Gadgetory

hey guys do we really need 720p high-definition on a smartphone screen what are the advantages what are the disadvantages that's what we're going to talk about today on the android guy weekly with Joe Levi alright let's lay the foundation of this topic with some history and to do that we're going to go back to televisions in fact really old televisions you know the ones I'm talking about there they're big they're clunky they hiss when you turn them on they played even be black and white but they're that big old cathode ray or CRT technology yeah really really ugly and low resolution for a few reasons ok the first reason is the number of lines of resolution that screen had so let's say you've got say a 19 inch TV which back in its day might have been on a little on the big side smaller screens were more likely to be back in the early 80s whatnot and yeah that's how far back we're going but TVs at least in the US had about 480 depending on who you ask for 86 but about 480 we'll just keep it nice and even for the purpose of this video about 480 lines of resolution now that means that instead of displaying an entire picture it's displaying a whole bunch of lines that when viewed together make up a picture and TVs you might not know this but TVs have moving pictures on them it's called sarcasm right there these pictures move and to do that you have to update the lines so one line may have a whole bunch of dots on it that when put together has a picture of a flower but then a breeze comes along the flower moves well to to convey that moving you have to update the lines and to do that we have what's called interlaced lines so instead of displaying every single line and refreshing them all at the same time so that the whole screen might blink we only display half at one time that's what 480i stands for that's the eye is interlaced so you're displaying half of the lines at a time and then you're updating the other half the other half the other half back and forth back and forth and it kind of gives a little bit of blurring but it means you only have to send half as much information to screen as you would otherwise it made for really not sharp images but hey it was TV and it was cool right well now technology has moved on and we don't have the same limitations in fact what limitations did we have back then well most of us didn't have cable TV back then or satellite TV back then it was usually broadcast and I know a lot of you did but let's talk broadcast just for a minute because it's very illustrative of the point that I'm trying to make instead of having this huge fat pipe there's this bandwidth just seemingly unlimited coming through you know the satellite or a cable connected to the house you had an antenna on your roof in your attic maybe even rabbit ears on top of your TV now there's only so many frequencies that you can transmit signals on whether those are radio or television in this case and a television signal takes up a specific amount of space in that bandwidth so you literally can't have a lot of television signals coming through a dozen maybe until you start running into technological limitations with distance and whatnot start overlapping into other things but you know that's a ham radio discussion not a pocket now discussion so we'll leave that for another podcast somewhere else but what it does illustrate is they did unique and novel things to try and maximize that bandwidth like interlacing the signal instead of making it progressive that's what the P stands for in resolutions okay so far okay but the resolution wasn't that great it didn't really matter because we had antenna on our TV that were just sucking in the signal however they could and the signal wasn't all that great it was staticky it had lines in it that were from you know the neighborhoods running their blender or whatever lots of environmental factors that made the signal really kind of distorted so the screen the display looked the sport distorted as well well there was another side of that on the other end the people who are actually filming these things these television shows that we were watching if you go back now and watch them on a really high resolution signal like you know I Netflix HD or whatnot you can see men the source really wasn't great either it was grainy it had pops it had all kinds of artifacts built into it that then was being broadcast out to everybody else and we couldn't tell because the resolution was so low we didn't know any better at that point but then something happened our screen started to get bigger people started to get big screen TVs and these were big TVs but they still had 480 high resolution some people had what were called up samplers to try and make them look better by interpreting them and kind of doing some math in the signal to to imply more lines than there were just was kind of weird and whatnot but we got to a point where the bigger the screen the worse the picture and that wasn't any good so what to do in the u.s. we decided let's go to all digital pictures so that we can go to high-definition screens and high-definition content so what is high definition well it's higher than low definition that's pretty much it so the first high-definition standard believe it or not is 480p yes twice as many lines of resolution is 480 I but in the same space the same way out the same all that stuff the nintendo wii for example with the right hardware can output 480p signals and that's the highest it can go you know it doesn't really need to if you just connect it using the stuff that comes in the box you're getting for a TI but that's higher definition it's twice as many lines in the same space so theoretically you're getting twice the resolution out of it and in fact it does take a little bit more overhead to do I'll get to that in a minute 720 I is the next one 720 lines interlaced just like we were used to that kind of came and went and I don't see it that often then we've got 720p 720 lines progressive so they're all updated all at the same time 1080i was around for quite a while and now 1080p seems to be what everybody is standardizing on because we can do it 720p really easy to do you can get a lot more signal through on a 720p signal stream than on a 1080p signal stream but 1080p works a lot better for much larger screens like a big screen TV that you'd hang on your wall so far we're good what does that have to do with smartphones and tablets why are we even talking about it so let's take a look this is the galaxy at or excuse me the Nexus S and it is a smartphone if you couldn't tell this is the Galaxy Nexus which is a little bit bigger and this is a samsung galaxy tab 7 7 so all of these have different resolutions and they're not TVs their displays now look behind me I've got a 19 inch computer screen that has a particular resolution and different screens for computers have different resolutions on them and really it's kind of a pain I'm a web developer I have to write web pages so that they display well on all of these different sized screens and they're all over the place how many dots are there how many lines how many pixels wide it's a pain in the neck think about smartphone apps if I write an app for this is it going to look good on this because it has different number of dots is it going to work on this it's got a different number of dots so there had to be something done to kind of standardized on what those dots and lines were going to be that's where we're kind of going to a standard basic display metaphor if you will this metaphor is based around one common type of screen we're not there yet but we take a look even just you know generation back phone was kind of doing its own thing but now we've got 720p this is a 720p high-definition screen just like you'll find on a 720p high-definition TV screen or computer monitor so whatever I write on one screen is going to look exactly the same smaller but it's going to look exactly the same on all of those screens that's great there are some pros and some cons to that okay so first let's talk about some some cons and we'll wrap up with pros first of all this type of screen is easy to make relatively speaking this type of screen with 720p is harder because there are more pixels here there are more lines so trying to cram them all down into one screen is kind of hard to do we really haven't had the technology to do that very well until just recently but we we just couldn't do it before we're finally to a point where we can and well some would argue we may still not be there because if you look this screen this is again the the Nexus is you know quite a bit bigger than the nexus s so the Galaxy Nexus is a much larger device to accommodate that larger screen kind of a catch-22 because you don't want to have huge smartphones because at what point do they become tablets you want to have a smartphone that's small that's you know useful that you pack around with you really the Galaxy Nexus is right there on the edge some people it's too big some people like me it's just right other people I guess it might be too small but it's right there on the edge we've really got to make them smaller now that's the second thing if I have a 720p TV screen hanging on my wall with a 720p signal and all that stuff the dots that make that up are the same as the dots that make this up this is obviously a lot smaller even then this tablet so if these have exactly the same resolution which they don't but let's say they do if they have the same resolution stuff on this screen is going to look a lot better a lot sharper a lot crisper than stuff on this screen because the pixels are smaller so that's the first thing things look higher resolution when they're smaller than when they're larger the larger you go you've got to get more and more pixels more more lines right okay so ebook readers used to be e ink because they could make those e ink pixels if you will a lot smaller than they can make actual real pixels so by doing that they can have a sharper higher resolution screen it was a lot slower and was only black and white not color but they could do that and it really lent itself better to book reading because it was higher resolution it was more like paper now we've got 720p screens you know we're starting to see that same level of a resolution on eBook readers now of course there are some power implications that we're really not going to talk about but we're starting to see shift away from eating and over to real LCD screens because of a higher resolution that we can do in the screens we're making the pixels smaller and smaller the the iphone with the retina displays a very good example of that making those pixels so small that you can hardly even see them with the naked eye so really kind of cool next we've got standardization once I know that my screen is 720p widescreen i can write content for it regardless of the actual physical dimensions and have everything look exactly the same all right so now let's talk downsides one of the biggest downsides to a screen other than its availability a high-definition screen is the fact that there are more pixels now I know you're saying whoa Joe you just said that that was an upside it is huge upside but it has some some baggage with it one of those things is those screens are harder to make because the smaller you make things the more difficult it is to make them you know if you have a pixel that's an inch by an inch relatively easy to make a pixel that's you know a millimeter by a millimeter or smaller that's hard now with technology and with automation you know it's getting easier but relatively speaking it's more difficult to do that's the first thing okay the second thing is the more pixels that you have on a screen the well generally in this case the bigger the screen is the bigger the screen even when we're talking between these two smartphones there's one there's one okay this has a lot bigger screen area the bigger the screen area the more power it takes to drive it the more lighting you need it just sucks down power faster so you've got to have a bigger battery or more efficient use of energy to make up for that if you're going to have the same size battery so battery life power consumption is a concern another concern is the more pixels you have the more computing power electrical power the computing power you need to drive it all so for example let's say you have a screen put this over here you got this screen and you've got this screen you can essentially fit what three of those on there so you think that if I'm doubling my screen size then all I have to do is double my video processing power right no you have to quadruple it the reason for that is you have to multiply height x width so if you've got something that's twice as high and twice as wide that's four times the number of pixels that you have to create content for you have to process content for you have to put out on the screen so your video processing has to be much more powerful as well which either means you know you're using the same video processor and it's going to seem slower because it's still taking the same amount of time to render say a thousand pixels now if you've got 4000 pixels it'll take four times as long in theory and there's some other stuff in there that that would mitigate that a little bit but generally speaking it's going to take about four times as long so hey now your new big screen device seems four times slower than your old one right that's not good so we've got to have a device to drive it that's at least four times faster at presenting those pixels out and you probably are going to have something faster than that but the point is you've got to upgrade your tech behind it as well as the screen itself of course that means more processing power and more battery power to run the thing so again kind of a two-edged sword that you've got more pixels it's looks nicer but you've got to have a bigger screen which takes more power you've got to have a bigger GPU which takes more power so you're going to have a bigger battery you've got to have you know stay close to an outlet something like that so there's kind of the ups and downs to it overall 720p is fabulous when we're talking smartphones that here's my prediction is the new standard everything is going to be a 720p smartphone display now it might take a little while to get there but that is going to be it right now we're working on these guys and we still have some differences in display resolutions kind of standardizing on sizes right now but resolutions are where it comes into play in fact if you'll notice that's kind of long and skinny it's a 16 by 9 aspect ratio so it's letter box if you will this not so much it's you can see there's a little bit of a difference in the then the sizes there and the ratios so we don't really have 720p tablets yet I think we will I think that will probably be the next step but after that one we're talking 7-inch versus you know right around five inch it makes sense to be the same resolution 720p you're not going to lose that much resolution on a tablet over a smartphone when you do that but when you go to bigger stuff like a 10 inch tablet like the zoom like the iPad that's where you really need to have 1080p resolution to have that same sharpness and clarity so when we see that I don't know when are we going to see the letterbox tablets I don't know but it's coming and it's coming before too long give it a year or two at tops and we'll be able to see kind of where things are going so 720p pros cons benefits disadvantages what do you think this is your part of the program where you comment on what we've said here don't realize that we've kind of dumbed down some of the technical lingo so that we can reach a broader audience like the whole for 8486 thing with TVs so keep things about the concepts and talk about what you know what kinds of experience do you have and what do you think the future is going to hold what do you want to see and what are some trends that are developing that you aren't really impressed with that you don't like comment down below let us know of course if you like this video like this format big thumbs up so that you can share it with your friends and tune in next week for another episode of the android guy weekly starting me Joe Levi