iPhone 6 Screens Demystified

Few days ago, Apple introduced iPhone 6 Plus. The new iPhone substantially changes the way graphics are rendered on screen. We've made an infographic to demystify this.

Line rendering

To demonstrate different rendering of pixels on various devices, we compare how 1-point wide line is rendered on

• Original iPhone - without retina display. Scaling factor is 1.
• iPhone 5 - with Retina display, scaling factor is 2.
• iPhone 6 Plus - with Retina display HD. Scaling factor is 3 and the image is afterwards downscaled from rendered 2208 × 1242 pixels to 1920 × 1080 pixels.

The downscaling ratio is 1920 / 2208 = 1080 / 1242 = 20 / 23. That means every 23 pixels from the original render have to be mapped to 20 physical pixels. In other words the image is scaled down to approximately 87% of its original size.

You can use our developer tool PaintCode to create user interfaces that are truly resolution-independent.