5" screen (on a P2)


I have a Sony Vaio P series laptop. It has a very high pixel density. Believe me, it is pointless. You just cannot see the difference, and the cpu/gpu is basically eating power to render pixels that you cannot see anyway.


High res output to TV/beamer/monitor would be nice, but even for that 1024x768 is probably enough. For the display itself, bigger area is nice but higher ppi is pointless imo. Moving the speakers seems like a good idea, but it has to be done without sacrificing audio quality...
 
Wow - over a month since this one saw a reply...


I'm sorry if you can't see the difference in high resolution screens vs low.


For many of us, though, screen quality as seen in color depth, contrast, brightness, refresh rate and resolution is important.


Part of the result is that you can read smaller realized fonts than you otherwise could on a 'normal' display. This counts on your eyes actually being able to resolve them though. Not everyone's eyes are the same.
 
Obviously I _can_ see the difference between high res and low res screens, in general. All I'm saying is that as long as you're above 200 ppi, there is little point in further increasing the ppi since there is no way anyone can see the difference between, say, 220 ppi and 300 ppi (unless you use magnifying glasses etc). So all I'm saying is: don't bother increasing the resolution to 400 ppi (e.g. 1600x768 pixels on a 4.3" screen), because you'll just end up having to increase font sizes etc. a lot.


Color depth is obviously important, I would prefer 24 bit color (18 bit would be acceptable too; less than that certainly not). Contrast, brightness, refresh rate are probably more important than further increasing the pixel density. The pixel density of the current Pandora is fine. If you want more pixels, the physical screen size should be increased. And even on a 5" screen, anything above 1024x768 (which would be about 250 ppi) is pointless.


See also: http://youtu.be/l3qM05C9hMI


However, it would be nice if the Pandora 2 could handle higher resolutions for TV / monitor / beamer output.
 
the physical screen size should be increased. And even on a 5" screen, anything above 1024x768 (which would be about 250 ppi) is pointless.

Wrong proportions - 720x1280 would make more sense


Depends largely on whats available at the time...
 
A resolution of 1280x720 on a 5" screen means almost 300 ppi. That would be overkill imo. I think a 854x480 screen (almost 200ppi, same aspect ratio) would be enough.


Most of the emulated games are made for a 4:3 aspect ratio, so extra horizontal space is not very useful for those. Perhaps the Pandora 2 could keep the current horizontal screen size, have a slightly bigger vertical screen size, so the resolution would be 800x600 (SVGA). Without the speakers on each side, the width of the device could be reduced by maybe 2cm, which would make the device even more compact.


Meh. The more I think about it, the more I like the Pandora 1 design. And as mentioned before in this thread, we can dream all we want about the ideal screen, but in the end, we'll have to use whatever is available.
 
5" screens are all the rage these days. the P2 should be definitely be 5". I think that is the perfect size for a handheld device for gaming, watching videos and browsing el internet and its still portable. With very little bezel of course a la note.
 
I like 800x480. 480 is a good fit for a lot of emulation targeting around 224-240 to 480 rows, which is a lot of them. You want something somewhat wide for web browsing and movies and what have you at this resolution, while not giving too much pillar boxing for emulation. 800 is a good compromise, and it's a very common resolution (640x480 and the like is cheap). The next step up may be quite the pixel density, but the difference between integer scaling and non-integer is still going to be dead obvious, even when resolving individual pixels is difficult. In other words, you need a ton of pixels to visually approximate arbitrary low resolutions. I wouldn't like having something 1024x600 (much less 800x600). 1600x960 is waaay too high resolution, you probably won't find anything that high res in Pandora's form factor any time soon.


800x480 5" displays are pretty common. From what I could find hunting down prices, density impacted price more than absolute size, at least to a point. 800x480 at 5" may well be cheaper than 4.3", and you may have more options/second sources. You'd want to move the speakers somewhere else of course. Maybe on the left and right edges of the base? (if you can free the PCB space up anyway)
 
Exophase said:
1600x960 is waaay too high resolution, you probably won't find anything that high res in Pandora's form factor any time soon.
maybe there will be some who would like to make something with HD or full HD. If you keep 800x480 there is no way to make something with high resolution due to screen limitations. For example Velocispider is a retro style game and it looks just so awesome on the iPhone4 or the iPad3 with high res 264 ppi screens... If you have the opportunity go check it out for yourself.. it just makes me happy to look at it xD


recensione-velocispider-01.jpg



A lot of us would like to watch HD videos on the Pandora. One big problem is when I'm openig a HD video the window is sooo big I can't handle it. Pandora 2 will have the power to easily play HD but when the resolution stays the same the window problem also stays.

Grench said:
For many of us, though, screen quality as seen in color depth, contrast, brightness, refresh rate and resolution is important.

Part of the result is that you can read smaller realized fonts than you otherwise could on a 'normal' display. This counts on your eyes actually being able to resolve them though. Not everyone's eyes are the same.
jep, I confirm that! ; )
 
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Just let your video player scale down your movie - going fullscreen in mplayer or vlc should do that. There is really no point in playing HD movies on such a small screen - you really won't see the difference. Now if the Pandora 2 would have HDMI output, then it would make sense if it can do that at HD resolutions - but it would still make no sense to put that many pixels in its own screen (provided that such insane pixel densities would be available).


Contrast, brightness, refresh rate: those are currently more important than adding more pixels. I could even live with a 16-bit color screen (instead of the 24-bit the current Pandora has, although it is rarely used at the moment) if that would help to bring down the price and/or have less ghosting and more contrast/brightness. Also auto-brightness (adjusting to ambient light conditions) could be useful (although I would still want to be able to override it).


There's another advantage to sticking to 800x480 (regardless of the size of the screen): provided it is backwards compatible (which is very likely in terms of the CPU, and should be doable in terms of software libraries since the P2 will probably have enough NAND space (or microSD or whatever) to store whatever compatibility libraries are needed), all the Pandora 1 PND's should work nicely on the Pandora 2, and many of them are of course optimized for that resolution.


When I'm playing Final Fantasy on PSX ReArmed, there simply are no more than 320x240 pixels. You can upscale that to any resolution you want, and it isn't going to look better (it will actually be slightly worse if your native resolution isn't a nice multiple of 240, like Exophase already mentioned). For movies, you're really not going to see the difference either. So the only reason for having a higher resolution screen would be the general desktop use, but in my opinion there's not a lot of extra pixels you can squeeze in in a useful way. Sure, it would help when using ported software that assumes everyone has a 1024x768 or bigger screen, so you don't have to drag oversized windows around anymore. But everything will be so tiny, it might be worse than the current situation.


Actually: wouldn't it be possible to make X show a scaled down 1000x600 or perhaps 1600x960 desktop? And have some mechanism to switch between scaled down full view and zoomed in partial view at native resolution, showing a 800x480 subrectangle of your virtual 1600x960 screen (I remember you could configure X to do virtual screens where the zoom follows your mouse; I don't know if it can do the automatic downscaling). Then perhaps one nub could be used as a mouse and one nub could be used to navigate the virtual screen (and use action buttons or shoulder buttons as mouse buttons). This would be a better solution to the "oversized windows" problem than the current shift-drag move around method. But of course the best solution is to make proper ports of software to take the small screen size into account.
 
I would rather see a screen without horrible ghosting

I agree. When I was looking at LCDs before a primary criteria was to have substantially better response time than Pandora's. I will gladly sacrifice power consumption for this, to a reasonable extent anyway. I would also sacrifice viewing angle, and might be willing to accept lower overall brightness and higher black levels. Response time is really important for emulating old 60Hz platforms!


I would prefer to keep it 24-bit, though. I really don't want banding to show up during videos, and the resolution is low enough that dithering would be pretty noticeable. At the very least >= 18bpp is a given because they don't really make displays below that anymore, afaik (not sure if they ever really made 16bpp ones, as opposed to 15bpp).


I found a 5" 800x480 one that looked nice on paper and had a low quote from a Hong Kong warehouse (about $15 USD for 5000) but I didn't sample it so I don't know if it had any problems or if they would have really honored the price.
 
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oh good,


luckily OLED-screens have a response time of about 0,001 seconds ; )
 
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Won't screen size largely depend on what becomes easily available? - in the same way that 800x480 has been standard for a while now
 
the only thing 24bpp VS 18bpp and even 15bpp is good for is looking at static shades of beige to browns, that's where banding is at its worse.


in other words: naked pictures.


with a good LCD controller, a 18bpp LCD screen can be space-and-time dithered to display 24bpp just fine.


black and white resolution for browsing ... TEXT :)


and game menus, and as little ghosting as possible for gaming is what's actually needed on a portable gaming console.


most of the emulated consoles only generates a 15bpp picture anyway, because its good enough.


what does make a huge difference is the LCD signal generator's capability to correct the separate color curves and apply dithering.


we had to do that in software on GBA, color-correct all the source images on PC and it did a huge difference on the picture quality.
 
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