Phonearena on Sony's 4K smartphone

I'm not sure what to think about this article from +PhoneArena

On one hand, they tried to illustrate their point with pictures which is great.

However, showing what you see on screen in photos is very difficult.

Video would be a better medium, since the viewer can build a better visual representation thanks to the multi-frame interpolation operating in our brain.
Also, high resolution photographs is not the best medium to highlight the usefulness of high resolution displays, since depending on the content and capture, fake details coming from sharpening can appear better than higher actual resolution.
Small text or diagrams with a lot of details benefit from high resolution displays more.

With the current state of technology, I will take a Quad HD smartphone over a sometimes(rarely)-4K one any day anyway.
And please, don't kill it with sharpening: halos and artifacts mask and destroy the resolution advantage over 1080p most of the time.

#supercurioBlog #press #critic #display



Kill it before it lays eggs: On the Z5 Premium’s 4K UHD display and why it’s useless
When it comes to display resolution, the law of diminishing returns pretty much renders any discussion moot. In essence, it states that, in most things, at some point further increases in X will results in smaller and smaller gains of Y. Put otherwise, the more you increase pixel count given an identical panel size, the less and less every other pixel will count, as you’ll be reaching a fundamental limit—that of your eyes’ finite resolving power…

Source post on Google+

Published by

François Simond

Mobile engineer & analyst specialized in, display, camera color calibration, audio tuning

4 thoughts on “Phonearena on Sony's 4K smartphone”

  1. +Rahul Patil​​ yeah it's almost impossible to take good pictures of display and its RGB matrix with a camera sensor with its Bayer RGGB matrix: only a Sigma Foveon sensor would be able to without introducing crazy moiré with the desired magnification.
    It's pretty difficult to illustrate this type of things well: they tried!

  2. I got a View Master cardboard VR unit recently, and the improvement from iphone (720p) to Nexus 5 (1080p) to Moto X Pure (1440p) is huge for VR application. VR looks to be the big thing for 2016 so I expect to see Samsung have a 4K screen and maybe HTC also?

  3. +Paul Atwal VR benefits massively from higher resolution displays indeed, and I suppose that 1080p upscaled to UHD, even with basic bilinear is still better than native 1080p since it prevents you to see the RGB subpixels.
    And VR lenses are only gonna continue getting better in terms of optical quality.
    It's another case where you don't want nasty sharpening artifacts to interfere BTW.

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