The iPad 2 didn’t get a Retina Display this generation like the iPhone 4… but there’s more to the quality of a display than just pixel density. Now Dr. Raymond Soneir of DisplayMate Technologies has performed tests on the many other characteristics of the iPad 2’s display, putting it in a shoot-out against that of the iPhone 4.
The results? Outside of pixel density, the iPad 2 and iPhone 4 have almost identical performance. That’s a good thing on the hardware side… but a bad thing when it comes to software.
According to Soneira, the iPad 2’s LCD display hardware is excellent, but the software has numerous bugs and issues when it comes to anti-aliasing. If the iPad 2’s anti-aliasing was better, it could actually close the perceivable gap between the iPad 2’s display and the iPhone 4’s Retina Display.
There’s also a big problem with the way iOS devices control brightness. Soneira says that a bug in Apple’s automatic brightness controls locks brightness based upon “the brightest ambient light sensor value that has been measured at any point starting from the time unit was awakened.” So if you’ve woken your device up in a bright room, then turned off the lights, the brightness controls won’t adjust accordingly unless you put your unit to sleep and wake it back up.
All in all, as long as you can look beyond pixels, the iPad 2 has as good of a display as any iOS device ever made. If you can wait until the iPad 3, though? You’ll get the upped pixel density too.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
8 responses to “Except For Pixel Density, iPad 2 Display Rocks Just As Much As The iPhone 4s”
Thank you for finally shedding some light on this issue. When testing a displays quality, resolution is 4th on the list of most important quality points. Colour and refresh rate are even above resolution. It’s sad everyone thinks resolution is the be all, end all of display quality.
I’ve been using iPad 2 from day one and the display seems MUCH better than the original. I’m very impressed.
I hope they will address some software problems mentioned in this article, but I don’t really care about upped pixel density. The display looks brilliant and I certainly wouldn’t want to wait for another year for such a minor feature.
Resolution isn’t everything of course. That said, iPad and iPad 2 look blurry after looking at the iPhone 4 all day.
Resolution isn’t everything of course. That said, iPad and iPad 2 look blurry after looking at the iPhone 4 all day.