Why the 4K screen in Sony Xperia Z5 Premium is a big fail
4K resolution or UltraHD is four times the resolution of a standard Full HD resolution. Do the math and you will find that a 4K screen has a resolution of 4096x2160 pixels - four times of 1920x1080 pixels. Screens based on the specification appeared for the first time in the early 2000s, and since 2010, at every edition of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in January, it is touted as the next big thing in home entertainment. Yet, here we are in the second half of 2015, and we still can't see 4K being a ubiquitous standard.
What’s the problem? Well, it is the age old chicken and egg story. The content isn’t there and till it arrives, affordable 4K TVs will not exist. In a country like India, the problem is graver as it is just starting to adopt HD - so 4K isn't likely to see the light of day before 2020.
More importantly, it is a standard meant for a big screen. A screen larger than 40 inches. So how does it work with Sony’s new phone - the Xperia Z5 Premium? You could argue 1080p is already a standard for high end phones and in, the recent past, 2K screens have seen wide adoption in some of the new flagship offerings. Sony also claims that its phone can upscale lower resolution content to 4K, but the quality of that remains to be seen.
In all honesty, the argument for a 4K screen on a phone seems flawed. Back in 2010, 300 pixels per inch was the standard, considered good enough for the human eye. It was the iPhone 4 that pushed the envelope at the time, and since then, Apple has maintained a rather humble resolution on its iPhones while the competition has turned fierce.
The new Xperia Z5 Premium has a 5.5-inch screen with a 4K resolution, which converts to 801 pixels per inch. That’s almost double of the 1080p screen that iPhone 6 Plus offers. I’d bet that even Superman wouldn’t be able to discern the extra 400 pixels. I know we already can’t with 2K screens, though Sony argues that 2K wasn’t much of a bump over Full HD. However, 4K will prove to be a differentiator offering that missing wow factor in smartphone screens that we had back in 2010-2011.
But even if Sony is right, how will it solve the issue of battery life? Already, the battery life of our smartphones sucks and 4K will certainly consume more of it. It will put more load on the processor and the GPU, which, in all certainly, will affect performance in a negative way. 4K will also present some thermal insulation challenges as the screen could lead to the processor and GPU being pushed to their brink where they start heating up.
Couple that with the fact there really isn’t no 4K content and you will ask why Sony escalated the race for screen resolution. A couple of years ago, Samsung did the same with its octa-core CPU on the Galaxy S4 and today all of us are basically in world of octa-core phones that don’t extract the maximum from each core and have questionable battery life and heat issues.
I’ve not seen the 4K screen on the new Xperia. It may look bewitching. But the truth is that smartphone technology isn’t ready for it. A 4K screen, from a purely technical standpoint, will come with a set of trade-offs that dilutes the entire smartphone user experience.
Think about it. For most of us, our 40-inch LED TVs don’t have such high resolution screens. Full-HD 1080P is serving us well enough. So what will we do with this insane resolution on a 5.5-inch screen, which is just 7.2 times smaller. Yes, what will you do with twice the amount of pixels on a screen that’s 7.2 times smaller than the one in your living room?
If you have an answer for that, then you should probably be applying for a marketing role at Sony, because they will certainly need your help.