Beautiful landscapes are prettier than portraits

[rohezal]

I had one lecture where the Professor talked about how noticeable quality difference is, with these parameters in mind: pixel density, area of the screen and distance between the user and the screen. It wasn't too positive about small display with high resolution. You can only sense Full HD on a small display  when your eyes are extreme near the display.

 

[Kiga]

It's all good to me. I have always been bothered by the fullHd screen. It's a silly waste of power and energy (and money). I'm glad that this problem has been resolved, and I see no reason to switch to 1080 even if it become supported.

 

[cuetzpalin]

I think 720 offers more pros than cons.

And if it's going to be possible to get an upgrade to 1080 later... way to go.

 

[panik]

[...]HalfHD will probably be more usable out of the box with a standard Linux[...]

Say no more. Go for it!

 

[WizardStan]

You can only sense Full HD on a small display when your eyes are extreme near the display.

Apple did a study which led to the creation of their Retina display, finding that a pixel density of about 300ppi at 12 inches is optimal.A 5" 720p screen has a density of 293ppi, assuming they're even sized pixels. Checking my Pandora, I hold it about 12 inches away comfortably. Give or take an inch.

Assuming the study is true, 720p is probably just about the right resolution for the Pyra.

 

[deadofmind]

EvilDragon, is there a comparison of power useage between the 720p and 1080p displays? About how much more power would we save switching to the new panel?

 

[ekianjo]

Apple did a study which led to the creation of their Retina display, finding that a pixel density of about 300ppi at 12 inches is optimal.

While I agree with your conclusion, the level of the boards discussion falls very low when one tries to refer to Apple's study as Science or something. Apple has been the company delivering more marketing bullshit than anyone else in the past 30 years, I would not trust any of their studies at face value. It's like referring to an Exxon study if you want to talk about Energy. 

 

[Yoyobuae]

Yeah, some people worst eyesight than others. So that means that a portion of the population won't even be able to fully benefit from Retina display resolutions.

For me the half HD display is good enough. The displays of my desktop PC is around that level, and it can fit a terminal window of ~200 characters in width. Good enough for me.

 

[kingoddball]

HalfHD!! Lower cost and I feel is a better res for a small portable.

Looks like the halfHD is a win - You should update pyra tech specs page

On to HD issue:I had a Vaio Duo 11 - This was an 11 inch screen with FullHD. It was terribly hard to read, looked bad. Brilliant LCD but poor quality under FullHD.

 

[levi]

The netbook I'm typing this on has a 1024x600 screen, so 720p sounds like quite the upgrade to me still. The 600 line resolution works pretty well for me, with only the new youtube and vimeo interfaces needing more resolution to run comfortably.


One nice thing about 720 lines is it's a 1.5x multiple of the 480 lines used in the Pandora or old TV consoles (or 3x the 240 lines used on a lot of old systems) - wheras 1080 lines is a 2.25x/4.5x multiple. It really shouldn't be much of an issue when the OMAP can do simple scaling very well, but it might simplify coding for people writing directly to the screenbuffer, that they can simply repeat every other line to get than 1.5x scaling (or interpolate the middle line of three to get perfect linear interpolation)

 

[FaeMinx]

720p for the win!

*Cheaper

*Uses less power

*Better performance due to less pixels to push

*applications easier to use out of the box

Done deal imho.

 

[bzar]

The (probably) lossy compression worries me a bit. It's difficult to benchmark how visible the artifacts will be and under what circumstances. But I trust you can come up with good test material and judge the result accordingly

 

[God Ginrai]

The (probably) lossy compression worries me a bit. It's difficult to benchmark how visible the artifacts will be and under what circumstances. But I trust you can come up with good test material and judge the result accordingly

Yea, the compression worries me as well. I don't mind going down to 720p, but I want to make sure that the screen will look good.

-God Ginrai

 

[thatgui]

The (probably) lossy compression worries me a bit. It's difficult to benchmark how visible the artifacts will be and under what circumstances. But I trust you can come up with good test material and judge the result accordingly

Yea, the compression worries me as well. I don't mind going down to 720p, but I want to make sure that the screen will look good.

-God Ginrai

me too

 

[_wb_]

The (probably) lossy compression worries me a bit. It's difficult to benchmark how visible the artifacts will be and under what circumstances. But I trust you can come up with good test material and judge the result accordingly

Yea, the compression worries me as well. I don't mind going down to 720p, but I want to make sure that the screen will look good.

-God Ginrai

It worries me too, but as long as the compression/rotation can be bypassed, it's not the end of the world. Native applications can then still use an uncompressed portrait screen. Also note that for video out to a landscape monitor (where pixels are bigger so artifacts could be more problematic), no rotation is needed.

For something like a Pyra version of Pandora Image Viewer, it would be not much effort to render everything in portrait. For applications with moving images, the compression is probably not noticeable anyway or irrelevant compared to other factors like ghosting.

I assume/hope that the compression does not introduce more error than, say, having to work with 16 bit color instead of 24 bit, i.e. that it introduces error in the least significant bits only, while still allowing smooth gradients unlike real 16 bit color. I would be interested to learn more details about the compression scheme.

 

[Askarus]

720p would be just fine.  1080p was mostly due to screen availability and a marketing point.

In the US, 720p TVs are still considered 'HDTV'.  Silly or not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television

So, even at 720p it might still work to advertise it as an 'HD' screen - without meaning any deception.

Note here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vector_Video_Standards5.svg

720 and 1080 are both referenced as 'HD'.

There isn't really such a thing as 'half HD'.  720p would be like 37.5% of the pixels in a 1080p display.  It's still called HD though.

720*1280 = 777,600 pixels

1080*1920 = 2,073,600 pixels

720p = HD

1080p = Full HD or FHD.

There's no official Half HD.

Please stop mixing it.

You're right, both are HD but one is Standard HD (720p) and one is FHD (1080p).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution

 

[PokeParadox]

I thought 720P was HDReady...

 

[doragasu]

Forget about Apple retina shit. Just go to a phone store and watch 2 phones with a screen size around 5" and half hd vs full hd resolutions. As I stated before, I own a 4,7" half hd Nexus 4 and my wife owns a 5" fullhd Nexus 5, and I can only spot the difference when holding the phone very close to my eyes (so close it becomes hard to focus, and is really uncomfortable to watch). And I must say I have a pretty good eyesight (I manually solder 0402 and even 0201 SMD at work, and that requires pretty good eyesight and pulse).

 

[Askarus]

^

Shame on you.

You said Half HD

I thought 720P was HDReady...

Not exactly.

It's something you may write onto your TV.

There's also "HD ready 1080p"

Here's the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_ready

 

[comradekingu]

Usually HDready means the dreaded 1366x768 pixel panels, but the signal is 1280x720, so you get uneven pixelmapping.