Though their importance is questionable, pixel counts in cellphones are on the rise. The first Quad HD phones — that would be devices with 2,560 x 1,440 resolution — launched back in October. Now a display maker is giving phone manufacturers a brand new way to build them.
AU Optronics, one of the biggest display makers in the world, has just unveiled an 5.7-inch AMOLED (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) panel with Quad HD resolution. At that size, the pixel density is 513 pixels per inch (ppi).
The company says it's the world's highest resolution AMOLED display, although probably not for long; the blog OLED Info says others from Sharp, SEL and Samsung Display are coming very soon.
AMOLED screens, found in phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Moto X, have some advantages over LCD panels, such as the ability to govern the lighting of every individual pixel. In a regular LCD screen, the display requires a backlight that consumes power even if only a single pixel is highlighted.
AMOLED screens are extremely thin, and the AUO's high-res panel is just over half a millimeter thick, or 0.022 of an inch. That's complete with touch sensitivity, and the company says a special driver for the display makes it even more sensitive to your fingers than a regular sceen.
You may well ask why you would ever want a phone with such absurdly high resolution, especially since a smartphone display becomes "Retina" — meaning the human eye can no longer discern individual pixels at normal viewing distances — at about 300ppi — or 214 ppi lower than this screen.
Factor in the extra power required to illuminate more pixels, the greater burden on the processor and the fact that few apps support such high resolutions, and you might even call this neverending pursuit of pixels a fool's game.
Still, as we march toward a world of 4K TV displays and 4K content to go on them, there will be a need for even mobile devices to deal with extreme pixel counts. That doesn't necessarily mean they need to display them, but phones and tablets do have to start getting used to handling ever-higher resolutions.
Finally, there are always the bragging rights to consider. When it comes to pixels, people simply want moar!
IMAGE: AU OPTRONICS