As expected, Steve Jobs announced the Apple iPhone 4 during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2010 (WWDC). One of the biggest new features in the iPhone is the Retina Display.

According to Steve Jobs :

“There’s a magic number around 300dpi, if you hold something about 10-12 inches (30 cm) away from your eye, it’s the limit of the human retina to distinguish pixels”.

To simplify things, if you hold a display with a 300dpi resolution at about 10 inches away from your eye, the human eye would only see continuous lines and would not be able to distinguish the pixels that make that line. In that way, the new iPhone 4 display’s sensitivity would outweigh the eye as it boasts a 326dpi resolution.


But does it?

Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technolgies challenged Apple’s claims:

“The resolution of the retina is in angular measure – it’s 50 Cycles Per Degree. “A cycle is a line pair, which is two pixels, so the angular resolution of the eye is 0.6 arc minutes per pixel.
So, if you hold an iPhone at the typical 12 inches from your eyes that works out to 477 pixels per inch. At 8 inches it’s 716 ppi. You have to hold it out 18 inches before it falls to 318 ppi.”

“It’s a great display, most likely the best mobile display in production but this is another example of spec exaggeration”.

So yes, the new iPhone 4 will have a very good display but it’s not retina. But we highly doubt that these claims will hurt iPhone sales at all.

After all the new display will be better than the iPhone 3GS and it can produce an image that’s nearly perfect to the human eye. So what is your feedback on this new "Retina" display.