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I inspected the 3rd gen iPad image, trying to figure out roughly how much gap there is between rows, because it looks unexpectedly large. It looks like the pixel-to-gap ratio is about 9:5. This would seem to indicate that the screen is 35.7% black.

Obviously, the eye doesn't perceive this large of a gap at no magnification, but still, I was surprised at how much of a gap there is between rows.

(Contrast this to the iPhone 4S, which is about 9:3.6, or 28.6% black.)

2 comments

But it's a power efficienty issue. The black areas are covering up backlight areas that otherwise would show through as useful illumination. There was a discussion yesterday about this in the iPad teardown thread. I was surprised about the apparent power consumption, and this was posited as one of the reasons.

Shouldn't be surprising, though, right? The same effect that causes you to perceive three colored lines as a single square causes you to perceive a black line as just a somewhat dimmer pixel.