from Hacker News

How sharp is the iPhone 4's screen? High Res 4 vs 3GS images

by petekalo on 6/14/10, 12:59 AM with 100 comments

• by rglullis on 6/14/10, 4:17 AM

  It amazes me how the Reality Distortion Field is strong. The Droid came with a 265 ppi screen and very few people cared (maybe http://xkcd.com/662 ). I googled around and could not find people taking pictures to compare the Droid screen with the iPhone 3GS screen.

  (Also, I'd love to find reviews of critics about the "squared, industrial" design on the Droid and their opinions on the "squared, industrial" designed iPhone. But I digress.)

  If anything, this seems to be how there's a void of real game-changing things on the iPhone 4, and yet bloggers and the writers who depend on Apple hype are working much harder to find anything to sell.

• by teilo on 6/14/10, 4:33 AM

  It would be nice if he had taken it straight on, or at least with a narrow enough aperture to capture the whole screen in the DOF. What's the point of the picture if most of the screen is out of focus?

• by lyime on 6/14/10, 1:42 AM

  here is a quick screenshot comparison http://grab.by/4UDZ

• by Groxx on 6/14/10, 1:54 AM

  Photos of the real thing == impressive. That's quite an improvement.

• by saint-loup on 6/14/10, 2:50 AM

  By comparison, the 3GS display, with the grid of pixels so visible, almost has a kind of retro, low-tech beauty.

• by ZeroGravitas on 6/14/10, 9:08 AM

  This suffers the same issue as Apple's demo site that shows the iPhone 3GS screens blown up 2x to compare against the iPhone 4 screenshots.

  My eye doesn't have a zoom. I see things at their actual size and even holding my phone right up to my eye I can't get it as large as those images. Details that I can't see without artificial zoom are the same as details that I can't see period.

  Clearly, higher resolutions up to some point are better for display purposes, but there's tradeoffs involved. I believe smaller pixels means less light gets through, it's more work for your processors which means less battery life etc.

  Everyone knows why Apple doubled ppi and quadrupled pixel count. The benefits of this system over, say, Androids flexibility should be apparent. But there are also limitations that mean the iPad is unlikely to increase its DPI for years unless it follows Android's lead. Certainly not a clear win.

• by MaysonL on 6/14/10, 2:43 AM

  The questions that I want to know the answers to:

  1. Will the next iterations of the iPad and MacBook(s) have this sort of display (perhaps as an option), or will it be the iteration after that?

  2. How much will they cost?

• by rodh257 on 6/14/10, 5:46 AM

  would be interesting to compare to the Samsung Galaxy S (android phone) which has a 4" super amoled screen, Samsung claims theirs is better as contrast ratios etc are more important than the extra few pixels, but then again, of course they would say that.

• by DTrejo on 6/14/10, 3:37 AM

  I took of picture of your pixels so you can see pixels in your pixels.

  Please forgive me.