Apple may claim that the iPhone has a “Retina” display because it’s hard for the human eye to distinguish individual pixels on a phone display when you can pack 326 pixels per inch. But Japan Display laughs at the iPhone’s 4 inch, 1136 x 640 pixel screen.

The Japanese display maker is showing off a new 5.4 inch, 2560 x 1440 pixel display with 543 pixels per inch.

Japan Display 2560 x 1440 pixel smartphone display

While Chinese phone maker Vivo is already working on a smartphone with a 2560 x 1440 pixel screen, the Vivo Xplay3S has a 6 inch display — since Japan Display’s screen is smaller, the pixels are packed even tighter.

It’s questionably whether there’s any good reason for a screen that size to be that sharp — it’d probably be tough for most people to tell the difference between a 1080p smartphone screen and a 1440p display. But it wasn’t that long ago that 720p screens on smartphones seemed pretty amazing.

Japan Display says its new display measures 1.12mm thick, offers 160 degree or better viewing angles, and offers low power consumption.

The company also has a 6.2 inch screen with the same resolution, but it only manages to pack  in 473 pixels per inch.

Japan Display seems to be going all out on high-resolution displays. The company also introduced a 12 inch, 3840 x 2160 pixel display for tablets and notebooks recently.

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8 replies on “Japan Display unveils 5.4 inch, 2560 x 1440 pixel smartphone display”

  1. Considering my old Laser printer is 600dpi, I would say that we need about the same (543ppi sounds about right) for our monitors / phones / tablets. I would like to see a 24″ monitor with something like 400ppi.

    1. I’ll second the motion I’m not buying a new 24″ monitor until the resolution improves past 1920 x 1080. I’ve been waiting for several years now.

    2. A laser printer’s “pixels” are single bit ones. They’re either white or black. A 24 bit per pixel display needs A LOT LESS resolution to give the same visual quality.

      Actually, even the best printed magazines like Vogue, are printed at 300 PPI. It’s OK to go a bit farther with phones, since we watch them closer to our eyes than a magazine, but your comparison makes simply no sense and 600 PPI on a phone screen is plain silly. It brings no extra detail at all (it’s probably useless to go beyond some 350 PPI).

      Of course these screens are amazing demos of how far technology can go. However, the problem with these screens is that they don’t scale at all. The market is in bare need for bigger resolutions at the desktop monitors segment, but it looks like manufacturers find it much easier to brag about stupidly high resolutions on very small screens, where nobody needs them.

  2. When will this translate into monitors that have a better resolution than 1920 x 1080? Seems like we’ve been stuck at this resolution forever.

    1. WIth 4K TVs out it can’t be that long until monitors catch up. If 4K establishes itself as standard it will start to wander down in screen size too.

  3. Well if they don’t find something new and expensive to hawk to OEMs we’d see price drops on consumer goods. Can’t have that! !7 layers of middlemen need high prices to keep buying bigger yachts.

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