Tag Archives: marketing

Gizmodo: Tech’s New Most Meaningless Spec: PPI

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source: Gizmodo

Adrian Covert of Gizmodo has an interesting piece looking at the gadget industry’s recent obsession with high PPI displays. With devices like the HTC DNA pushing resolution well past 300 PPI, electronics makers may be turning PPI into the next overhyped marketing stat, just like contrast ratio is for the TV industry and megapixel is for the digital camera.

Adrian gets to the heart of the problem:

There are plenty of ways to make a better-looking display. But we’ve reached the point in the pixel density wars where higher figures have stopped automatically equating to improved performance for users. Any grandstanding about pixel density, from here on out, now is mostly just marketing fluff.

We tend to agree, and color performance is probably the display feature with the most room to improve. The best LCD smartphones on the shelves right now can show you more pixels than your eye can detect, but can only show you about a third of the colors you can see. If electronics makers want impactful feature improvements for new devices, color performance is where it’s at.

Time to Ditch the Diagonal?

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Size is a critical dimension for consumers to consider when buying a product with a display. Will this TV fit on my wall? Would this tablet fit in my jacket pocket?  How much picture am I getting? To guage displays today, we take a diagonal measurement of a 16:9 rectangle. This leaves value on the table. Not just because consumers are notoriously bad at math, it fails to capture the full value of the increase. As display industry analyst Bob Raikes said:

A display that has twice the diagonal (and the same aspect ratio) has four times the screen area. Would Intel describe the clock speed of its CPUs by giving them a number that is the square root of the clock speed? If Intel went from 1GHz to 2GHz, would the company really give customers a number that is just 40% bigger? Ah, we’ve gone from 1 IntelMark to 1.4 IntelMarks. No chance!

Why would we say “twice” when the real value increase is “four times”? This is especially relevant as consumers shop more online. Although size may be apparent in a brick and mortar showroom, it is not easily conveyed online. Take a look at this image- which tablet is bigger? By how much?

Apple’s Phil Schiller demonstrated this yesterday at the iPad mini announcement. The new iPad mini is only 0.9 inches or 12% bigger than a Nexus 7 on the diagonal, he says, but it is actually 35% larger by area. This is another example of display marketing efforts starting to move beyond PPI comparisons. Product and display marketers: let’s get real about the value we’re adding – whether it’s surface area or color. Let’s stop leaving value on the table.

Source: apple.com