Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
Frankly when I upgraded to the iPad 3 to get the better screen, video playback was the least important reason. Video can look good even on a lower res screen, because in most cases when filming real-life screens you have soft edges and colour boundaries that blend together.
High res is much more important for text, where there are exact edges and harsh blank and white contrast, and in turn text would be far more important for a corporate tool than a consumer one.
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Well, text is the area where Microsoft's "trickery" shines the most.
As pointed out above, Apple does simple antialiasing, whereas MS does sub-pixel addressing and font hinting, among other techniques.
Also, the benefit from using FullHD screen for HD video is on CPU/GPU loading; you can get smooth playback even with lesser processor power if you just map the stream to the display and don't have to scale it after decoding it.
With the New iPad most of the extra power (from the iPad2) in the GPU goes to just getting the screen working smoothly. So MS may have gone with the lower-res screen not necessarily to save money but to spare the processors and make the system snappier and more responsive.