34 PCWorld JANUARY 2021NEWS SORRY ANDROID FANS, APPLE IS RIGHT
TOO MANY PIXELS
For a while there, it looked like phone
companies were going to start competing in
the 4K space, starting with the Sony Xperia 1,
which had a whopping 3840x1644 resolution
and 643ppi pixel density. While Sony has
continued to trot out ridiculously high-res
screens—with a rumored 5K, 900ppi model
in the works—overly high-res screens haven’t
really caught on.
That’s a good thing. While 2K, 3K, and 4K
are great for spec sheets and marketing copy,
the extra pixels are, for the most part,
unnecessary and even detrimental to the
overall experience. High-resolution displays
use more battery, tax GPUs, and occasionally,
disrupt app layout and performance. They
deliver few benefits beyond the perceptionthat images and
fonts look crisper. In
short, 4K is great on
a TV, but wholly
unnecessary on a
phone.
The same goes
for 2K and 3K. On
paper, Apple’s
iPhone 12 displays
are pedestrian
compared to those
on most premium
Android phones. But
specs don’t tell the
story. Apple takes
such care with the calibration of its displays to
make them visually indistinguishable from the
excellent WQHD displays on Galaxy phones
and light years better than Google’s 1440p
Pixel phones. Now that Apple has finally gone
full-OLED with its iPhone lineup, there’s very
little left to criticize, apart from the lack of a
120Hz option. Rumors suggest that will come
next year, which will put the iPhone on a par
with Samsung’s best, even with significantly
lower resolution.
Apple cares more about display quality
than pixel quantity, and it’s willing to yield a
bit to its competitors to get there. In doing so
it’s proved that we don’t actually need
resolution better than 1080p. I’m hoping
other phone makers will stop trying so hard
and follow Apple’s example instead.If you want to use the 120Hz refresh rate on the S20 or Note 20, you’ll need to
keep the screen resolution low. And that’s OK.