Skip to content

iPhone 8 to switch from 16:9 to 18:9 display—here’s what this means for you

2017 May 26
by RSS Feed

Apple is expected to change iPhone’s screen aspect ratio from 16:9 on iPhone 7 to about 18:9 on iPhone 8, according to multiple reports. Economic Daily News said today that the device’s screen ratio will change to 18.5:9 instead of the previous 16:9 (18.5:9 accounts for the rumored curvature of iPhone 8’s OLED display).

Yesterday, DigiTimes said that Apple is expected to unveil a new iPhone in the second half of 2017, equipped with a 5.8-inch 18:9 AMOLED panel.

Aspect ratio, for those wondering, is the relationship between the height and width of a display. In simpler terms, a 16:9 has 16 pixels in one direction for every 9 pixels in the other. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, popularized by older TVs, and 16:9 found on widescreen ones.

The new screen format was popularized by the latest phones from Samsung and LG with 18:9 screens, which are taller than the 16:9 ratio used by the majority of smartphones, prompting panel vendors to expand capacity to meet fast-growing demand for 18:9 smartphone displays.

It looks like the 18:9 screen aspect ratio is here to stay, but what’s so special about it?

For starters, the 18:9 screen aspect ratio (you could just call it a 2:1 display) results in a display that’s a little bit taller than a typical 16:9 screen. As a result, an 18:9 phone may provide a better grip than its 16:9 counterpart.

As a bonus, the 18:9 screen aspect ratio should be perfectly suited for Split View multitasking that Apple is expected to bring to iPhones with iOS 11. More importantly, in 18:9 mode you can theoretically have one app on top of another in portrait mode. In the Camera app, as an example, you might be able to take a square photo on half of the screen and review it on the other half.

18:9 screens also render more content vertically so users see more of a webpage in Safari, additional images in their Instagram feed, more tweets and so forth without scrolling.

On the downside, a majority of HD videos today are encoded in the 16:9 format and many games and apps are optimized for 16:9 on a landscape mode. If iPhone 8 will really come outfitted with an 18:9 display, all 16:9 videos will show blank space on the sides of the phone.

As Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica noted in his review of Galaxy S8, the device’s unusual aspect ratio results in pillarboxing when watching 16:9 video without zooming or stretching it.

What’s the point of having thin bezels on a phone if your 16:9 movie-watching experience suffers from blank space on the sides, you might be asking. While this is no doubt concerning, you can always double-tap to prompt iOS’s media player to zoom in the video so that it fills the entire screen, in which case parts of the video would get cropped out.

In the meantime, the new screen format could gather some momentum if filmmakers adopt it. For what it’s worth, select new shows on Amazon Video and Netflix have been shot in the 18:9 aspect ratio. Additionally, Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro is pushing the new Univisum 2:1 format (or 18:9) versus the typically wider 2.20:1 aspect ratio commonly used in movie theaters nowadays.

Apps will also need to be updated to support that aspect ratio natively or users will see black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Furthermore, it’s unclear at this moment if iPhone 8’s upgraded camera will feature a new aspect ratio that’s closer to 18:9.

For example, Galaxy S8 has a 12-megapixel rear shooter in the 4:3 aspect ratio, but if you shoot in the 18.5:9 mode you only get 7.9-megapixel of the camera’s capabilities. In the same vein, LG G6’s thirteen-megapixel camera offers a maximum of 8.7-megapixel capability in 18.5:9 mode, or 9.7 megapixels for 16:9 images. Only 4:3 images can be shot in the full 13-megapixel resolution.

On the other hand, as iPhone 8 is said to include an active display area at the bottom with potentially persistent on-screen controls, like Android, it’s possible that the actual content area could be in the 16:9 aspect ratio. In that case, apps and movies would render without ugly black bars on the sides.

Be that as it may, Apple certainly is no stranger to making an iPhone’s screen taller.

With the 2012 introduction of iPhone 5, Apple made the display a tad taller without making it wider so that users could still reach screen corners at the top in one-handed mode. It took months for developers to update their apps to take full advantage of the new screen format.

At any rate, Google has urged developers to work with newer 18:9 aspect ratios for their apps and Apple is expected to do the same if iPhone 8 adopts the new screen aspect ratio, in which case 18:9 will be the new norm for smartphones.

As we reported before, iPhone 8 should managed to squeeze a 5.8-inch AMOLED panel (with an active display area measuring 5.1 inches) inside a chassis that would be just a little bit wider and a tad taller than the existing 4.7-inch iPhones. The company will hopefully achieve this by drastically reducing or eliminating the bezels and integrating the Home button, Touch ID, the FaceTime camera and sensors into the display assembly.

Fun fact: the original iPhone had a screen aspect ratio of 3:2.

Source link: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2017/05/26/iphone-8s-display-to-switch-from-169-to-189-aspect-ratio-heres-what-this-means-for-you/

Leave a Reply

Note: You may use basic HTML in your comments. Your email address will not be published.

Subscribe to this comment feed via RSS