A sensationally-titled piece over at Gadget Lab posted on Wednesday asserted that Jobs’ claims about the iPhone 4’s Retina Display being so dense that individual pixels were unobservable to the naked eye was “false marketing.”
Not so, says the Bad Astronomer himself, Phill Platt, who uses what he knows about optics and resolution from his years spent calibrating cameras aboard Hubble to prove that Jobs’ (mostly) told the truth when it comes to how the iPhone 4’s display looks from twelve inches away.
“At the very worst, you could claim Jobs exaggerated; his claim is not true if you have perfect vision,” Platt writes. “But for a lot of people, I would even say most people, you’ll never tell the difference. And if you hold the phone a few inches farther away it’ll look better.”
Lest you think that Platt is just making excuses for Jobs’ overly optimistic (but factually incorrect) wording, while it’s true that some people will be able to resolve individual pixels on the iPhone 4’s Retina Display from a distance of twelve inches, those rare individuals will need to have better than 20/20 vision.