Microsoft is moving onto the market with a huge campaign behind its Surface Tablet, one that has taken the path of the recent Samsung and Nokia attacks towards Apple. Now MS is claiming that the Surface RT display is actually better than the one on the iPad 3 and apparently it’s all about the resolution.
The Surface RT display provides a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, as confirmed by Microsoft and we compare that to the iPad’s 2048 x 1536 Retina screen. And here comes Microsoft’s applied sciences department manager Stevie Bathich, who explains that there’s more to this comparison than pure resolution. Apparently the iPad’s high resolution hurts readability, while the Surface RT tablet has ideal readability. Stevie says that screen resolution is only one of the components of the perceived detail on a screen.
The actual criteria to take into account is called MTF (Modulation Transfer Function), a combo of both contrast and resolution. In lack of good contrast resolution is said to decrease, according to this system. In the image above you can see the contrast sensitivity of the human eye and figure out how much that means. As resolution increases the eye becomes less sensitive, so in the case of the iPad 3 more is… less. The same expert mentions using a custom 10.6 inch high contrast wide angle LCD screen and that it was bonded with the thinnest optical stack available.
The result? In the tests they did, people end up seeing more detail on the Surface RT than on the iPad 3. There you have it… do you believe it?
