The iPhone 6 Decoded - What Makes Retina HD Different From Simple Retina?

With the iPhone 6 launched, and pre-orders for the device started, the question on every Apple lover'southward listen is which iPhone six is the right one? After all, this September marks the kickoff fourth dimension in company history that Apple has released ii variants of it's flagship smartphone and finally catered towards the larger screen demands of the market.

The two iPhone half dozen models this year came with a Retina Hd display. Retina HD was an upgrade from the iPhone 5S' unproblematic Retina display. So what really separates the iPhone half-dozen Retina HD from the iPhone 5S Retina display? Let's find out in terms of the way points are mapped and rasterized onto screens.

The above render shows the area on the three different iPhone variants in terms of points. At present to start we need to be clear on what points are. Points are units in which any content image is defined with and reflect the positon and the space or the expanse it will occupy on a given device's screen. At present in order to display an image on to a screen, points are rasterized into pixels, which ends up translating into overall screen resolution.

Now the original iPhone and the iPhone six both accept like shooting fish in a barrel calculations for translations of points into pixels. Screen definition and image quality on a screen depend on the scaling factor used to convert points into pixels. The original iPhone had a scale factor of one which meant that point area and pixel resolution were the same. With the iPhone six, which uses a scale factor of two, a bespeak area of 375 ten 667 translates perfectly into a resolution of 750 ten 1334.

But for the iPhone 6 plus, which uses a scale factor of iii, the point area ends up translating into a greater resolution. Therefore, content is scaled down past a ration of 20/23 which results in an prototype scaled downwards to 87 % of it's original size. When done with all these calculations, the last stride is to bear witness the content on the screen, the quality of which depends on pixels per inch or ppi. So naturally, college the ppi, the ameliorate the brandish.

Then to apply this theory to concept, let'south take an instance of the unproblematic letter 'a'.

The signal value of the letter is rasterized into the pixel value, just every bit explained above. The point value of the character is rasterized into pixels. With the iPhone half-dozen Plus, this is downsized in social club to correspond to the screen resolution of the device.

And voila, the epitome is finally displayed on to the screen. And so if you're still having trouble agreement the resolutions of the new iPhones and so it should be pretty articulate how they work past at present. The iPhone 6 Plus resizes content to display it onto the Retina HD, which uses a calibration factor of 3x. Cheers PaintCode for making things clear!