Let's talk... Retina external displays

After using my MBPR, I now find any external display horribly fuzzy. This includes my beautiful 27" Thunderbolt Display.

I haven't been able to find much of any discussion of whether an external retina display is practical.

What is the barrier? Is it the GPU power to drive that many pixels? Is it the difficulty in making a high DPI display that big?

They wouldn't need to be huge - I'd even be happy with two 21" displays, for example. Does anyone have any idea what kind of resolution would be required to make that retina?

 

I honestly think it's price and manufacturing. GPU is a bit of an issue, but come one; a mobile gpu can power a retina display.

I think that as more and more companies use much denser screens, the prices will begin to fall and it will become more mainstream. But within the next few years, I would honestly be surprised if I didn't see any retina external displays. Even though I hate to say it, waiting is the only option

 

The iPhone is retina at about 10" (viewing distance).

The iPad is retina at about 13".

The rMBP is retina at about 16".

My guess is that for a 27" external display, they would go with pixel doubled 1920x1080 (3840x2160), which would be retina at 21".

I would say that you're not seeing such displays primarily because of cost to manufacture, not performance. The cost of the display is a function of pixel density and display size. I'm sure it will roll around eventually, you'll just have to wait.

 

Interesting. Then it would be better to go for a smaller display and let people buy two. It's utter overkill to have a 27" display running only effective 1080p. E.g., two 24" at retina 1080p? Sounds pretty nice.

 

A 24" external display would probably be pixel doubled 1600x900 (3200x1800), or possibly doubled 1680x1050 if it goes 16:10. That would make it retina at 22". The 27" again would get 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 depending on whether it goes back to 16:10.

But you don't have to worry about the software details. Even with Apple's current implementation, you can adjust the equivalent desktop space. The 15" macbook pro is 2880x1800 pixels, and you can set the equivalent standard size desktop space to 1440x900, 1680x1050, or 1920x1200.

A pixel doubled 1920x1080 display would operate the same way, offering desktop space matching standard 1920x1080, 2560x1440, and perhaps 2880x1620 (or taller 16:10 resolutions if it goes for that ratio - 1920x1200, 2560x1600, 2880x1800).

 

^ At a 22" viewing distance sitting that far away from a 24" monitor. You can use your Thunderbolt display and push it back if you find things to be too fuzzy. That is what I do at work on the 24" 1920X1800 monitor I have at work. It is a little pixelated when I push it to the near edge of my desk but, when I push it back, I can't make out the pixels. I don't think we will see retina labeled external displays for a while. They are focusing on putting them in notebooks as-is with screen sizes 13-15". Manufacturers are going to focus on those sizes for now and then work their way up to 19", 20", 22", 24", and so on. Initial models are going to be pricey too.

 

Definitely. You're going to see a 13" retina model before external displays, and those are also cost prohibitive, because Apple probably wants to keep the prices down on the 13" model.

 

From the numbers you're quoting, we may have to go better than retina! 1600x900 on a 24" display is going to be disappointing.

 

1600x900 would not be a retina display @ 24" at normal viewing distances. I cited 3200x1800.

 

I still hope for a simple, 2560*1440 x2 that would be some serious pixel pushing

 

on a big monitor.. they better just go 3840x2160

 

thats just too few

 

It's really not. If you get to the point where you can no longer differentiate pixels, you don't need more pixels.

If you elements on your screen to look the same size as they do on your 2560x1440 display, then a 3840x2160 will display them with higher clarity. However, at ~21" with 20/20 vision (I believe that's the figure I cited), increasing that resolution further will not increase clarity any further. If you want elements to look even smaller, then by all means, make them smaller, but there's no point in making them smaller by increasing the resolution of the display, because again, it will not increase the clarity of the image.

I think you may have missed the point of retina displays. No matter what you want to represent on your screen, you don't need a physical resolution that's higher than what your eye can resolve.

 

Yes, but no... This would be true if the MacOS desktop were arbitrarily scalable. In practice, you can have a display which is retina, but where the user interface elements are too big. The only way to get them smaller is to have yet more pixels, even if you can't in fact distinguish them. It's an OS problem, not a human-eye problem.

 

You're talking about speculative problems with the practicality of a large format retina display because of the way retina displays are currently handled in software.

You have to keep in mind that this tech is not coming out tomorrow. The software solution is anything but set in stone for these devices which we are imagining for the future.

 

Furthermore, it would be a lot less expensive to update how an OS handles such large displays than it would be to upgrade the manufacturing process of displays to include way too many extra pixels just to account for the software. Software updates cost less to implement than needless hardware upgrades. A manufacturer is not going to add an extra couple thousand pixels (which means denser displays and more backlight requirements) when a few lines of code in an OS will solve the problem and the display can still be counted as being "retina."

 

I would be delighted if you both turn out to be correct. I'll only say, if it was as trivial as "a few lines of code", both Apple and Microsoft would have addressed this problem years ago.

 

Time will tell.

I have no doubt that the designers of future hardware will not go to elaborate lengths to wrangle new hardware to fit with current software systems. If retina resolution is achieved at a particular PPI for normal viewing distance, that will be the ballpark resolution of the device.

If that resolution does not mesh conveniently with the previous notion of UI element size, then that notion will be scrapped and replaced.

What you will not see is hardware that uses excessive pixel density, excessive back-lighting, excessive power, and dramatically increased cost, just to have it match up well with previous UI element sizes.

Apple may simply continue to handle resolutions as they are done with the Macbook Pro 15". Everything is rendered internally at 2x the desired "comparable-resolution", and then downscaled to the resolution of the display. This is the system already in place, and there's no reason why it wouldn't work on larger format displays. So yes, the software adjustments may be trivial.