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Originally Posted by fjtorres
Oh, maybe because pixel count isn't the only, or even the best, measure of screen quality. (Color fidelity and purity, to mention two, come to mind.) It has value but it has its limits in describing quality, especially in the newest PenTile displays.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenTile...ly#Controversy And, maybe because higher pixel counts mean the GPU needs to work harder and generate more heat, just to display the same information. (Remember the short-lived iPad3? The jump to "retina" resolution ate the added processing power, ran hotter, and required a bigger battery.) |
I disagree with the idea that pixel count and color "fidelity" (as a musician, I like your audiophile-parlance substitution for
accuracy) must be mutually exclusive, or that your argument about the limited use of PenTile screens of specific vintage in Samsung mobile devices has anything to do with the tablets we're discussing, which use standard IPS displays.
And I'd expect virtually everyone at MR to be aware of the issues not only with the iPad 3, but also with the possibility of similar issues with devices like Lenovo's upcoming Y50 -- a gaming laptop that will have the highest-res screen of any so far and will likely be a cooling nightmare. Using a worst-case device -- instead of any of the current and more evolved devices -- to argue in favor of lower ppi is a straw man argument.
I say this not to glove-slap you while citing a hoary arsenal of rhetorical fallacies that any of us (including me) might be guilty of resorting to occasionally, but to stress the fact that the iPad 3 example doesn't apply to current cases. If your point is that MS is being conservative given the potential of the added processing power for overheating, then I would suggest they could still find a way to use an HD IPS panel without heat issues and not sacrifice sales to consumers and "prosumers" who care about resolution (graphic designers, etc.).
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Not all the features that define the quality of a product are readily apparent or appreciated by the mainstream market. Sometimes, the best engineering intentions result in superior quality that goes underappreciated or even ignored by most buyers.
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You seem to be dismissing users as ignorant and "unappreciative" -- users who comprise an area of the business market and are not merely part of what you seem to be characterizing as the oblivious masses -- though I think it's also a mistake to dismiss ordinary consumers as being concerned with the wrong features and "intentions."
My girlfriend is a web designer/graphic designer who deals with printed and web media transpositions; her sister is an industrial designer. Neither is likely to buy a Surface Pro until the ppi is higher. I'm on the fence specifically because I deal with multiple windows in music and high-resolution images in book design. If I bought an SP, I'd want to be able to use Adobe products like InDesign and even Photoshop at their full potential.
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(The much maligned Zune comes to mind: it had spectacular audio fidelity far superior to ipods. But you only noticed if you fed it high quality files and played back through a quality stereo or truly premium earbuds or headsets. Most buyers simply noted that it sounded better than the ipods but assumed it was just because it had better earbuds.)
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You're on shaky topsoil praising the Zune to an obsessive listener like me, who has demo'd it and several other music players with a variety of high-end headphones and amps.
Neither I nor a number of critical users found that the Zune was "far superior" to, say, the iPod 5.5G, nor did we find it sounded as good as Sony's offerings at that time. Back then, I was very close to buying the Peter Saville limited-edition Zune until I actually A/B'd one with the Sony NW-A810, Sony X and even an iRiver iHP40. In the opinion of many of us who listened at the Head-fi meet, the A810 destroyed the Zune. We also compared an iPod 5 using the same headphones and amp as the Zune and heard no evidence that it trashed the iPod or even bested it in the way you've suggested -- some of us actually preferred the iPod. Besides which, the Zune couldn't play 16-bit 44.1k FLAC files, which was the definition of a higher-end portable music player back then. Apple had its same-res alternative to FLAC, of course -- ALAC, which is just as good but irritatingly proprietary -- but the point is that the Apple, Sony and iRiver players all played lossless audio files while the Zune did not.
And of course there was the problem of the ecosystem being significantly smaller on the Zune, which didn't matter to me (since I burned my files from my own sources and stripped DRM from the files I bought) but mattered a great deal to others.
Again: You can interpret the resolution issue any way you like, but audiophiles weren't going to pay for a Zune that played lower-res files any more than they're now likely to prefer the iPod Classic (16-bit/44.1 files) to the Sony PCM-M10 (96/24) or the Astel&Kern AK120 (24-bit/192k) or the Samsung Note 3 with the Exynos processor (i.e., with Wolfson DAC) -- or virtually any current Samsung device when paired with an external DAC (24/192).
That comparison is not only old news; it is also one with which I've never disagreed. I've even responded to that comparison before on this forum and cited it on others.
For some reason, you seem to feel that we're debating whether last year's news stories about certain displays being better than Apple's are true, and that I've disputed their claims uncharacteristically -- as if I were some Apple apologist invested in asserting the iPad's superiority rather than a person who's simply pointing out that all three of the panels being tested in your link have higher resolutions than the SP3's. Again: That's a straw man in this discussion. You're attempting to disprove arguments that I've never made.
The Zune was a failure, but I think you and I can agree that we'd like the Surface Pro series to be successful -- specif. for the leap in flexibility, professional software access and power that it offers. To ensure that the Surface Pro is as successful as possible, Microsoft should invest in a display solution that combines heat efficiency and color accuracy with a higher pixel density. Otherwise, many consumers and graphics people are likely not to purchase the SP3 because it costs more than the competition and has a lower-resolution screen. The Surface Pro doesn't need that kind of problem, which ought to be solved in later models so that a greater number of consumers will embrace the line.