Does the Retina display reflect anti-aliasing?

Question

With iPhone 4, the Retina screen resolution is so great that most people cannot distinguish pixels from each other (presumably). If so, do Retina display-enabled apps still need smoothing to make fonts and images smooth, or is it no longer needed?

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Edit: I'm interested in more details. Began generosity.

Answer 1

There is no question - you still need to do the math smoothing , due to the complexity of the curves, second-order curves, intersecting curves and different types of unions.

(Note that this is very simple, as this question appeared two years ago. Retina grids are now ubiquitous, and indeed, anti-aliasing is actually performed everywhere on every Retina display.)

Of course, straight lines (perhaps at 45 degrees) can probably also be tested on A / B tests. But just look at the smaller line or the changing differential.

And wait - there is an argument with a knife ............

Do not forget that you can display a typography really, really small on the retina screen !!!

You can say that you need smoothing when the letter is less than (let’s say) 50 pixels. That way, if you had a crappy 10-dot display per inch ... but the letters were 80 feet tall (8,000 pixels high), you wouldn't need anti-aliasing. We just proved that you do not need “smoothing” on a 10 ppi display.

Conversely, let's say Steve's next display has 1000 pixels per inch. You would STILL need smoothing for a very small type - and any very small part - that is, 50 pixels or less!

Also: don’t forget that the part in type ... which is a vector image ... is endless!

You could say that the "body" of the Baskerville "M" looks great, without smoothing, on the retina screen. Well, what about crooked serifs? How about chipping at the ends of serifs? And so on down the line.

Another way to look at this: well, on your regular Mac display, you don't need anti-aliasing on flat lines or maybe 45 degrees. In addition, on the retina screen, you can leave without attiasing, possibly 22.5 degree lines and even 12.25 degree lines.

But what? If you add anti-aliasing to the retina screen, you can successfully draw ridiculously small lines, much finer than, for example, on a Macintosh display with a pre-grid.

As in the previous example, let's say that the next iPhone has one million pixels per inch. However, adding smoothing will allow you to have EVEN SHALLOWER beautiful lines - by definition, yes, it will always look better because it will always improve details.

Please note that the “eye clearance” business of magazine articles is complete and complete nonsense.

Even if they say 50 dpi, you only see a fuzzy amalgam created by the mathematics of the pixel mapping strategy.

If you don’t believe it is, look at this letter right now on your Mac and count the pixels in the letter “r”. Of course, it is inconceivable that you could do it! You could “allow” pixels on a display with a resolution of 10 dpi. The important thing is that the math of the put created by the mapping strategy.

Smoothing always creates the "best fluff" as it were. If you have more pixels, then anti-aliasing will simply improve fuzz again. Again, just look at even finer features, and of course you want to smooth them out.

It looks like a state of affairs!

Answer 2

The resolution at which the eye / brain detects a gap or the edge of the ladder is higher than the resolution at which it can resolve individual pixels. The Retina display is apparently high enough for the latter.

But cast animation, hand movement, vehicle vibration, imperfect vision, display reflections, et.al. and you may need to experiment to determine if the first one affects your specific application.

Answer 3

I did some quick tests on my iPhone 4 with a friend with the OpenGL app. However, without multisampling, the output still had stairs and other artifacts, but with multisampling they disappeared.

This is not surprising since you can still create hard edges with a lot of pixels, so just placing more pixels in one device will not solve the problem (however, this can clearly help reduce the need for multisampling)

Answer 4

Make a test application with two images next to each other, with one smoothed, and with the other not. Let users choose the one that, in their opinion, looks better on the retina display and draws your conclusions from the results. If the clear majority of participants choose an anti-aliased image, then you certainly have a significant difference, otherwise it would be safe to assume that the difference does not matter for people who use the application.

Answer 5

Here's an article that offers you 477 DPI resolution to exclude the possibility of seeing pixels that exceed 326 DPI of the Retina IPhone 4 Retina screen. Be sure to also follow the refutable link in the article. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/iphone-4-retina/

I also remember reading the argument some time ago that anti-aliasing works better at higher resolutions to a certain point; Sorry, I can not find the link.

Edit: I still cannot find the source link that I was thinking about, but John Gruber compared the IPhone 4 326 DPI screen with the 220 DPI Retina MacBook Pro and found that the MacBook excels in text smoothing. Look about halfway in the article: http://daringfireball.net/2012/08/pixel_perfect

Answer 6

At some point, the DPI number is large enough so that the “pixelated” line with such a high resolution still looks smooth. I'm not sure if Retina will be. For applications such as games, if you have a screen with a resolution of 300 dpi or more, you do not need smoothing for the geometry. (although things like textures and sprites still need this, because when you approach objects in the 3D world (or even look at them from different angles), the textures stretch or shrink)

Here is a great article on this topic: http://gamintafiles.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/when-anti-aliasing-is-no-longer-needed/

Answer 7

Yes, you still need to. If you really want to use a higher PPI, you will use anti-aliasing. Its essence is to provide the "bleeding" necessary to make the image look as good as possible than in analog form. The only reason the magic number 300 PPI or DPI makes the difference in printing is because the dots merge some of them. When you are dealing with the hard edges of the LCD, you need to use anti-aliasing or you are still dealing with a digital connection attempt in analog mode.

Since we are dealing with light-emitting pixels, instead of pixels reflecting light, the need is even higher, since the contrast of hard borders on the screen is even more noticeable. Reflective light mixtures and bleeding, in order to collect better than the same light intensity, must be very direct from the radiation source.

Smoothing will be necessary until we get high-resolution displays that do not have meshes, preferably reflective in nature.

Answer 8

Good question!

When I think about anti-aliasing, I think about a technique that was invented to compensate for too large pixels. Image details are propagated to the surrounding pixels because they are prematurely cropped at the edge of the pixel. Since you cannot see individual pixels on the retina screen (from any distance in any case), I think that smoothing becomes irrelevant by definition.