Before the iPad 2 was announced the rumor mongers among us were absolutely convinced that Apple’s second generation tablet would have twice the number of vertical and horizontal pixels, yet maintain the same screen size; effectively a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels in a 9.7 inch screen. Many pople were expecting a “retina display” for the iPad, but with hindsight we know that didn’t really happen. So what about the iPad 3, could it have a super high resolution screen? Next week in Los Angeles Samsung plans to demonstrate a prototype 10.1 inch display they’ve built that packs an extraordinary resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels. It uses pentile technology to reduce the number of subpixels, something that made the display in the Nexus One a bit controversial. That being said, Samsung said this display has a color gamut that covers 72% of the NTSC standard, which is higher than the displays we have today that only show 55% of the available NTSC colors.
“Samsung’s PenTile display technology is the only display technology that operates at 40 percent less power yet provides twice that of Full HD-viewing performance for consumers compared to legacy RGB stripe LCDs. There is no other commercial display technology on the market today that offers this high of a resolution and pixel density in a 10.1-inch size display,” said Dr. Sungtae Shin, Senior Vice President of Samsung Electronics. The South Korean firm expects to begin commercial production of this display later this year. Device makers are going to need one hell of a powerful GPU in order to drive a fluid user experience on this thing. It has a little over 5x the number of pixels compared to the iPad. The GPU in the iPad 2 is already supposed to be 9x faster than the one in the iPad 1, so the as yet to be announced “A6” chip from Apple would have to have an equal performance bump on the graphics side.
Update: For what it’s worth, the guys who are responsible for the pentile technology have a Twitter account and they list Cupertino, California as their homebase. That’s the same city where Apple HQ is.