The Apple iPad Review (2012)
by Vivek Gowri & Anand Lal Shimpi on March 28, 2012 3:14 PM ESTThe Display: In Numbers
Apple is very big on maintaining a consistent experience between its products. We see this a lot in our Mac reviews where it's not unusual to see similar white points across virtually all Apple products. It's no surprise that the with the move to the Retina Display Apple wanted to retain as much of the original iPad's display characteristics as possible. We'll start with an analysis of brightness and contrast, both of which remain relatively unchanged from the iPad 2:
Apple is expected to have triple sourced panels for the new iPad, so you can expect to see variation in these results but for the most part you can expect the new iPad's display to perform similarly to the previous model.
Despite similar brightness and contrast to the previous model, the new iPad offers remarkably better color gamut and color reproduction than its predecessor. Relative to other tablets, the iPad's display is spectacular.
As we mentioned in our Retina Display analysis, Apple delivered on its claims of a 44% increase in color gamut. The new iPad offers nearly full coverage of the sRGB color space and over 60% of the Adobe RGB gamut:
Below is the CIE diagram for the new panel with an sRGB reference plotted on the same chart so you can visualize the data another way:
Color accuracy has improved tremendously if we look at delta E values for the primary and secondary colors:
Remember from our display reviews, lower delta E values indicate greater color accuracy. Values below 4 are typically considered good and you can see that the iPad 2 as well as the Transformer Prime both fell short in this department. With the new iPad Apple has clearly focused on color accuracy, which makes sense given it was used as the vehicle to introduce iPhoto for iOS.
Apple still has a lot of work ahead of itself to really put forth a professional quality display in a tablet, but for now the Retina Display is easily the best we've seen in a tablet and a tremendous step forward.
What's most absurd about the iPad's Retina Display is that you're able to get this resolution and panel quality in a $499 device. While we must be careful not to give Apple too much credit here as Samsung, Sharp and its other display partners clearly make the Retina Display, it's obvious that Apple has really been pushing its partners to develop solutions like this.
The biggest problem in the production of any commoditized component is the primary motivation for innovation is to lower cost. For years I argued with notebook PC makers to use higher quality LCD panels but no one was willing to commit to the quantities that would lower costs enough. I was also told that as soon as you put these notebooks on shelves at Best Buy, users wouldn't really care whether they were getting a high quality IPS display or not—all that mattered was the final price.
Apple, under the leadership of Steve Jobs, had a different mentality. Steve's pursuit was quality and experience, cost was a secondary concern. Through slow and steady iteration of this approach, Apple was able to build up a large enough customer base and revenue to be a significant force in the industry when it came to driving costs down. Apple can easily fill your fabs and eat all that you can produce, but you'll have to do whatever it wants to get the order.
Apple's behavior since it got rich has been to drive down the cost of higher quality components, LCDs being a perfect example. Unfortunately other companies don't benefit as much here as Apple tends to buy up all of the production of what it has pushed to create. That's one reason why, although ASUS was first to introduce a 1080p Transformer Pad, it won't launch until well after the new iPad. From what I've heard, the panel makers are all busy servicing Apple's needs—everyone else comes second.
Eventually the entire industry will benefit and all indications point to Apple doing something special for "pro" users in the notebook space next. As I've said previously, Apple has raised the bar with the iPad's Retina Display. The time for average display quality in a $500 tablet is over, the bar has been raised. It remains to be seen whether or not Apple will be able to maintain this quality across all suppliers of its Retina Display. On the iPhone Apple has been entirely too lax about maintaining consistency between suppliers. If it wants to be taken seriously in this space Apple needs to ensure a consistent experience across all of its component vendors.
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Jamezrp - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
Didn't want to cause Verizon too much trouble? Heh, very funny. I am amazed at how the iPad ends up being an amazingly good Wi-Fi hotspot. It almost seems like business users should opt to get an iPad for that function alone. I know plenty of people who would be happy to keep it in their bag, with the hotspot feature enabled constantly, while travelling about. Even for the price there is nothing even close that can compare.Plus, you know, you get the tablet too.
supertwister - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
"It’s a quantum leap from the noisy, 0.7MP mess that was the iPad 2 camera."Interesting choice of word considering a quantum is the smallest possible division for a quantity...
omion - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
Quantum leap:(n) an abrupt change, sudden increase, or dramatic advance
The phrase comes from the ability of particles to make a sudden jump between two energy levels. It is a leap (of any amount) between two quantization levels, not a leap of the smallest possible amount.
drwho9437 - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
A large fraction of the die doesn't seem to have a known use? Wondering what could be taking up all that area if not GPU, CPU and memory interfaces/caches... Most other I/O would have small footprints...tipoo - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
The 4S had a larger than usual die for its voice cancellation features that were needed to make Siri work well, the iPad does't have that but it does have voice dictation so some space is probably for that.PeteH - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
A big chunk of it is probably the ISP they talked about when the 4S debuted.Lucian Armasu - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
So this is how I assumed. The new iPad is in fact slower than the iPad 2, if games actually start using the 2048x1536 resolution for their apps, which everyone seems to be encouraging them to do. But once they do that the graphics will either look poorer, or they will be slower than they were on the old resolution, even on an iPad 2.Add that to the fact that apps are much bigger in size with the retina resolution, and the CPU is the same as last year. The new display might look great, but it's obvious that the new iPad is absolutely a step-back in terms of performance, whether it's GPU or CPU we're talking about. Hardly worth an upgrade, especially for iPad 2 owners.
xype - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
Blah blah blah performance blah not worth it.I don’t give a shit about theoretical performance that I might be getting if DNA folding software was available for tablets. I really, really give a shit about being able to read website and ebook text without my eyes straining after an hour.
One would think that 10 years after "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." and Apple raking in millions and billions of profit, those Geek Metrics™ that people are so fond of here (nothing wrong with that, it’s interesting stuff!), would be recognized as completely and utterly worthless to the average population. But apparently not.
The iPad was never ment to replace PCs and Consoles as a hardcore gaming device, and it was never ment as a render farm server replacement. It would be really nice if people realized that, at some point. In the next 5 years, perhaps.
tipoo - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
It seems a bit like the 3GS-4 transition, it used the same GPU despite higher resolution and so performed worse at native, although in this case the CPU is unchanged and the GPU is "only" 2x better for 4x the pixels. Developers got around that on the 4 by making games for the old resolution and using upscaling mode. I'd imagine they will do the same here once games hit the limits of the GPU at native. Games like Infinity Blade 2 also use separate resolutions for things like the menus vs shadows vs terrain textures.darkcrayon - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
I guess if the only thing you bought an iPad for were games, and you could only consider a game to be worthwhile if it were drawn directly at 2048x1536, you'd have a point. But of course the new iPad could play games at the "iPad 2" resolution at much higher detail, or at a slightly resolution with the same detail, etc.It doesn't make sense to say it's a step backward in performance overall- it simply has the option to display much higher resolution graphics that the old model didn't have. The iPad 2 displays 2048 x 1536 text at "0 mhz" so to speak. It's not like you are losing anything by having the option of ultra high resolution if the type of game (or app) can use it within the hardware capabilities.