Researchers create pixels 8X smaller than those in Apple iPhone 4’s Retina display

Apple Online Store“Researchers at the University of Michigan have created a display with nanometer-thin sheets of metal (called nanoresonators) that use slits to create pixels eight times smaller than the pixels currently on the iPhone 4,” Mike Schramm reports for TUAW.

Advertisement: The iPad. With a 9.7″ touch screen & amazing new apps, it does things no tablet PC, netbook, or e-reader could. Starts at $499. Shop Now.

“To show off their work, the University of Michigan researchers created their school’s logo on a display only 9 microns tall (a strand of human hair is about 100 microns wide, so the display itself could fit inside the period at the end of this sentence),” Schramm reports.

“Crazy. You have to wonder what an iPhone-sized display would look like with a resolution like that (or if we’d even tell the difference, given that our eyes have a limit on the amount of detail they can discern),” Schramm reports.

Read more in the full article, with links and photo of that tiny Michigan logo, here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]

31 Comments

  1. Pretty cool, but if you can’t see the pixels in Apple’s retina display then why make them smaller?

    At some point the law of diminishing returns comes into play and usually it the limits of human interaction that dictate those boundaries.

  2. A Michigan logo in the period of every sentence. If’s that’s not an evil scheme then I don’t know what is. ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />

    WE ARE… PENN STATE!

  3. There are some women that are considered to have a perfect body because of they measurements, even that, men clearly prefer other type of woman because they are pretty, sexier, or charismatic.
    It is the same case for the specs of a product. Specs isn’t everything, the product must appeal to you, no convince you (sorry girls, you are not a product, but couldn’t find a better example).

  4. Think of the computing power and amount of memory a display with that resolution and the size of, well, anything useful, would take to drive it. I’m still wow’ing over NeXT’s MegaPixel Display. ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />

  5. With light emitting version of this at this scale…

    I see…eyeMac the mac that resides on your eye. Surgically implanted behind your retina (retina display max) it flips down to turn on and display what you want to look at on the mac micro pro mounted on your eyebrow ridge.

    Mac OS 7of9.

  6. The point is, you could make an extremely small display that could be read with a magnifying lens in front of it. This would allow you to mount the equivalent of a large display in eyeglasses, for instance, or in a tiny iMac nano. At the moment the scale needed for any kind of input makes such small displays irrelevant, but we aren’t too many years away from high quality speech input. Even today, MacDictate works surprisingly well. So, this is not just a technical exercise.

  7. Think LCD projectors with no screen-door, blocky pixels, even at 15 plus feet.

    Think heads-up display googles with iPhone Retina Display quality views.

    Think bigger than hand-helds and laptops. This is, as Basil says, much more than a technical exercise.

  8. There is NO point in making pixels this small. There IS point in making bigger screens of Retina Display pixel density (imagine 3072 * 2304 pixel iPad display in couple of years)

  9. Still catching up to print…
    …if you print line art on paper, the recommended resolution for many years has been at least 600dpi, preferably 1200.

    High-end color coffee table books are printed at 2400 dpi

  10. @dan,

    Print artwork is printed at recommended 600-2400 dpi in order to make smooth precise edges on halftone dots. But in that case the halftone lines per inch is a better (though still imperfect) analog to display pixel resolution, and it’s usually in the range of 65-185 lpi.

  11. @ Posterboy:

    Nice, but can you imagine the outcry of people who would have to pay ATT $350 to get out of their eyeMac contract when the eyeMac 2 with integrated laser came out the next year? Pandemonium would ensue, I tell ya!

    Plus, who the hell wants a surgical implant at your local ATT store? And no, Verizon’s surgical team wouldn’t be any better, they would just demand to tatoo “Verizon Wireless” across your forehead at the same time.

Reader Feedback

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.