liquid retina lcd panel free sample

Many Apple products use liquid crystal displays (LCD). LCD technology uses rows and columns of addressable points (pixels) that render text and images on the screen. Each pixel has three separate subpixels—red, green and blue—that allow an image to render in full color. Each subpixel has a corresponding transistor responsible for turning that subpixel on and off.

Depending on the display size, there can be thousands or millions of subpixels on the LCD panel. For example, the LCD panel used in the iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019) has a display resolution of 5120 x 2880, which means there are over 14.7 million pixels. Each pixel is made up of a red, a green, and a blue subpixel, resulting in over 44 million individual picture elements on the 27-inch display. Occasionally, a transistor may not work perfectly, which results in the affected subpixel remaining off (dark) or on (bright). With the millions of subpixels on a display, it is possible to have a low number of such transistors on an LCD. In some cases a small piece of dust or other foreign material may appear to be a pixel anomaly. Apple strives to use the highest quality LCD panels in its products, however pixel anomalies can occur in a small percentage of panels.

In many cases pixel anomalies are caused by a piece of foreign material that is trapped somewhere in the display or on the front surface of the glass panel. Foreign material is typically irregular in shape and is usually most noticeable when viewed against a white background. Foreign material that is on the front surface of the glass panel can be easily removed using a lint free cloth. Foreign material that is trapped within the screen must be removed by an Apple Authorized Service Provider or Apple Retail Store.

Typical LCDs are edge-lit by a strip of white LEDs. The 2D backlighting system in Pro Display XDR is unlike any other. It uses a superbright array of 576 blue LEDs that allows for unmatched light control compared with white LEDs. Twelve controllers rapidly modulate each LED so that areas of the screen can be incredibly bright while other areas are incredibly dark. All of this produces an extraordinary contrast that’s the foundation for XDR.

With a massive amount of processing power, the timing controller (TCON) chip utilizes an algorithm specifically created to analyze and reproduce images. It controls LEDs at over 10 times the refresh rate of the LCD itself, reducing latency and blooming. It’s capable of multiple refresh rates for amazingly smooth playback. Managing both the LED array and LCD pixels, the TCON precisely directs light and color to bring your work to life with stunning accuracy.

There are two versions of the new MacBook Pro and we"ve got the 16-inch version, although the 14-inch model"s display is very similar just smaller and with a different resolution. Apple calls this particular display a "Liquid Retina XDR display" which is typical Apple marketing speak. If I translate this into what Apple actually means, they are giving you a high resolution full array local dimming mini-LED LCD with true HDR functionality.

If we dive deeper into the specs, the 16.2-inch panel has a resolution of 3456 x 2234 which continues Apple"s tradition of using non-standard resolutions across their line-up. Apple doesn"t disclose the exact technology used here, but it"s an LCD panel which appears to be IPS-like in design. The backlight has 10,000 mini-LEDs for impressive zone density at this size, allowing for a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 and peak brightness up to 1,600 nits in the HDR mode on paper.

As for refresh rate, Apple are offering up to 120Hz with adaptive sync, which they"ve rebranded into "ProMotion" although this sort of functionality has been available for many years now in other laptops and displays. The combination of everything though is a first, and the only rivals to this sort of panel are the latest wave of 4K OLED panels seen in a few high-end Windows laptops.

I don"t want to dwell on the notch too much as in practice using the laptop it"s not that big of a deal. Let"s take a look at how the Liquid Retina XDR display actually performs and I"m going to start here with some color performance results because I think these are most relevant to a creator-focused display like this. I"ll get to talking about response performance later.

This performance also destroys basically any other LCD based monitor I"ve looked at before. On the standalone monitor side, it"s virtually unheard of right now to see LCD zone counts higher than a couple of thousand. This limits worse case contrast to around 12,000:1 in the case of the 2,000-zone Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 with VA technology, or just 4,000:1 in a checkerboard test.

Apple choosing to use 5-10x the zone count massively improves the achievable contrast ratio in tricky situations and I"d say this amount of zones - and the density of zones - is what is required as a minimum for the best HDR experience with an LCD panel. Even Apple"s own ridiculously overpriced Pro Display XDR doesn"t compare as it has a paltry 576-zone backlight and it was criticized at launch for poor blooming compared to professional level HDR mastering displays. The MacBook Pro"s display will be far better for producing HDR content, aside from the small size.

So from one perspective it"s easily one of the best LCD-based HDR experiences I"ve seen, but on the other hand it isn"t a self-lit panel like an OLED which is completely free of blooming and in some situations OLED still delivers better HDR. Of course, OLEDs have other drawbacks such as lower brightness levels and the risk of burn in so I can understand why Apple would opt for LCD instead. Besides this one complaint though the HDR experience is excellent, especially for a laptop.

Unfortunately there is a major drawback to the Liquid Retina XDR display used on the new MacBook Pros, and that"s the motion performance. While it"s nice to see Apple upgrade the refresh rate to 120Hz compared to the 60Hz they were using previously, the display being used here doesn"t have the appropriate level of response times to keep up with that 120Hz refresh rate. The panel is actually very, very slow, which is a disappointment.

This is exacerbated by using a combination of IPS-like LCD technology, and an always-active mini-LED backlight, noting that both the LCD layer and mini-LED need to change to transition fully.

Luckily full transition fall times aren"t as horrific, though still reasonably poor at over 15ms even with our very generous 20% tolerance. The real transition time is more like 35ms, so less than half that of the rise time, but far slower than most other LCDs out there. The best laptop grade OLED panels can perform these transitions in under 2ms with the same test conditions, making them an order of magnitude faster.

I tested a few more transitions of varying degrees and typically the MacBook Pro would fall between 20 and 40ms, though luckily there is no overshoot to speak of. When viewing UFO test results, you can see the product of these horrific response times: a substantial blur trail behind moving objects. Even though the panel can feel somewhat smooth to use because it has a moderate refresh rate of 120Hz, the actual clarity in motion is terrible and this impacts the usefulness of the higher refresh rate.

Right next the MacBook Pro we have the Aero 15 OLED"s panel which has half the refresh rate at just 60Hz, but massively faster response times. You"ll see here that even though the MacBook Pro"s display is twice as fast in refresh rate, the extremely slow response behavior limits motion clarity to more like a 60Hz monitor or worse. The level of smearing is insane and I"m not sure how a modern LCD could end up this slow, Apple really should have experimented with some sort of overdrive.

There is no doubt that the MacBook Pro"s Liquid Retina XDR display is excellent for content creation. It has perfect P3 color gamut coverage and outstanding factory calibration, with particular attention to detail paid to multiple color specifications for mastering.

The Liquid Retina XDR display has impressive HDR specifications and performance. A mini-LED backlight zone count of 10,000 is the star of the show in this respect, significantly reducing blooming compared to other LCD-based HDR monitors, and providing exceptionally high brightness. The level of performance is good enough for both enthusiast level mastering and HDR playback, so the MacBook Pro is a great device for video editing on the go when you also factor in its overall performance.

A few nitpicks aside, the major downside to the display is motion performance. This display is exceptionally slow even for an LCD, despite packing a 120Hz refresh rate. This affects areas including web browsing and any work with text as you scroll through content, and blur trails can be visible across a wide range of use cases, not just gaming. It"s not bad enough to negate the benefits you get elsewhere, but Apple needs to put a lot of work into optimizing how quickly their panels transition. I also feel the lack of HDMI 2.1 on the MacBook Pro is a bit puzzling, going HDMI 2.0 for external monitors (in addition to Thunderbolt) is a bit annoying.

The only real competition right now are OLED panels, which come with their own set of strengths and weaknesses. There are a few other mini-LED laptop options on the Windows side, like the screen you get in the Acer Predator Helios 500, but that display only has 512 zones, not the 10,000 on offer here. So it"s a battle between the MacBook and the OLEDs you see in products like the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED.

The reasons to get an OLED display over this LCD would be in terms of its self-lit pure HDR experience with zero blooming, significantly faster response times for better motion clarity, and wider color gamut allowing for accurate work in the Adobe RGB color space as well as P3 and Rec.709. However, the drawbacks are also significant, including a 60Hz refresh rate limitation with current 4K offerings, the risk of permanent burn in, and significantly lower brightness. Actual implementations we"ve seen also lack the calibration Apple is offering.

On the balance of things, I"d prefer to get the Liquid Retina XDR in the new MacBook Pro than an OLED, especially for color-accurate content creation, and the HDR experience is close enough to OLED that I can forgive very minor blooming on occasion. I wouldn"t say Apple is miles in front with this screen, but it"s certainly very impressive and calling it the best display for production work is justified.

Retina is an Apple marketing term for which there’s no concrete definition: put simply, a Retina display is any screen Apple has decided to call that. There are however, features which set Retina displays apart from non-Retina screens.

Here we’ll tell you what you need to know about each type of Retina screen, list the Apple products which have them, and try to give an idea of whether these screens are worth the premium you pay for them.

When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone 4, and with it the first Retina display, he described it as having a screen with so many pixels packed so closely together (it was rated as 326ppi – pixels per inch) that they were imperceptible to the human eye at a distance of 12 inches. You wouldn’t see individual pixels: you’d just see the image those pixels created.

Since then, Apple has launched many more devices with Retina displays. Some have pixel densities of more than 326ppi, some with less. How can they all be called Retina?

It’s because there are two crucial elements to whether or not pixels are perceptible: density and distance. The further your eyes are from the screen, the lower the pixel density needed to make the pixels ‘disappear’. Generally speaking, the bigger the screen, the further your eyes are likely to be from it and so the lower the pixel density required to ‘qualify’ as a Retina display.

Look at the 13in MacBook Pro, though, and its screen has a density of just 227ppi. But it qualifies as Retina because you sit further from a laptop screen.

So you see that it’s all a bit vague – but the rough idea is that a screen is rated as Retina if it is sharp enough for the human eye not to be able to see individual pixels at a typical usage distance.

In simple terms, Apple ‘converts’ a device’s display to Retina by doubling the number of pixels vertically and horizontal, meaning it has four times as many pixels as its non-Retina counterpart.

If it did that and nothing else, however, there would be a problem. User interface elements like menus and icons would look tiny. To compensate for this, Apple created what it calls HiDPI mode, where each interface element is doubled in size vertically and horizontally and so appears at the same size as it would on a non-Retina display.

The effect of a Retina display is to make everything look crisper. Text in particular benefits from Retina – it looks smoother, with the curves on characters looking like curves instead of jagged steps.

Never one to miss an opportunity for a catchy label, Apple labelled the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus displays Retina HD. It continued to this label up to and including the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus in 2017.

But with the arrival of the iPhone X shortly after the 8-generation handsets, Apple took things one step further. With its 5.8in, 2436 x 1125, 458ppi screen, the X was deemed to deserve the latest version of the Retina branding: Super Retina HD.

Note that these enhanced versions of Retina are not necessarily defined by the pixel density/distance equation in the same way as Retina itself: you’ll note that the Retina HD iPhone 6, 7 and 8 all have 326ppi screens, the same as the plain Retina iPhone 5 and 5s. The HD and Super HD labels are earned by having a higher resolution.

There are a few reasons. This is the first all-screen LCD in an iPhone and – unlike most ‘bezel-less’ Android phones – Apple has managed to avoid a thick bottom bezel on the iPhone XR (above, left).

Apple says it’s the most colour-accurate LCD screen on any phone, and it has a high brightness and contrast ratio which allows it to display a wide colour gamut for HDR video and photos.

Also, it has True Tone which ensures accurate colours no matter what the ambient lighting. Add in the pixel masking and sub-pixel antialiasing to help with the curved corners, and we’d say it’s fair enough to give it a name that sets it apart from the usual Retina HD screens.

So when Apple launched a 27in iMac with 5,120 horizontal pixels in 2014, it used the same naming convention and called it Retina 5K. In October 2015, it launched a 21in iMac with a horizontal resolution of 4096 pixels (and a pixel density of 218ppi), and called its display Retina 4K.

No other manufacturer uses the Retina branding – Apple’s lawyers would soon have something to say if they did. But several makers of smartphones and tablets, in particular, have displays with pixel densities which are at least a match for Apple’s devices, and in some cases far exceed it.

A Retina display, then, is not one with the highest resolution available, but may be the optimal balance between image sharpness and the power needed to provide those images.

Sadly, despite having launched a 27in iMac with a Retina display in 2014, Apple has yet to upgrade its Thunderbolt display to Retina. Indeed, the product was discontinued in 2016, although it is expected to

Retina Display is a brand name used by Apple for its series of IPS LCD and OLED displays that have a higher pixel density than traditional Apple displays.trademark with regard to computers and mobile devices with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and Canadian Intellectual Property Office.

The Retina display debuted in 2010 with the iPhone 4 and the iPod Touch (4th Generation), and later the iPad (3rd generation) where each screen pixel of the iPhone 3GS, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPad 2 was replaced by four smaller pixels, and the user interface scaled up to fill in the extra pixels. Apple calls this mode HiDPI mode. In simpler words, it is one logical pixel = four physical pixels. The scale factor is tripled for devices with even higher pixel densities, such as the iPhone 6 Plus and iPhone X.

The Retina display has since expanded to most Apple product lines, such as Apple Watch, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, iPad Mini, iPad Air, iPad Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, and Pro Display XDR, some of which have never had a comparable non-Retina display.marketing terms to differentiate between its LCD and OLED displays having various resolutions, contrast levels, color reproduction, or refresh rates. It is known as Liquid Retina display for the iPhone XR, iPad Air 4th Generation, iPad Mini 6th Generation, iPad Pro 3rd Generation and later versions,Retina 4.5K display for the iMac.

Apple"s Retina displays are not an absolute standard for display sharpness, but vary depending on the size of the display on the device, and at what distance the user would typically be viewing the screen. Where on smaller devices with smaller displays users would view the screen at a closer distance to their eyes, the displays have more PPI (Pixels Per Inch), while on larger devices with larger displays where the user views the screen further away, the screen uses a lower PPI value. Later device versions have had additional improvements, whether an increase in the screen size (the iPhone 12 Pro Max), contrast ratio (the 12.9” iPad Pro 5th Generation, and iMac with Retina 4.5K display), and/or, more recently, PPI count (OLED iPhones); as a result, Apple uses the names “Retina HD display", "Retina 4K/5K display", “Retina 4.5K display", "Super Retina HD display", “Super Retina XDR display”, and "Liquid Retina display" for each successive version.

When introducing the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs said the number of pixels needed for a Retina display is about 300 PPI for a device held 10 to 12 inches from the eye.skinny triangle with a height equal to the viewing distance and a top angle of one degree will have a base on the device"s screen that covers 57 pixels. Any display"s viewing quality (from phone displays to huge projectors) can be described with this size-independent universal parameter. Note that the PPD parameter is not an intrinsic parameter of the display itself, unlike absolute pixel resolution (e.g. 1920×1080 pixels) or relative pixel density (e.g. 401 PPI), but is dependent on the distance between the display and the eye of the person (or lens of the device) viewing the display; moving the eye closer to the display reduces the PPD, and moving away from it increases the PPD in proportion to the distance.

In practice, thus far Apple has converted a device"s display to Retina by doubling the number of pixels in each direction, quadrupling the total resolution. This increase creates a sharper interface at the same physical dimensions. The sole exception to this has been the iPhone 6 Plus, 6S Plus, 7 Plus, and 8 Plus, which renders its display at triple the number of pixels in each direction, before down-sampling to a 1080p resolution.

The displays are manufactured worldwide by different suppliers. Currently, the iPad"s display comes from Samsung,LG DisplayJapan Display Inc.twisted nematic (TN) liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) to in-plane switching (IPS) LCDs starting with the iPhone 4 models in June 2010.

Apple markets the following devices as having a Retina display, Retina HD display, Liquid Retina display, Liquid Retina XDR display, Super Retina HD display, Super Retina XDR display or Retina 4K/5K/6K display:

Reviews of Apple devices with Retina displays have generally been positive on technical grounds, with comments describing it as a considerable improvement on earlier screens and praising Apple for driving third-party application support for high-resolution displays more effectively than on Windows.T220 and T221 had been sold in the past, they had seen little take-up due to their cost of around $8400.

Writer John Gruber suggested that the arrival of Retina displays on computers would trigger a need to redesign interfaces and designs for the new displays:

The sort of rich, data-dense information design espoused by Edward Tufte can now not only be made on the computer screen but also enjoyed on one. Regarding font choices, you not only need not choose a font optimized for rendering on screen, but should not. Fonts optimized for screen rendering look cheap on the retina MacBook Pro—sometimes downright cheesy—in the same way they do when printed in a glossy magazine.

Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies, has challenged Apple"s claim. He says that the physiology of the human retina is such that there must be at least 477 pixels per inch in a pixelated display for the pixels to become imperceptible to the human eye at a distance of 12 inches (305 mm).Phil Plait notes, however, that, "if you have [better than 20/20] eyesight, then at one foot away the iPhone 4S"s pixels are resolved. The picture will look pixelated. If you have average eyesight [20/20 vision], the picture will look just fine... So in my opinion, what Jobs said was fine. Soneira, while technically correct, was being picky."

Apple fan website CultOfMac hosts an article by John Brownlee"Apple"s Retina Displays are only about 33% of the way there."visual acuity in the population saying "most research suggests that normal vision is actually much better than 20/20" when in truth the majority have worse than 20/20 vision,WHO considers average vision as 20/40.presbyopia

The first smartphone following the iPhone 4 to ship with a display of a comparable pixel density was the Nokia E6, running Symbian Anna, with a resolution of 640 × 480 at a screen size of 62.5mm. This was an isolated case for the platform however, as all other Symbian-based devices had larger displays with lower resolutions. Some older Symbian smartphones, including the Nokia N80 and N90, featured a 2.1 inch display at 259 ppi, which was one of the sharpest at the time. The first Android smartphones with the same display - Meizu M9 was launched a few months later in beginning of 2011. In October of the same year Galaxy Nexus was announced, which had a display with a better resolution. By 2013 the 300+ ppimark was found on midrange phones such as the Moto G.Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One (M8) had 1080p (FHD) screens around 5-inches for a 400+ PPI which surpassed the Retina density on the iPhone 5. The second major redesign of the iPhone, the iPhone 6, has a 1334 × 750 resolution on a 4.7-inch screen, while rivals such as the Samsung Galaxy S6 have a QHD display of 2560 × 1440 resolution, close to four times the number of pixels found in the iPhone 6, giving the S6 a 577 PPI that is almost twice that of the iPhone 6"s 326 PPI.

The larger iPhone 6 Plus features a "Retina HD display", which is a 5.5-inch 1080p screen with 401 PPI. Aside from resolution, all generations of iPhone Retina displays receive high ratings for other aspects such as brightness and color accuracy, compared to those of contemporary smartphones, while some Android devices such as the LG G3 have sacrificed screen quality and battery life for high resolution. Ars Technica suggested the "superfluousness of so many flagship phone features—the move from 720p to 1080p to 1440p and beyond...things are all nice to have, but you’d be hard-pressed to argue that any of them are essential".

What I learned is that Retina is a registered Apple trademark, “[a marketing term] for which there’s no concrete definition: put simply, a Retina display is any screen Apple has decided to call that. (MacWorld)

Retina display was introduced by Steve Jobs when he launched the iPhone 4. He described the screen as packed with so many pixels that you could no longer see individual pixels when viewing the screen at a distance of 12 inches (30 cm). In other words, he defined a  retina display in terms of pixel density; which is measured in pixels per inch (ppi).

NOTE: While retina display monitors are generally thought of as 4K or larger, any monitor that can scale to 50% of its maximum resolution will look like a retina display. I proved this with the ViewSonic monitor which has a native resolution of 2560 x 1440. When scaled to 1280 x 720 (50%), text and image quality matched that of a retina display; though, obviously, the total resolution was much less.

The easiest way to create a retina display is to take the native resolution of a monitor (say, 4K at 3840 x 2160 pixels) and cut it in half (1920 x 1080 pixels). This means that a block of four pixels now shares the work of one.

This is the real reason behind monitor manufacturers touting 4K, 5K, even 6K monitors. Almost never does the the monitor display its full resolution. Instead, the macOS turns that monitor into a “Retina display” by cutting the resolution in half to improve image and text quality. Thus:

You can obviously set a monitor to its highest resolution, but text will look ragged and virtually all interface elements become desperately tiny. This brings us to the second key feature of a retina display.

If all a retina display did was cut the resolution in half, icons would virtually disappear. So, Apple created HiDPI mode, which doubles the size of all interface elements while, at the same time, shrinking the size of the actual monitor display. This means that interface elements appear the same size on both retina and non-retina displays.

I’ve seen that for myself as I move elements between an LG 4K (retina) and a ViewSonic 2.5K (non-retina) monitor. While the smoothness of the text changes, the size of the interface elements do not.

According to Macworld, since January, 2018, every Apple product with a built-in display supports Retina or better, with the exception of the MacBook Air and the 27″ Thunderbolt display.

So, while the term “Retina Display” is reserved for Apple hardware, the results of increasing pixel density to improve text and images extend across all Mac-compatible monitors, whether from Apple or third-parties. The key to keep in mind is that, if you want your text to look it’s best, get at least a 4K monitor and expect the actual on-screen resolution to equal 1/2 the maximum monitor resolution.

Do you have any specific monitor recommendations? Ideally I’d like something around 26/27″ but am not quite sure what max resolution it’d need to have to display like retina at that size. 5k?

Windows calls Retina displays “HiDPI.” As for monitors, Dell, LG and ViewSonic are always good choices for Windows users. 5K is ideal, but 4K is good enough for most work.

Apple has used Retina Display screens in the iPhone and other devices for years, but it launched the iPhone 11 with a different type of screen: a Liquid Retina Display (LRD), which is a type of Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) only Apple uses.

Liquid Retina Display differs from other types of screens in some subtle, background ways; to understand what an LRD is, you first have to understand what a basic Retina Display is.

Essentially, a basic Retina Display is a screen with so many pixels packed tightly next to each other that you can"t see individual pixels or jagged lines on the screen, even when looking very closely. The result is a super-high-resolution screen with a high pixel density, which makes the images and videos appear much more clearly than with other types of displays.

A Liquid Retina Display builds upon that basic retina display by adding a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), a standard type of screen found in computer monitors, laptop screens, smartphones, tablets, and other devices for many years. It"s a tried and true technology that"s been around for years.

LRD uses 10,000 LEDs in its pixelated display and combines the haptic effects and contrast ratios from basic retina displays to produce a higher level of pixels per inch (PPI). That can give a screen a paper-like effect with improved brightness and color.

The technologies used to manufacture the screen are the major difference between the Liquid Retina Display screen in, say, a standard iPhone and the Super Retina XDR display of an iPhone Pro.

The Super Retina XDR screens found in some Apple products use Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) screens, a more modern screen technology that delivers brighter colors and deeper blacks while using less power than LCDs.

Screen Technology:Liquid Retina Display screens are made using the older LCD technology rather than the newer OLED used in Super Retina XDR and HD displays.

Pixel Density:Liquid Retina Displays have a pixel density of either 326 pixels per inch (ppi) or 264 ppi (on iPads). Both the Super Retina HD and XDR displays sport 458 ppi pixel density.

Contrast Ratio:The contrast ratio on Liquid Retina Displays is 1400:1. A Super Retina HD display has a 1,000,000:1 ratio, while a Super Retina XDR has a 2,000,000:1 ratio. Contrast ratio effects the range of colors the screen can display and the depth of its blacks.

Battery Life:This is less easy to quantify since so many things go into how long batteries last, but OLED screens in the Super Retina HD and XDR screens generally use less power than the LCD screens in the Liquid Retina Display.

An always-on Retina display is a feature of the Apple Watch that means features such as the time, watch face, and most recent active app are always visible.

Apple recommends cleaning your MacBook Retina display (or cleaning any Mac display) with the cloth that came with the device. Or, use any dry, soft, lint-free cloth to wipe away dust. If more cleaning is needed, dampen the cloth with water or a designated screen cleaner and gently wipe the screen. Ensure moisture doesn"t get into any openings.

Retina resolution is not only a product on offer, but an experience that has enticed consumers across the globe to purchase products from the company.

Apple uses all sorts of proprietary names for standardized technologies which can make it difficult to compare products. One example is the company’s Liquid Retina XDR display found on the latest iPad and Mac models.

The Liquid Retina XDR display is an evolution of Apple’s existing Liquid Retina panels. It’s an LCD that uses IPS (in-plane switching) technology, with the “Retina” moniker referring to the high pixel density which makes it virtually impossible to identify individual pixels at normal operating distances.

What differs in newer XDR models is the method of lighting. While a standard Liquid Retina display uses a panel of LEDs that remain on regardless of what content is displayed on the screen, the XDR variant uses many more, smaller LEDs which are grouped into zones, and individually dimmed.

This allows the Liquid Retina XDR display to achieve a better contrast ratio than its predecessor. The XDR display can also get brighter than the older models, which enables a more impressive HDR (high dynamic range) video presentation. By switching off groups of LEDs, dark colors and blacks appear deeper increasing the perceived contrast ratio.

The Liquid Retina XDR display is essentially Apple branding for what many refer to as mini LED technology. These displays have improved contrast ratio and peak brightness compared to older backlit and edge-lit LCDs but they are built on the same fundamental technology.

This is in stark contrast to OLED, which uses organic compounds to generate light with no backlighting required. There are some compelling use cases for both technologies, with OLED still being susceptible to burn-in and not hitting the same brightness levels as comparable LCD panels.

By contrast, an LCD panel may exhibit ghosting (a visible glow around the edge of a dimmable LED zone) and inferior contrast ratio to OLED, while being immune to burn-in and far brighter for light-filled viewing environments. Apple’s own version of OLED is known as Super Retina (XDR) and is found on higher-end iOS and iPadOS models.

Apple products are of high quality and favored by many, but try not to pay too much heed to marketing terms. If you’re trying to compare an Apple product to another, cutting through marketing terms like ProMotion and Super Retina can help you make a better decision.

“Retina” images are actually just ordinary images displayed in such a way that they become more crisp on Apple’s retina displays. For the basics of retina images, check out our blog from last year, Mobile Optimization: Retina Images in Email.

This blog will cover the challenges of coding images that are fluid and retina ready, but won’t break your email’s display in Outlook. If you’re not interested in why it’s challenging, just skip down to the code!

Apple’s retina displays use four or more physical pixels to create one “display” pixel for CSS and layout purposes. A 300px wide image displayed at 300px will not take advantage of Apple’s retina technology. The 2×2 group of physical pixels that comprise each display pixel will all show the same color, making the image look blurry. But, if a 600px wide image (or more) is shown at 300px, the retina screen will be able to show increased detail for that image. Each of the physical pixels will show a different color. This creates a crisper, more appealing image for users with retina screens.

The image below shows a zoomed in portion of the image (using pinch and zoom on the phone) which makes the crispness of the retina image even more clear.

When building fluid emails, such as any email using the popular fluid hybrid technique, retina images become more of a challenge. This is partially because the designer may have to choose even larger images to make sure that they are “retina” on all screen sizes. For example, a given email may be designed to slim down to 320px for iPhone 5S (and earlier) but can also fill the given space up to 768px wide for iPad Retina screens. The image would have to be 1536px wide to still be considered “retina” on the iPad. At that size, the image would be nearly five times as wide as the iPhone 5S display!

This coding technique depends on the image having the same native size as the listed max-width. This is because Outlook for desktop (2007, 2010, 2013, 2016) will only allow images to be resized using the width attribute (not the width style) and doesn’t respect max-width. It also doesn’t care about the size of the container. It will blow out all the tables in your email to show the image at its native size. This is at odds with the retina technique, which requires that we use images larger than their displayed size in the email.

The “retina_image” class is included only for progressive enhancements. For example, on iPads you may want to override the max-width setting to use even more of their screen size.

Check out the completed code sample below. You can send this to an iPhone or iPad with a retina display to see the difference this powerful code makes.

Another great tip for avoiding giant file sizes on Retina images is, if you require a 300px wide Retina image, save out as 600px wide, but at 20-30% jpg quality. The file size will be similar to 80% quality 300px wide jpg, but will still look sharp on Retina displays at 300px wide.

3. The smaller asset is shown only to make it clear what difference the retina image makes in retina capable devices. It wouldn’t be used in a real send.

Slightly off topic but any idea why orange.fr shows mobile view (using fluid hybrid method) and why the Retina images on orange.fr show as the larger sized versions despite using the code from this blog?

What about images for Super Retina displays like the iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X? Apple recommends developing images at 3X the target size for these devices.

I want you to clearly understand what Retina Display is. In the simplest of terms, it means a high definition display, that’s it. Also, Apple products are not excusive to this type of display. Retina Display is simply Apple’s term for is but other phones, tablets and monitors too have higher quality displays. But, because these displays are being widely implemented and used, it is more than ever important to create websites and apps that support these displays.

With that said, let me explain to you why Retina ready images and Responsive Web Design go hand in hand and how to create such images for Responsive Web Design.

Retina Display is Apple’s brand name term which refers to a liquid crystal display that displays pixels at higher density. A simple visualization will explain this concept well so take a look at the image below which compares the pixels between Retina and a standard definition display. In Retina Displays, you get double the pixels in the same amount of space as you would with a traditional display. This is why icons or text on an iPad 2 looks blurrier then on iPad 3.

Designer and developers now have to accommodate different types of displays. This means two things:  users with Retina Displays will either have badly displayed images on designs that did not include Retina support or the designs that do support Retina, the users will enjoy a high quality, crisp imagery that we all crave and love.

The answer to this question is actually very simple: a lot of newest mobile Apple devices have Retina displays (and the new upcoming ones will too) therefore when creating a responsive website you also need to accommodate Retina images into them for the best display. The best display also means the best experience.

Because of the unique ability to resize flawlessly, SVG is a great format to use in Responsive Web Design. No matter the screen size, the image will resize accordingly and look great on any phone, tablet or monitor. This is also true for Retina displays as the SVG image will resize for the pixel density and stay the same shape. You should always use a SVG if you can as it will solve this dilemma for you.

I understand that not all images can be a SVG format especially if they are a photo or are already a raster image. There is a possible solution to this issue which is to use image at twice its desired size and display it at 50% of those dimensions. What I mean is that if you have a photo in a website that is 150px wide by 150px tall, use an image that is actually 300px x 300px in size but still display it at 150px x 150px. This way, on a Retina Display the image will show nice and sharp.

When creating a CSS media query you are able to specify more than just device widths or heights. The following code is a sure way to detect if the device has Retina Display. This works best when the images you use on your site are backgrounds of divs so that in the media query you just change the image with the one that is double in size. This way, the big images are only loaded for the Retina Display devices.

If you don’t fancy the media query solution that is perfectly fine. There is a JavaScript plug in to solve this issue! “retina.js is an open source script that makes it easy to serve high-resolution images to devices with retina displays.” How this plug in works is that when you have two images, one of the intended/original size and the other one double that size, retina.js detects when there is a Retina Display being used and changes the images accordingly. It is very simple to work with and I suggest checking it out. All you have do is to make sure that you name your images accordingly to work with the plug in.

Thanks to @font-face and fonts that are made up of icons instead of letters, you are welcome to utilize them instead of images. I very well support this method for two reasons. First, fonts are great at scaling in a similar way that SVG do, therefore they not only scale to different screen sizes but also to different resolutions such as Retina.

When you buy through our links, Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more.Apple"s latest 12.9-inch iPad Pro features a new Liquid Retina XDR display based on Mini-LED backlighting technology.

Apple revealed the next-generation iPad Pro during its Spring Loaded event on April 20 with two major changes: A switch to the M1 processor found in the latest Macs and a new Liquid Retina XDR display that features Mini-LED backlighting. That display is only found in the 12.9-inch model, however, leaving the 11-inch model with the same Liquid Retina display as before.

This means anyone shopping for a new iPad Pro now must choose between two entirely different display technologies rather than deciding which screen size best fits their needs. Let"s consider the primary differences between the Liquid Retina XDR display and its XDR-less counterpart to see who might want to use Apple"s latest-and-greatest technology.

Most displays rely on some form of backlighting. Basic models feature a single LED backlight that shines through an LCD panel to illuminate every pixel, while more advanced models feature multiple LEDs that operate within specific zones. Mini-LED shrinks those LEDs to somewhere between 0.1mm and 0.2mm to provide even more control over how precisely the display panel is lit.

We can see the benefits of Mini-LED backlighting by comparing the Liquid Retina XDR"s specs to the Liquid Retina display found in the previous 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Apple told The Independent that its prior 12.9-inch iPad Pro display was lit by 72 LEDs spread across multiple zones. Comparatively, the Liquid Retina XDR"s backlighting is powered by 10,000 Mini-LEDs spread across 2,596 full-array local dimming zones.

The differences afforded by those additional LEDs and local dimming zones are striking. Let"s start with brightness. Apple says the Liquid Retina XDR offers 1,600 nits max brightness while viewing HDR content and 1,000 max full-screen brightness as well as 600 nits max brightness during typical use. The Liquid Retina in the previous 12.9-inch model and today"s 11-inch variant offers just 600 nits max brightness, full stop.

Having more control over which parts of the display are lit also gives the Liquid Retina XDR a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio more typical of OLED panels than traditional LED backlit displays. Although this will be most noticeable when viewing HDR content, the improved brightness and contrast ratio over the Liquid Retina display should also be evident during daily use.

Unfortunately the Liquid Retina XDR didn"t just bring Mini-LED backlighting to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro; it also raised the tablet"s price by $100. (The 11-inch model"s price remained the same, which suggests the display is responsible for the 12.9-inch model"s new price.) Will it be worth the premium?

That depends. People who regularly watch HDR content, or who plan to use the iPad Pro to edit or create such videos, should benefit from having the Liquid Retina XDR. Anyone who uses their iPad Pro in particularly dark or bright environments might also appreciate the improvements to the tablet"s backlighting.

Otherwise the Liquid Retina XDR is a nice-to-have that"s likely to reach other iPad models — and become more affordable—in the future. Will it look great now? Almost certainly. Will people still think it looks great several years from now? Probably, and the standard Liquid Retina display is still good enough to hold most folks over until then.

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