Monday, May 02, 2011

Revisiting 300 DPI


In 2008, I wrote about how 300 dpi and higher displays would enable new forms of reporting data by approaching the fidelity of ink on paper -- well, inkjet ink sprayed badly on paper. I even made a test paper design of medical data in some older and newer formats.

Well, we did get our mass-market handheld device of even more than 300 dpi, the iPhone and iPod Touch 4G. So I thought it was time to revisit the question. I used the same PDF file and displayed it on my iPod Touch to see how it felt, and compared it to my computer screen.

As I wrote before, the biggest advantage is being able to simple hold the device closer to the eye than is comfortable with a big laptop or desktop. But besides that, the graphs are comfortable to read. I'd want to tweak them graphically a bit more to make the data more prominent than the grids it is in, but what I am getting is that it becomes easier than ever to create overviews of larger volumes of data than has been usual on computer screens, while still allowing drilling down or showing in different formats, which paper does not.