What Will We See With 4K?
With Sony announcing the Xperia Z5 Premium, the first smartphone with a 4k screen resolution (over 800 pixels per inch), and later announcing that it won’t be 4k all of the time, as you don’t need it to be 4k most of the time, and it takes up lots of precious battery, let’s explore into whether or not 4k in phones will take off, or whether it will just be another smartphone gimmick.
According to scientists, people with 20/20 vision (‘Perfect’ vision), who hold their screens at 12 inches (just over 30 cm) away from their face, will only see 720 pixels, whereas if people had 20/2 vision (the eye ‘resolution’ that we think most birds of prey have), they would be able to see in 4k resolution from just 30.48cm in front of their faces.
So, even though we would only technically be able to see 720p at 12 inches distance from perfect eyes, many of us - me included - can claim to tell the difference when a 1080p video or a 720p video is playing. So, why can we claim to tell the difference between 720p, 1080p and 2k displays?
One answer is the framerate of devices. A device with a high framerate tends to look better than a device with a lower one. Things that run at 60fps (or frames per second) show 60 different pictures on the screen every second, and as the normal android phone’s screen refreshing frequency is 60hZ (or 60 times a second), the screen runs at its optimum framerate. This is often referred to as vsync. When vsync is on, you see smoother video, as the screen is refreshing at the same rate as the picture, but when it drops below that, images and videos can often get choppy and slightly un-synced, causing somewhat subpar visual quality.
Another reason is simply the screen software and hardware – does anyone remember the massive issue with the OnePlus one screens? There was a yellow hue at the bottom of some screens, and while some people claimed it was fixed with software updates, some people took apart their devices and ‘fixed them’, while others exposed their phones to UV light, and all parties claimed that their method worked. In truth, it was a bit of all of these things – early batches did seem to have some screen issues, and some phones just needed some new software to get rid of it. The point I’m trying to make is that the was a screen looks often depends on how the manufacturer not only makes the hardware, but the software too.
So, what does this all mean in the eyes of a Sony customer? Well, in simple terms, as long as the hardware is sound, and the software is not only well polished, but adds a vivid range of colours to the mix, you should be looking at the best smartphone screen we’ve seen to date... Even if you can’t tell that it’s the best smartphone screen we’ve seen to date...
