Been comparing stats on Apple's site and can't work out if there's any real difference in person in the screen from 4th gen 12.9 inch IPP to the newer Air or M4 Pro.
Have you guys got any opinions on this?
Would save £400 going for the Air, but would only want to do so if the screen was an upgrade too. Want games and videos to look better as the first benefit so it feels like something new!
Struggling to find a way to convince myself to buy a Pro again.
TLDR —> Just know that the OLED iPads have a lower clarity (true resolution) than other iPads.
Personally, unless you need the more powerful processor that the pro has, I would suggest the iPad Air 13 inch. Clearer (higher true resolution) than the OLED iPads and you save money, you can get a magic keyboard or just plainly save your money for your next upgrade in a few years.
EDIT — for what it’s worth, I think the iPad Pros with the mini-led has the overall best screen for iPads.
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It has to be blurrier than the IPS iPads (unless the resolution is 1.5x higher to compensate for the 33% drop in subpixel count).
It
has less subpixels overall because of the subpixel layout (it has R/B G/B supixels i.e 2 blues for every 1 red and green subpixel) – other iPads have R/G/B for each pixel (i.e.
3 subpixels per pixel IPS as opposed to only 2 subpixels per pixel OLED) where as most OLED screens have only two subpixels per pixel. This is why most OLED screens have really high resolution (to compensate for the lower amount of subpixels).
Less subpixels essentially means a 4K LCD with R/G/B (standard) subpixel layout will look clearer than a 4K OLED with R/B // G/B subpixel layout.
Essentially with OLED you get better blacks at the cost of lower (true) resolution and lower overall brightness (unless you do something like Apples Tandem-OLED display, but this only fixes the brightness issue not the subpixel issue)”
To avoid this issue
when Apple introduced the iPhone X they
upped the resolution substantially. People thought it was to be closer to other android phones but in reality (my assumption), they updated it from around 300ppi to 450ppi because of what I stated here. They knew that
they needed to increase the pixels per inch by 1.5x in order to keep the image quality in line with previous iphones so they did just that.
Another way to explain it is that most OLEDs use 2 subpixels per pixel.
So essentially a
4K OLED is similar to a 2.666K LCD
just to be clear, this is
NOT HOW ALL OLEDS ARE. OLED TVs often do not have this fault/compromise and that’s because TV’s are generally not used as often as phones/tablets. Most OLED phones and tablets (all of the ones I can think of) use 2 subpixels per pixel.
