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Barkley on 28 January 2015
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sc94597 said:
MikeRox said:


And it's already a noticible step down from the TV screen output. A quarter of that resolution will really impact on what you can see/read on the screen far more than the PPI difference will make.

PPI of a 100" 1080p TV is much lower than a 32" 1080p TV. However resolution is the same and so the content translates fine across either size.

32" 480p TV has nowhere near the clarity however of a 32" 1080p screen. This is the kind of difference we are talking, just look at all the complaints about games such as Dead Rising on the XB 360 when people were trying to play them on their SD screens but the HUD/Game Text was no good for this.

PPI differences are the main cause of not being able to read the text (it is scaled to the point that it is blurry.) If I had  - say - a 720p image (remember most WIi U games are rendered at 720p, not 1080p) on a 32" telvesion and a 100' television you'll notice the same blurry image that prevents you from reading the text.  A 480p image on a Wii U gamepad is going to be less blurry than a 720p image on a 100 inch television. 

Resolution isn't something special in itself. Pixel density is the important factor here. Now if your argument was that less could fit on the screen because of the difference in scaling (aspect ratio) between the resolutions of the screens, then yeah I'd accept that. But your argument was entirely about image quality.

And duh, because the 480p 32" tv has a lower PPI than the 1080p tv. 


PPI is the clarity of the image based on the size of the screen. Yes a lower PPI means it'll be blurry and a higher PPI means the display will have clarity however that does not change the fact that if the image is scaled down too far the raw pixels or information that are vital for the font to be readable are missing. 

You only have so many pixels to work with, PPI is irrelevent if you don't have enough pixels to get all the information across.

As you said earlier the gamepad has a resolution of 854 x 480 but the 3ds has a resolution of 400x240 (800x240 actually but that's just for displaying 3d.)

The PPI may make it look clear but it's still taking a 1080p image and shrinking it to 240p and you can't expect all the vital information to keep it ledgible to be retained.

Try taking a 1080p image from a game and shrinking it to 400x240, zoom in as far as you want you'll most likely not be able to read the font assuming it isn't of a large size.