While even affordable devices, like Microsoft"s recently-launched Lumia 640, can now be purchased with HD displays, at the top end of the smartphone market, handsets with much higher-res screens are becoming more commonplace.
Flagships like the LG G4 and Samsung Galaxy S6 edge now have Quad HD (2560x1440px) displays - that"s enough resolution to make it pretty much impossible to spot individual pixels with the naked eye. And yet, display manufacturers are still pushing ahead with even higher-resolution mobile screens - Sharp revealed last month that it"s developing a 5.5-inch smartphone display with 4K resolution - that"s 3840x2160 pixels, or an astonishing 806 pixels per inch.
But one manufacturer that isn"t buying into this craze for insane resolutions on handsets just yet is Sony.
The company recently launched its latest Xperia Z3+ flagship - and its 5.2-inch display doesn"t have 4K, or even Quad HD, resolution; just good ol" fashioned Full HD (1920x1080px). As far as Sony is concerned, that"s more than enough for now.
As Focus Taiwan reports, Jonathan Lin, general manager of Sony Mobile Taiwan, said recently that the company has extensively deliberated the merits of upgrading its top-tier devices with higher-res displays. The move has so far been rejected, he said, because an increase in resolution alone isn"t enough - until Sony can make "significant improvements in display quality and digital image processing technology", there"s simply no point in pushing out phones with Quad HD resolution.
"At the moment, making the move to 2K technology on 5- to 5-inch screens does not seem able to achieve market segmentation, so we have no plans to launch 2K phones," Lin said - although strictly speaking, "2.5K" is the more accurate term for the resolution to which he was referring.
He emphasized that Sony will focus its Quad HD efforts solely on its Xperia tablets for the foreseeable future.
Sony"s position on Quad HD smartphones is similar to that of Huawei, whose CEO said last year that such a high-resolution display on a mobile handset is "very bad for power consumption and it doesn"t offer anything in return... so why should we do that? I think it"s a stupid thing."
Source: Focus Taiwan via TechRadar