So any of you who post here regularly know about my affinity for Apple products, but all the internet buzz has got me pondering the significance of the retina display. I've always found the difference between print quality and display quality to be a bit irritating. For instance, my imac's resolution is 1920 X 1200 or about 2.3 MP's Even my D40's images more than fill up the screen. Now I don't have a ruler handy, but using the length of letter paper, I'd estimate my 24inch display works out to about 20 X 13 inches. At 300 DPI, I'd need 23.4 mp's to fill the same space. That's a pretty big difference.
The real gotcha, however, is that I have blow up the picture to huge sizes on screen in order to see pixel for pixel how an image will look printed. Because of the low pixel density of my screen, it usually looks kind of crappy at 100%. Imagine if I could have a screen that would perfectly show at the pixel level how an image would look printed. Well it turns out with the iPhone 4, we can do just that... except its tiny.
How long before we get full size displays with that kind of pixel density... if we can do it on a phone, how come nobody has figured it out already on a desktop? Is it just to many pixels for modern day graphics processors to manage? Is it because Apple \ Microsoft didn't design the OS's to display things large enough on that kind of pixel density? What are your thoughts.
When will the age of the retina display be upon us? I say the sooner the better...
