-quality photographic prints. Put an iPhone 4 next to any other phone and you'll instantly see what I mean. It even make Apple's iPad screen look cheap in comparison.

The beauty of this screen is most evident when looking at photos. Photos on the iPhone 4 look so good that you can't believe you're looking at the same photo. This isn't an exaggeration: photos on the iPhone 4 don't just look better, they look like professional photographs on a light box. It's really stunning. And it's not even just that they look so much better, for all intents and purposes they ARE that much better. The quality of the display is a huge factor in determining picture quality, a fact that many seem to forget.

People tend to get all worked up about megapixels as a measure of digital picture quality (the fact that megapixels ostensibly provide a quantitative measure of said quality doesn't help with marketers who exploit this fallacy ad nauseam), but megapixels aren't even the most important photographic measure of quality, let alone the most important overall measure.

Most would agree that the displays on digital cameras aren't very good—this is on account of trying to preserve battery life for taking all those pictures. And I'd say that most people accept this; they don't intend to keep the photos on their camera anyway, so they don't need the preview display to be so good. It's ironic that the image by which we decide whether a photo is worth keeping or re-taking is likely the worst that photo is ever going to look. But not so with the iPhone 4.

Display technology has been steadily improving, and if Apple wasn't the first to bring print-quality digital resolution to the general public, there's no doubt someone else would have. But now that we're here, the proliferation of such displays will forever change the way we interact with our digital world. Pixelation will become a thing of the past—if you think 16-bit graphics are lovably retro now, just wait until we reminisce about today's computer displays in the same manner. It may be sooner than you think.

We've arrived at a resolution so good that its limits can barely be perceived by the human eye. It's like how movies are presented at (about) 30 frames per second, which is the limit beyond which the eye cannot detect the individual frames and instead perceives them as fluid motion. It means we don't have to wait for display technology to materially improve. We're here, this is it. Right now it's on the iPhone 4, but tomorrow it will be everywhere.¹

If you haven't figured it out yet, you can't really understand what a big deal this is until you see it for yourself. Go visit an Apple Store and see an iPhone 4 in person, or look at one of your friend's. You absolutely cannot experience the difference on your computer. When you do see an iPhone 4 in person, compare the display to your own phone, then imagine if every display was of such impossibly high quality and you'll start to get the idea of where we're headed. 

¹ If I were a betting man, I'd wager the next place we'll see this display is on Apple's next version of the iPod Touch, and I'd further bet that we'll see this device announced by the end of September.←