Still having trouble figuring out which new iPhone model is best for you? Chances are that one of the things you’re fretting over is which display size to pick: The 4.7-inch version of the 5.5-inch version. PaintCode has put together a fantastic analysis that breaks down how pixels are rendered on iPhone 6 displays that also shows how the iPhone 6 Plus “substantially changes the way graphics are rendered on scree” compared with all earlier models.
FROM EARLIER: Which new iPhone 6 model is right for you? Here’s the easiest way to find out
The most important thing to know about the iPhone 6 Plus’s display is that it resizes objects to look smaller on the screen than how they look on the iPhone 6’s display. As you can see in the graphic that PaintCode made below, the letter “a” on and iPhone 6 Plus will actually be rendered to look smaller than the same letter on the iPhone 6:
This seems counterintuitive — after all, why would you make something look smaller on a larger display? It turns out that it all has to do with the way coordinate points are mapped out on each display. In the original iPhone, the coordinate points just happened to match up perfectly with the device’s 320 x 480 resolution. But when you have bigger displays, you have to multiply your point coordinates by a scale factor to get them to properly align — otherwise you’ll be looking at images that are either too long or too wide.
This scale factor works out well with the iPhone 6 — if you take its coordinate points and multiply them by 2, you get the device’s exact pixel resolution of 750 x 1,334 pixels. But multiplying the iPhone 6 Plus’s coordinate points by its proper scale factor of three would get you a resolution of 1,242 x 2,208 pixels, which is higher than the device’s actual resolution of 1,080 x 1,920 pixels. This means that, unless you adjust the display so that objects it shows are smaller, you’ll end up with a display that seems to have poorer resolution than you’d expect.
PaintCode’s entire post is very much worth your time as it goes into much greater detail and provides more helpful graphics than anything we’ve given you here. Be sure to check it out by clicking the source link below.
