60HZ, 90HZ OR 120HZ SMARTPHONE? JOURNEY INTO THE MAGICAL WORLD OF HERTZ
From 2007, the year of presentation of the first iPhone by Steve Jobs , to today we have seen all the colors in the smartphone field. The market was saturated beyond belief, companies and products that were so similar when different from each other arrived, with producers openly challenging each other on several fronts.
At the beginning we played to raise the size of the screen,
then those of the batteries, in the blink of an eye there was the race to
reduce the frames around the display, the biometric sensors for fingerprints
arrived, the unlocking systems with the face and the retina , until every
company has put all its cards on cameras, zooms and wide angles.
As we all know today the game has even moved tofolding
smartphones such as Huawei's Mate XS , a "return to the past" that
intrigues not a little public, in this roundup, however, we have left one
element behind: the screen refresh rate .
Images per second
Until recently, when sponsoring a new smartphone, almost no
manufacturer spoke of hertz (Hz), but today this word has opened a new
battlefield, especially in the Android field . To tell the truth, even if it
still hasn't touched up its phones today, it was Apple who threw one of the
first stones into the sea, bringing to the market the iPad Pro with Pro Motion
technology , a name that hides an update frequency of the Variable 120Hz screen
. A full-blown revolution that anyone who has picked up a newly made iPad Pro
will understand immediately, after a few seconds of use.
Now the "fashion" of raising the refresh rate of
displays has also affected smartphone manufacturers, with the market now
offering several 90Hz or 120Hz devices , but what exactly do these numbers
mean? What are the differences from a traditional 60Hz display?
Translating everything linearly, the hertz of the refresh
rate indicates the " number of times in a second that the image is redrawn
on a display ". 60Hz means that on the screen the image is updated 60
times per second, 120Hz 120 times per second and so on.
This leads us to smoother image reproduction, smoother and
more dynamic animations, reduces lag using an input device -let's think of an
Apple Pencil for example , which on the iPad Pro with Pro Motion emulates
writing on paper sensationally well. Small details that significantly improve
the user experience, which is why the entire market will soon be aligned at
least on 90Hz.
PAL and NTSC
The people most favored in understanding the hertz mechanism
are certainly gamers, video game enthusiasts . In this regard, allow us to take
a short and nostalgic leap into the past, up to the splendid 16bit era of the
90s, when the SEGA Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo gave them a good reason .
At that time, the writer learned what it meant to own a PAL game cartridge,
designed for European systems, rather than an NTSC for American and Japanese
consoles (the same happened on NES and SEGA Master System even if it created
less scandal. ...). Simple, in the first case we had a slower game, less
dynamic and consequently a little less fun, the PAL in fact provided the 50Hz
while the NTSC the 60Hz(There are also exceptions with PAL cartridges at 60Hz,
moreover it is necessary to calculate the different resolutions and colors that
were sometimes higher in European cartridges, however the speed of NTSC was
unquestionable in most cases).
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Trivializing it all, it meant that PAL titles showed 50
images per second , NTSC 60; a difference that may seem ridiculous but that in
practice changed the gaming experience (if you like to fiddle with emulators,
take today the same ROM but coming from a different geographical area and try
...).
A 60Hz cartridge was smoother and more playable than 50Hz
ones even if with only 10 more images per second, a real pleasure for the eyes
and the spirit, which is why we ended up - like authentic electronic butchers -
to handcraft consoles. and to order USA / JAP cartridges from unlikely postal
resellers , even at the cost of losing a little bit in terms of vertical
resolution, lower than the NTSC standard.
Today things are certainly different, the PS4 and Xbox One
titles no longer have the Region Lock , but the hertzes continue to dominate
the scene under the table. The diatribe between games at 30 or 60 fps is more
alive than ever (it is always about updating and fluidity, even if in this case
the frames are the images that scroll on the screen), also for some years
thanks to Esports and competitive video games we have come to talk of 120Hz,
144hz and beyond , with works, screens and graphics cards capable of supporting
these modes at very high speed to allow maximum fluidity and precision to Pro
Gamers, who perhaps have built a ' entire career.
Hertz in everyday life
Even smartphones have therefore begun feverishly discussing
hertz and refresh rates, with companies like OnePlus, Samsung and Asus (just to
mention a few, there are many others) that have brought 90Hz and 120Hz on their
displays . Take for example the entire S20 range, with Dynamic AMOLED
Infinity-O screens up to 120Hz ("up" because Samsung allows you to
choose the frequency and we will soon understand why), or the recent OnePlus 7
Pro, 7T Pro and 8, with 90Hz display . This technology "from 90 updates
per second" and more has also arrived on some Realme, Nubia, Xiaomi, Razer
and Google devices, in short, is preparing to become a new standard in the
mid-high-end smartphone market as mentioned above,even if Apple is missing from
the appeal , usually the first to launch technical innovations of this type
(think of displays with P3 dynamic range for example) but which for now has
preferred to confine extreme fluidity only to the tablet world.
The bitten apple also prompts us to talk about the only
compromise a 90Hz / 120Hz screen has to bend to: power consumption . Probably
it is precise for this reason that the Cupertino company has not yet
"speeded up" its phones, since it would have less autonomy for the
same battery.
For this reason, a company like Samsung (but not only you of
course) allows you to change the hertz of the screen in the options, so that
the user can choose whether to have balanced performance and more hours of use
or extreme fluidity and fewer phone calls.
So far, Apple's choice has had a very specific meaning, also
because Tim Cook and his associates have shown that they know how to play with
hertz better than anyone else - and not just with the iPad Pro. Let's think
about the new Apple Watch Series 5 , with which Cupertino went upstream while
all the others went down the river.
Instead of increasing the hertz of the smartwatch, Apple has
decreased them : in "rest" mode, the clock display drops from 60Hz to
1Hz , updating itself once per second and thus being able to stay on all the
time, consuming a negligible amount of energy - so much so that many would like
this mode also on the iPhone to finally enjoy an Always On Display, but that's
another story.
With hertz, therefore, we can have fun "managing
time", slowing it down or speeding it up depending on what we wants to do,
we just have to see how far the market will go.
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