displays

No matter how you slice it, the phone's screen is the part you look at the most, and if that's cheap, cracked, hazy, or blurred, your e-mails, videos, stories, and games will look terrible.

Luckily, resolution is skyrocketing, and premium phones pack in more pixels than ever.

Of course, pixel performance isn't enough; the screen materials must also be top-notch. In addition, individual handsets' peak brightness settings are also in play; phones with a lower brightness setting won't look as good when you're out in bright sunlight.

Take a look at the many factors that go into top-notch screen quality, and enjoy our favorite smartphone screens to look at now, in no particular order.… Read more

Apple might be suffering from an iPhone 5 supply shortfall, all because of its new display technology.

Apple relies primarily on LG Display and more recently on Sharp to produce the iPhone 5's screen, notes a Bloomberg report. However, Sharp has faced some trouble with defects and didn't start shipping screens until the smartphone's debut, a Barclays analyst stated, according to Bloomberg.

An IHS iSuppli analyst also told Bloomberg that "supply constraints" may have hampered the supply of iPhones its first weekend on store shelves.

Apple's iPhone 5 comes with in-cell touch sensing. Unlike … Read more

Apple's iPhone 5 beat Samsung's Galaxy S3 in a display tech "shoot-out" at screen testing firm DisplayMate Technologies.

The iPhone 5's Retina screen is the best smartphone display that DisplayMate has tested to date, according to results the firm posted today.

iPhone 5: "It is a significant improvement over the display in the iPhone 4," said DisplayMate's Raymond Soneira, who cited much lower screen reflections, much higher image contrast and screen readability in high ambient lighting -- the latter, the highest he's ever tested.

DisplayMate -- which gave the display an "A" -- also cited improved color gamut and factory calibration that "delivers very accurate colors and very good picture quality." The Retina iPad is the only thing that beats it in accuracy, according to Soneira.

Galaxy S3: While DisplayMate said the OLED display is "very good" and gave it a "B+," it fell short of the iPhone 5.

The problem, comparatively, as Soneira sees it, is that the Galaxy S III's OLED technology is still on steep development curve. OLED is "a new technology that has not yet been refined to the same degree as LCDs, particularly the IPS LCDs on the iPhones, so it doesn't objectively test or perform as well as the iPhone 5," according to Soneira.

The brightness on the Galaxy S3's display is about half of the iPhone 5 "due to power constraints resulting from the lower OLED power efficiency," among other issues, that makes for poorer image contrast and screen readability in high ambient lighting compared to the iPhone 5, said Soneira.

Other issues he cited are a "lopsided" color gamut and calibration. "For some reason Samsung has not bothered to calibrate the Color Gamut on any of its OLED displays, so they are wildly inaccurate and produce inaccurate and over saturated colors." … Read more

Yesterday Microsoft released an update for Office 2011 for Mac which added high-resolution support for Apple's Retina Display; however, after applying the update a number of people are finding the Office programs still open in low-resolution mode. In some cases one or two of the Office programs appear to run in Retina mode, while the others do not.

It appears the system simply is not recognizing the new high-resolution capabilities of Office. If you get information on the program in the Finder (select it and press Command-I), you will see the Open in Low Resolution setting is grayed out … Read more

Hewlett-Packard is adding a new thin X series monitor -- this time a 24-incher.

The new HP x2401 24-inch-diagonal LED backlit monitor has an 11-millimeter profile encased in a glossy black-piano finish and brushed-metal case.

Sporting a resolution of 1920x1080, it taps MVA (multidomain vertical alignment) to deliver good viewing angles and 5,000:1 and 10,000,000:1 static and dynamic contrast ratios, respectively.

DisplayPort and HDMI ports are built in. And wall mounting is also possible.… Read more

Google is to be king in the display ad market. According to a new report by research firm eMarketer, the Web giant is expected to surpass previous winners, Facebook and Yahoo, and will soon reign over all digital advertising markets -- including search, mobile, and display.

Though Google has dominated search and mobile in the past, it has never ruled over all three markets.

According to The New York Times, eMarketer has predicted that Google is expected to earn $2.31 billion in U.S. display ad revenue, which is up 38.5 percent over last year -- while Facebook … Read more

Amazon's Kindle Fire HD display is good enough to challenge the pricier Retina iPad's display and "decisively" beat Google's Nexus 7, said display testing firm DisplayMate.

In an article posted Wednesday, DisplayMate compared the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD with the third-generation iPad Retina and got a surprising result.

"It is much better than the iPad 2 and almost as good as the new [Retina] iPad in overall picture quality and color accuracy," wrote Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate.

For example, the Kindle Fire HD has greens and yellows "that are slightly more … Read more

Microsoft today released an update for Office 2011 for Mac that provides support for the Retina Display in Apple's latest MacBook Pro systems.

As explained in its Office for Mac blog, the update (version 14.2.4) gives the enhanced resolution support to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and should give text and interface elements throughout the Office suite a sharper feel and look when used on Apple's MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

While this update may be beneficial for those who have Apple's next-generation MacBook Pro systems, Microsoft makes no note of the update offering any … Read more

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