Sony Unveils Smartphone With 4K Screen 117
An anonymous reader writes: Sony has taken the wraps off its new Xperia Z5 Premium smartphone, which has a 5.5" display that operates at 4k resolution. "The company acknowledged that there was still a limited amount of professional content available in 4K — which provides about four times the number of pixels as 1080p high definition video. But it said the Z5 Premium would upscale videos streamed from YouTube and Netflix to take advantage of the display." Sony's answer to the obvious battery concerns raised by such a pixel-dense (808 ppi) screen was to use a 3,430 mAh battery and memory-on-display technology. The video upscaling can also be turned off to decrease battery drain.
Does Sony also provide... (Score:5, Funny)
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I was more thinking Gear VR stile headset to take advantage of the higher resolution.
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That does seem to be the main application of a phone screen that dense. I had hoped the Note 5 would have a 4K screen for Gear VR, but that didn't work out. Gear VR with the S6 is fun, but the pixels are huge.
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You can see over 600dpi at normal smartphone distances and the round number makes upscaling cheaper and more precise.
Re:Does Sony also provide... (Score:5, Informative)
The maximum physically possible resolution for the human eye to see is 2190 dpi [wolfcrow.com]. But that's not an average eye, but rather a flawless eye limited only by the size of the pupil; and viewed from as close as an adult can focus, 4 inches.
If we downgrade from a perfect eye to an average eye, the resolution drops down to 876 dpi... but still at 4 inches.
At a more practical 12 inches, this drops to around 300 dpi. Which is why magazines are printed at 300 dpi - it's good enough for most practical circumstances.
Also note some additional limitations:
* These sort of resolution figures are based on the ability to distingish bright white lines from bright black lines without them blurring together into gray. The smaller the contrast and the dimmer the light, the less the eye can resolve.
* The human eye also loses a great deal of ability to make out resolution when objects are moving.
* Obviously the further away one is from the center of the field of view, the lower the resolution - with a rather fast dropoff.
Yes, 808 dpi is complete and total overkill, unless you've got superb eyes and are in the habit of holding your phone as close to them as you can focus while looking at high contrast stationary images.
Re:Does Sony also provide... (Score:4)
Yes, 808 dpi is complete and total overkill, unless you've got superb eyes and are in the habit of holding your phone as close to them as you can focus while looking at high contrast stationary images.
You mean like when you've got the phone strapped to your head in VR mode?
Wrong aspect ratio... (Score:2, Informative)
Not that it has stopped some, but a 16:9 display in a phone is not optimal for VR. It is difficult to drive such a display while doing something interesting, and a phone just doesn't have the CPU to do it locally, or the bandwidth to do it remotely.
An wired 8:3 would display would be a much better fit, as it matches the human visual field more closely, and wouldn't require batteries or other useless hardware.
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you use the lenses in vr displays to stretch the 16:9 to fill the fov.
like, this screen in a rift v1 would make it usable for almost anything.
but this screen on a friggin phone? fairly useless. the 1600 x 2560 pixels on the note4/edge is enough to not see the pixels on the huge display 20 cm away..
Re: Does Sony also provide... (Score:1)
With Google cardboard, the screen is even closer to your eyes than this, but focus is still fine because of the lenses. So there definitely are uses for the pixel density.
The EVF on my NEX-7 must be somewhere around 2000 DPI and that's a few years old now (again though it's lensed so it appears much bigger than its real 0.5" size), so it's not like it's even that hard to hit 800 DPI.
So why not :)
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Magazines print photos at an effective 300 dpi. Text is printed at a much higher resolution - 1200 dpi or more - because text at 300 dpi looks lousy.
So this phone is complete overkill for photos, but about right for text. At this resolution we might finally do away with font hinting and anti-aliasing.
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Every time something like this comes out, someone like you posts what you did.
I am 40 years old, my eyes aren't special in any way.
I sit 3 feet from a trio of Dell 30" monitors at 2560x1600 and I can see the pixels. Playing games, you have to turn on the AA or the jaggies are crazy.
I sit 10 feet from a Sony 70" 1080p TV, and I can see the pixels. Doesn't matter the content, they are there. Of course, when relaxing and watching a movie, you just ignore them after awhile, but they are there.
At 10 feet, a 7
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Yeah. Seconded.
I'm currently about 60cm from a 28" 4k screen and it also needs AA to hide the pixels when gaming. Text (the stationary high-contrast case) looks beautiful - but the level of custom AA on text rendering is staggering.
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At a more practical 12 inches, this drops to around 300 dpi. Which is why magazines are printed at 300 dpi - it's good enough for most practical circumstances.
They use 300dpi because it is cheap and because with cheap ink and cheap paper it doesn't matter. Higher quality publications use 600dpi or more.
Also, print is not the same as an LCD screen. Ink on paper does not form perfect little square pixels with extremely sharp edges.
My eyesight isn't great, I wear glassed, but I can see the difference between a 300dpi screen and a 500dpi screen. Text looks a lot better at 500dpi to me. As well as being a little sharper and clearer, it allows the device to use fonts w
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That's ignoring Vernier Acuity, which is a very important effect on displays where the pixels form parallel lines, i.e. pretty much every modern electronic display. It gets down to 0.13 arc minutes, which is why there are several replies pointing out that your theory doesn't match reality, even for people with worse than average vision.
And this figure of 2190dpi? That's 3 significant figures, computed from something that was given to only one significant figure (0.4 arc minutes). You can't do that, and i
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...high-definition bionic eye implants to be able to see the difference?
The eye has higher effective resolution than Apple has led us to believe with their "retina" marketing. This article shows how human eye can see 530 ppi resolution in a 20 x 13.3-inch print viewed at 20 inches. http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html
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The eye has higher effective resolution than Apple has led us to believe with their "retina" marketing. This article shows how human eye can see 530 ppi resolution in a 20 x 13.3-inch print viewed at 20 inches. http://clarkvision.com/imagede... [clarkvision.com]
Which is hardly news in the print world. Most fonts are passable, but noticeably less than perfect at 600dpi. Some fonts still don't quite work right at 1200dpi. Of course, that's without anti-aliasing. Grayscale at 600 dpi can do a pretty good job of representing print if the anti-aliasing is well done.
Re:Does Sony also provide... (Score:4, Informative)
20/20 vision is defined by the ability to resolve 1 arc minute. For example, the "E" on an eye doctor's chart on the 20/20 vision line is 5 arc minutes tall, as reading it takes the ability to break it down into five vertical glyphs and distingish between them. That page is based on the premise of a person being able to resolve 0,3 arc minutes.
Problem.
Also, see above. The human eye has a lot more limitations than just a simple single angular resolution figure can express. I even forgot to list one: time. Not only does motion greatly limit one's resolution ability, but even on a stationary image, the person has to be able to focus and take time in order to get even "normal" levels of visual acuity.
Re: Does Sony also provide... (Score:3)
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Yep, until I hit 40, I was rated at 12/20 vision. I could see at 20 feet what most people needed to be at 12 feet to see.
Now I have to wear glasses if I want my better than 20/20 vision back.
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Probably my memory. I am not an eye doctor.
Re: Does Sony also provide... (Score:2)
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But a person with either good vision or properly corrected vision has significantly better than 20/20 acuity.
What's more, we're sensitive to certain visual artifacts below the nominal limit of acuity, in some cases significantly below: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There's certainly a point of diminishing returns, but there's no hard line beyond which no improvements matter. (Or rather, there is, but it's far beyond the "retina" limit defined by Apple's marketing or 19th century opthalmologists.)
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Yes, there is. Even a flawless human eye couldn't resolve better than about 0,4 arcminutes.
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And does it use overpriced propriety Sony memory cards? Ah... I so love that with most of their devices.
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Earlier Xperias use bog standard flash.
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I know... it was more of a stab at Sony for some of their other electronic items that do use proprietary memory.
Good work, SONY (Score:5, Insightful)
Fix bugs? Address users' complaints? Release updates within the schedule *you* announce? Maybe add basic functionality to your 'premium' music playing software, functionality that media players have had for well over a decade now?
Naaaah, fuck that, let's put a 4k screen on a 5.5" phone! Yeah!
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No risk in the US. Their data plan will have cut them off after about 3 to 5 seconds.
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Not me. I'm still grandfathered on a plan Verizon isn't allowed to throttle. :D
Of course, this phone probably won't be available on Verizon's network. :(
3D... (Score:5, Interesting)
That type of resolution lends itself very well to doing things like lenticular 3-D. I know people often don't like lenticular, but that's usually because it's done so poorly so often. Well-done lenticular is amazing to see and is not a strain on the eyes. If glass lenticules were built into the display itself, and were appropriately sized and spaced, it could be impressive.
There are other interesting technologies too that could be done, such as barrier-screen - that could be implemented by LCD over top of the display - which would be less intrusive and could be turned on/off.
I write software for these applications - I would drool over a screen that had 808ppi!
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Just noodling on this - a fixed LCD barrier screen, combined with the selfie-camera could automatically adjust the underlying image to calibrate automatically for the inter-ocular distance of the user, no matter how close/far from their eyes they're holding the screen. 808ppi with a 80-100lpi barrier screen would give you tons of resolution to play with in this respect. It would be awesome. :)
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Yeah, the new models of 3DS already do this ; the face cam recognises your eye positions and adjusts the panel so you don't have to sit stock still to use it effectively. When you use it in the dark you can see the IR lamp it lights your face up with so it can still see your eyes as a dim red glow above the screen.
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I believe you would be using it incorrectly.
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I believe you would be using it incorrectly.
I'm sure he's drooling in a well-defined pattern to make an array of small droplets on the screen. And that's why people don't like lenticular 3D.
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I'm sure he's drooling in a well-defined pattern to make an array of small droplets on the screen. And that's why people don't like lenticular 3D.
" Anyone else read that as "why people dont like tentacular 3D"
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" Anyone else read that as "why people dont like tentacular 3D"
Sounds like it'd be popular in the Japanese home market.
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" Anyone else read that as "why people dont like tentacular 3D"
Sounds like it'd be popular in the Japanese home market.
My son, who was into anime some years ago, once showed me an artwork of that. Truly there are different srokes for different folks.
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It would be one of the few good cases not to "release the Kraken".
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Yes, it would be cool. The failing of many VR systems is field of view. With more resolution, you can increase the FOV while still having enough detail to look decent. I think Occulus Rift is one of the few doing it "well", but even they have a bit of tunnel-vision in their system.
I can't wait until there are VR systems that have FULL field of view, so even your peripheral view is addressed.
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In every day use in a phone however it's a waste of time and probably just taxes the phone far more than necessary for minimal dif
If you hold it 1.3 mm in from of your face (Score:2)
You can JUST tell the difference between the 4k and 1080p.
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I'm waiting for the technology to completely fail, and then they'll announce the next thing.
The people making it are all going "yarg, teh 4K". The average consumer doesn't give a crap.
Having rode out the first decade of HD waiting until it stopped being a moving target on $10K TVs no sane person was going to buy ... seen the format wars to move on from DVD ... and having see a couple of early adopters discover their TV could no longer display HD because of the copy protection stuff ... I can tell you the a
Re: If you hold it 1.3 mm in from of your face (Score:2)
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The 2x24" 1080p screens on my desk are just fine thanks.
In fairness, there's a pretty spectacular improvement in moving to a "retina" class display on your using-it-all-the-time monitor. I can see no rational reason for having a higher resolution on my phone than I do on my 27" computer monitor though, even if I do hold it half the distance away.
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I doubt it will fail even if people don't care simply because once the early adopter premium is over the cost difference is not that huge and unlike 3D there's really no downsides. Checking my local price comparison site here now in Norway there's 84 TV models with 720p, 7 models with 1080i, 445 models with 1080p and 253 with Ultra HD. If I restrict it to 50"+ models UltraHD is already in a majority (188 vs 176). About 4 years ago I bought a 60" 1080p LCD, I see now you can get a 58" UHD LCD for 20% less. A
Not impressive (Score:1)
Yawn!
Please wake me when they have a 16K screen.
Better screen for Project Morpheus (Score:2, Interesting)
They say 8k is the ultimate target for a VR headset.
Re: Better screen for Project Morpheus (Score:1)
8k is what is needed to achieve a pixel-per-degree approximately equal to what a typical 24" 1080p monitor has when viewed at a typical comfortable distance.
bah (Score:2)
I'll wait for the 32k version
Because we NEED that kind of resolution on a 5.5" screen...
For the love of christ wwhhyy?? (Score:1)
It's a tiny screen generally viewed from about a foot away. I'd imagine, taking perspective into account, it's around 1/4th of the size of a regular TV yet requires 4 times the pixels?
Unless you press eyeball to the screen i'd be amazed if you could tell the difference between 1080p and 4k on something that size....but i'm absolutely sure you'll notice the difference in battery life between the resolutions.
Better on a large tablet. (Score:1)
Does sit also come with a (Score:2, Informative)
high definition root kit?
Screen magnifiers (Score:3)
Sounds like it's time to bring back the 1940's era TV screen magnifiers [myauctionfinds.com] so users can take advantage of all of those pixels.
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That reminds me of the fresnel lenses over the screens in the movie Brazil.
Absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary. (Score:2)
Our eyes can't even resolve that kind of resolution at that size. Not to mention more energy needed, which sucks down even more power. How about a 2k screen and a bigger battery instead? People would be happier with that instead of 4k screen.
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Pixel Whores (Score:5, Insightful)
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Your false parallel is showing. You can always find something more compute-intensive, as much as necessary for any increase in compute-power to make a clear difference.
But indulgent masturbating with insane excess visual resolution stops making any perceptible difference to anyone at some point well below 4K on a 5.5" display. Hell, for my vision, anything much over 800x480 doesn't give me any gain whatsoever.
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Your false parallel is showing. You can always find something more compute-intensive, as much as necessary for any increase in compute-power to make a clear difference.
The gist of "MHz wars" was that smarter, lower-MHz CPUs were actually better at compute-intensive tasks, whereas something like Pentium 4 could only show higher numbers of MHz and watts.
To me, the real issue is that some of the best technology ends up in dumb consumer devices like phones, while people who write code and perform heavy scientific computing make do with old-school hardware. For example, try finding a laptop with similar efficiency and density of computing power and memory as phones. I'm str
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What possible function other than driving phone sales can 4k on a 5.5" screen have?!
Mounting it in a VR headset. Google cardboard is a fail on my books because of the "low res" screen of my current premium flagship phone.
Upscaling is BS (Score:2)
Back in 2009 I bought a beautiful 50" Panasonic 1080p plasma. I (still to this day) absolutely love that TV and the images that it renders. When I used a BluRay for the first time (Actually the only way to fully use the 1080p, as Comcast isn't 1080p), I realized that by standing a couple feet away from the TV I could see things that I wouldn't be able to see at a normal distance. 4k must be amazing - it's like a microscope, as you can see detail that you wouldn't be able to see with the naked eye if you
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I agree that upscaling is BS. Upscaling is also what a computer's LCD does when watching a 720x480 YouTube vido full screen. It still looks like crap.
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Hyperbole warning! 720p video at normal viewing distance is anything but crap. It's very slightly less perfect than 1080p.
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720x480 is 480p, not 720p. I don't know who invented the "p" denomination, but it was a stupid idea.
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yeah, but the horizontal resolution is also a big deal and they forgot that information.
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It's not because it varies that it is not important.
A 100x720p movie would suck a lot more than a 1280x720i movie
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Actually, proper interpolative upscaling reduces spatial quantization "jaggies", which means you get a more accurate representation of the original real-world view. Yeah, bog-stupid upscaling by just duplicating every pixel 2 times horizontally and 2 times vertically does not do anything whatsoever for resolution.
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Are you basically saying to make pixels by averaging the color of the adjacent ones?
Granted, human eyes at normal distances can't use the kind of detail that these new TVs can deliver, but I just don't see how you could get a "more accurate representation of the original real-world view" by adding things that aren't really there. I mean, our eyes would do the same work at the TV screen the same way they would if we were positioned where the camera was. Wouldn't they? I could be missing something...
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Are you basically saying to make pixels by averaging the color of the adjacent ones?
No, he isn't.
If its surprising to you that its possible to do better prediction of the missing information between the pixels of images than various kinds of interpolations (such as bilinear (aka "averaging" for 2x), bicubic, etc..), then its because you are wholly ignorant on the subject. Amazing that you jumped in to discuss a subject that you are wholly ignorant on.
If it were purely random data then your from-ignorance consideration of the subject would have some weight, but it isn't arbitrary data.
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Ok. So, technobabble aside. I'd like to know HOW? for a simple example, suppose we have 3 pixels horizontally. Pixel 1 is blue (RGB(0,0,255)), pixel 3 is green (RGB(0,255,0)). Tell me what pixel 2 should be?
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Re:Upscaling is BS (Score:5, Informative)
You do understand that 1080i has precisely the same spatial resolution as 1080p, right? There is no field fade (whatsoever) on an LCD, as there is on CRT. And the temporal resolution depends on the respective frame rates. 1080i is 60 fps in the US and other NTSC-legacy areas, and 50 in Europe and other PAL-legacy areas.
1080p may be either 24, 30, or 60 fps in the US, and 25 or 50 in Europe. The lower figures are the norm for film-derived material, since film has 24 fps. The lower figures give you in fact a LOWER temporal resolution for 1080p than for 1080i. The higher figures give you the SAME temporal resolution for 1080p as for 1080i. The difference is that in 1080i, only 1/2 the 2,073,600 pixels change every 1/fps seconds, and in 1080p all of the 2,073,600 pixels change every 1/fps seconds.[*]
In scenes with no motion, there is no difference in image quality whatsoever. None. 1080p and 1080i give identical images. Only in scenes with significantly rapid motion does 1080i introduce noticeable artifacts that aren't there with 1080p.
[*] The actual situation is modified by various motion-smoothing video-processing algorithms employed in any good-quality interlaced display.
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I agree with this... But we were never arguing "i" versus "p"
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Furthermore, there is zero (none) difference between 1080p and 1080i when watching 24 FPS film content, as displayed on an LCD -- whether there is motion or not. The same can also be said of 1080p30 and 1080i60 for content that is of 30 FPS.
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>About Upscaling - This is the biggest load of crap ever. You can NOT create detail beyond that which you started with. An upscaled picture, displayed at 4k, that was captured with a 1080p camera can't possibly be any more accurate than the same picture displayed on a 1080p TV. Of course, the masses don't understand this. This seems to be the "MO" of most technology these days, since non-tech-savvy people are using a lot of tech gadgets - you can say meaningless things that sound "good", and people will accept them as "good" since they don't know what the hell they've really got.
Interesting thing about visuals and upsampling/interpolation. You can actually end up with a BETTER image (visually smoother, cleaner) when you upsample and interpolate. In fact, that's the standard approach in ultrasound - capture the raw data, use it to create an upsampled/interpolated set of data, and then do all displays and calculations in the new data. The only reason you use the original data is to give you something to upsample. And empirical, double-blind tests in medical situations proves that
8K/eye (Score:2)
"To get to the point where you can't see pixels, I think some of the speculation is you need about 8K per eye in our current field of view [for the Rift]." -- Palmer Luckey, the founder and creator of the Oculus Rift [arstechnica.com]
I got a 4K TV Yesterday (Score:5, Informative)
NetFlix 4K looks a lot better than their 1080p service, but just like the 1080p service, the video is over-compressed, so fine detail is missing. YouTube 4K videos look amazing.
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What's the horizontal resolution on a 4k set?
I'm curious as to what the bandwidth would be for uncompressed 4k video.
Also, I'm clueless as I don't have anything 4k - what's the Blu-ray equivalent for 4k? I guess you'd need that to truly see how good your TV is... I can't imagine that youtube is streaming anything that doesn't have a lot of loss... (Again, I'm speculating here...)
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Most TVs that I have been able to find are now 4k but rather UHD which has a resolution of 3840x2160 and usually crop the left and right sides of the image when displaying real DCI 4k content.
I suspect the problem is only going to get worse over time because I doubt very many consumers understand the difference in aspect ratio between DCI 4k and UHD. A 4k display can display UHD c
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Sounds like how they took the computer monitor screens and used "1080p" hype to reduce the average resolution of a screen from 1600x1200 to 1600x1080. Whenever I go looking for a monitor now, I spend lots of time to find the ones with 1200 vertical pixels versus 1080.
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yea... I'm all about real estate when it comes to my monitors. For real... I'm dying to get a new big monitor with something_x2160 pixels, but don't have the cash to fork over for it. As a software developer, resolution means a lot when using an IDE like visual studio - I like to have all my debugging side windows open.
Even for browsing the web, I like to have a lot of vertical resolution to be able to see full pictures, and not have to scroll a lot. Real estate baby, real estate..
Optional accessory... (Score:4, Insightful)
To go along with the 4K display Sony will be offering an optional 30lb. battery (with an available backpack). A Sony spokesperson, when asked to comment on this, confirmed that the optional battery should allow users an entire day of phone use without the need for a recharge.
"These things are flying off the shelf" according to I.P. Nightly of Sony. "Our customers are demanding 4K screens for their phones and, by gosh, we have delivered in a big, big way!" claims Nightly.
Stay tuned for more news as it develops....
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"These things are flying off the shelf" according to I.P. Nightly of Sony.
"4K replay is causing the 4 fans to run full speed. The ventilation slots are at the bottom of the device so it starts to take off the shelf like a copter" Nightly explained.
How is that possible? (Score:2)
Not the screen or the phone, but how is it possible to play games on a 4k phone at any reasonable speed. Are they 16x upscaling?
I ask because we see how 4k multi-head (say 3x4k, or even 8k) gaming is nearly impossible without 1000W of parallel GPU horsepower and a shitload of GPU RAM, and even then it's not great. Yet you can fit 4K into a 5W thermal envelope in a phone?
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This would actually be useful if... (Score:2)
Does Android have some equivalent of Apple Airplay, so that you can beam the display of your phone over the local WiFi network to a bigscreen equipped with the appropriate streaming box?
Higher resolution than reality (Score:1)
Futurama [youtube.com]
I can think of only one use for this (Score:2)
Otherwise not so much. It just means the DPI goes into stupid territory and the phone OS ends up having to upscale apps to stop them looking like postage stamps.
VR (Score:1)