We’ve heard about the iPad 3’s Retina Display speculations for a while now and with various components and screen panels surfacing on the web it’s hard to decide what to believe these days. However, this time MacRumors managed to score an iPad 3 display and check it out under a microscope, trying to determine if it’s an ultra high resolution Retina Display or not… The result can be found below.
Physically the new screen is the same size as the ones on the iPad 1 and iPad 2 and keeps the same 9.7 inch diagonal. The thing is that when you use a microscope and compare the display with the one on the iPad 2, as shown below you finally get an epiphany: the iPad 3 screen’s pixels are one quarter the size of those on the iPad 2. The guys of MacRumors didn’t have a way to power the screen, so with poor lighting and whatnot they managed to make out the pixels on each screen and highlighted a cluster of 2×2 – 4 pixels from the iPad 2 to compare it with the same batch from the iPad 3.
The same cluster on the new tablet’s panel was occupied by 16 pixels (4×4), being twice the resolution, exactly what we were looking for. This means that the new Apple iPad will support a resolution of 2048 x 1536, twice the res of the iPad 1 and 2, that was 1024 x 768. This display should provide sharp images, much sharper than the ones done with the previous generation of iPads.
