Make sure you actually click on the image above to see the full effect of the rumoured iPad 3 resolution (2048×1536).
If the 2048×1536 iPad 3 retina display turns out to be real this year, oh god almighty it’s going to be glorious. A 1080p image would be smaller than the iPad 3′s display! And remember, all those pixels would only be on 9.7 inches (probably). The 2048×1536 display has been the resolution long expected on the next iPad because it’s double the pixels of the first two iPad’s screen (1024×768), when the iPhone’s Retina Display was introduced, it was double the pixels of the previous iPhone’s screen.
Si
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:57 AMThe question I have is, when content still isnt really made any higher than 1080p, why do we need resolutions higher than 1080p?
Wouldn’t running the iPad 3 at a res like 1920×1080, help when it comes to battery life?
Knifeyspooney
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:13 AMapple will try set a new standard, and make a massive deal about it at the ipad 3′s launch. And fanboys and fangirls will celebrate its glory while the rest of us will look at them and say “seriously”. nothing is available at that resolution, and if you were to cram apps, images, videos etc with that resolution, you wont be able to put much on it.
Sam D
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:16 AMIt’s not just about video though. I’d love to view my photos on an iPad retina display.
Richard
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 6:17 PMI think it benefits text more than film TBH anyway.
Tim
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:19 AMI would also think that images/video at 1920×1080 would reduce in quality when upscaled to 2048×1536. It’s not even the same aspect ratio…
Richard
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 6:19 PMThey have the option of adding a boarder if thats an issue. Really it’s no bigger issue than they face now except they will have more pixels to play with.
Matt L
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 12:13 PMBecause if there’s a device that’ll support it, the formats will follow… It’s future proofing itself.
Jamie
Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 2:03 AMThe same reason I love my 2560×1440 27″ iMac, it’s AWESOME.
Will
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:26 AMerrr pretty sure on that size screen the human eye cannot differentiate between pixels of that size and what is currently available. its like 4k tvs….you need a MASSIVE tv to actual gain any benefit. On a tiny device,…yeh pretty sure it gives no benefit.
TSH
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:26 AMActually, it’s double the *dimensions*, quadruple the *pixels* :–P
Would be good for Apple to catch up with the rest of the tablet world for screen resolution, but TBH I don’t think they need to. “iPad 2S” could just improve the existing formula (better camera, processors, battery life etc) and the true “iPad 3″ can up the resolution next year when they actually have a decent amount of HD content available through iTunes.
silentwolf
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:27 AMNot even going to happen, the performance required to push that many pixels, especially for games, is not something you want to put into an iPad.
Ben
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:49 AMi doubt the resolution would be that high unless they significantly bumped up the storage capacity. You might be able to fit one and a half Blu-ray quality movies on a 64gb iPad
Matt
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 11:43 AMAgree with above.
MotorMouth
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 11:13 AMIt won’t work like that, will it? Isn’t the whole idea of the retina display is to increase pixel density? If so, won’t it scale everything to suit? Right now computers display everything at 96ppi but for the Retina display to work, they are going to have to increase that to 300ppi or something. Like the iPhone’s screen, it is more about marketing than any useful benefit, unless you are in the habit of holding your iPad 5cm from your face. Everybody hates the 1920×1200 screen on my 15.4″ Dell laptop, except me. I can’t imagine anyone would be able to handle an iPad size screen at even higher resolution unless it scales everything, which means until every vendor optimises their UI for high res, everything will look horrible.
Sally
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:11 PMI disagree, there are many benefits to a higher pixel density.
I currently use my iPad 1 while flying for a moving map (in conjunction with paper maps of course). The existing pixel density means that the map on the screen, while useful, and easier to use than a paper one, especially in a small cockpit, does not have the same level of clarity, even when zoomed to a similar scale to the real life paper map.
With a screen that has this rumoured resolution, maps on this screen will be crystal clear, even when zooming out.
There are many purposes of this pixel density, just maybe not for you.
Lillee
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 11:21 AMblablabla Just give me 128GB or more of storage options and I am sold
Andreas
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 11:23 AM@Ben with cloud, one doesn’t need to store it on his ipad.. I would hope that once ISP’s understand that they need to provide us with unlimited data download/upload deals, the devices will have less and less storage….
The resolution makes perfectly sense though, same happened on iPhone when Apple introduced Retina Display (for compatibility)
Chumly
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 1:49 PMwhat data connection are you going to need to stream 2048×1536 video?
I get how this is nice and all but it just doesn’t seem a real selling point. HD video will still be letterboxed due to the aspect ratio and there’s not exactly many websites 2048 pixels wide.
Will just make for slightly nicer icons and wallpapers.
MotorMouth
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 2:50 PMWhy should ISP’s foot the bill for your poor purchasing decisions? I hate having to get stuff off the video server at work, using the cloud is so far off my radar that it is not a factor at all.
Telextial
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 11:37 AMI don’t understand how people can be annoyed by this (except for fanboys of other brands, who will never be satisfied anyway). A bigger screen here, a bigger screen there, technology moves onwards and hopefully this is an indication of better screens on other electronics in future. Turn down the fanboy attitude though, it’s worse than the old Intel/AMD arguments.
MotorMouth
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 2:54 PMI see your point and in some ways it is good but I can certainly see some issues with Apple going their own way. They will further wall in their customers and it could make it much harder to develop for their platform is completely different GUIs are required to deal with higher pixel densities. But I’m happy to see how it goes.
Chris
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 1:39 PMAmazing, every 2nd story here today is an apple advertisment in the guise of a story
typedmillepede
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 3:01 PMIt’s amazing how many people are forgetting the complete lack of retina display apps at the launch of the iphone 4. that didn’t mean it was useless.
most people in the comments are whinging about scaling and hwo nothing would ever work. i’m glad youre not making tablets because then they’d all have the aesthetics of a house brick and the screen from a nokia 5110.
the retina display on ipad will be great for picture viewers, and app developers will only have to develop new textures etc for the screen size. it won’t take up that much more space. as far as videos are concerned, i’m sure scaled video won’t look that crappy. if you can’t even see the pixels/ barely see them it’ll just look like video on a screen, maybe a bit blurry. if this was coming on an android device, everyone would be like omg best thing suck that crapple, but as soon as apple does it, omg useless why would you want it. spare me.
Brian
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 3:23 PMThe moment when that image doesn’t fit on my desktop monitor ._.
Ozoneocean
Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 12:51 AMIt’s a display. A retina is part of your eye. This is just a display like any other.
Yep, higher res is great to a point, but after that point it is about stats marketing.
Stats marketing is annoying because it ignores bottlenecks. The main bottleneck here is your eye; Up to a point you cannot actually (in reality, not in your own personal fantasy world) even see pixels on that teeny screen from a reasonable distance.
So it won’t make a screen “gorgeous” or in any way appreciably different. It WILL photograph better though… which is important for tech articles maybe?
Michael
Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 1:27 PM** As TSH correctly pointed, it’s FOUR TIMES the pixels, not double, get your maths right Casey. **
** Why the higher res screen will be popular, as it will provide BETTER display of text (What a lot of people use the ipad for) **
Rhys
Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 8:34 PMI’m very curious to see what a HD/Retina display would look like on the iPad. I also have an couple of videos what look forward to in the iPad 3 over at http://insydetech.info/2012/02/10/ipad-3-in-march/