Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies, is accusing Steve Jobs of using “marketing puffery” in claiming that the new iPhone 4 will have a "retina" display. Jobs spoke in great detail about the display during his WWDC keynote on Monday while launching the iPhone 4.
Soneira, who holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University and has spent over 20 years studying display technology, states that the term “retina display” is misleading to consumers. “It is reasonably close to being a perfect display, but Steve pushed it a little too far,” Soniera told Wired.com.
The iPhone 4 display will have a density of 326 pixels per inch according to Jobs, who also stated that the limit of the human retina was 300 pixels per inch for a display held 10 to 12 inches away from the eye.
Soniera says that the iPhone would display 477 pixels per square inch when held a foot away from the eye, and 716 ppi at 8 inches away. Per his calculations, the iPhone would need to be held 18 inches away from the eye in order to display 318 ppi.
"So the iPhone has significantly lower resolution than the retina," Soneira wrote in an email to PC Magazine. "It actually needs a resolution significantly higher than the retina in order to deliver an image that appears perfect to the retina."
Soniera did, however, agree with Apple’s claim that the display will be the best on the market. He also praised the display quality of the Motorola Droid, referring to it as “outstanding”, and said that the iPhone 4 screen should be comparable.
While it may seem silly to some to bicker over such fine details that are barely visible to the naked eye, the root of the issue here is truth in advertising. Soniera says that, “everybody is lying,” when it comes to display specifications and that no manufacturer could actually release the real numbers because they would look bad compared to what is already on the market.
So how are consumers supposed to know what they’re really getting when it comes to a product with a display? Apparently, there is no good way to tell unless you have a physicist like Soniera available to check over your gadgets. For the rest of us, personal preference may be the best way to go rather than obsessing over the numbers and marketing puffery.
