New: Android pixel-density bucket table
The Reference section of the calculator now has a fourth tab, "Android density buckets", sitting alongside the existing Device category, Print type/DPI, and Quality scale tables. It maps Android's six standard density qualifiers to approximate PPI ranges and their scale multiplier:
| Bucket | PPI range | Density scale |
|---|---|---|
| LDPI (ldpi) | ~120 | 0.75x |
| MDPI (mdpi) | ~160 | 1x (baseline) |
| HDPI (hdpi) | ~240 | 1.5x |
| XHDPI (xhdpi) | ~320 | 2x |
| XXHDPI (xxhdpi) | ~480 | 3x |
| XXXHDPI (xxxhdpi) | ~640 | 4x |
This table exists to translate a raw PPI number into the vocabulary Android's asset pipeline actually uses. If you've ever seen a folder named drawable-xxhdpi in an app project, or read a spec sheet that casually mentions a phone is an "XXHDPI device," this table is the missing decoder ring — it's the same six-bucket system, just laid out so you can look a PPI value up directly instead of guessing.
A hypothetical device walk-through
Say (purely as an illustration) you're checking a mid-range Android tablet spec'd at 2000×1200 pixels on a 10.1-inch diagonal. Punch that into the "Screen PPI" tab and you'd land in the low-200s PPI — comfortably inside the HDPI-to-XHDPI transition zone in the new table above. That single lookup tells an app developer roughly which image-asset multiplier (1.5x or 2x) that device is likely to request, without needing to memorize the bucket boundaries.
New: PPI² in the Screen PPI breakdown
The second addition lives in the calculator itself rather than the reference section. Run any calculation on the "Screen PPI" tab, and the result breakdown beneath the main PPI number and quality badge now includes a PPI² (pixels per square inch) row, sitting next to the existing dot pitch, total pixel count, and aspect ratio figures.
The practical effect is that PPI² makes gaps between similar-sounding PPI numbers look much bigger than they do at first glance. A phone at 460 PPI versus one at 400 PPI reads like a modest 15% difference — but because PPI² scales with the square of PPI, the area-based gap is closer to 32%. Nothing about the underlying pixels changed; the new figure just represents that same difference in a way that lines up better with how densely a screen can render detail across a patch of surface, not just along one edge.
Where it sits in the result card
You don't need to change how you use the tool — enter a resolution and diagonal exactly as before, hit Calculate, and PPI² appears automatically in the breakdown list under the main result. It's additive: the core PPI number, the formula behind it, and the Poor-to-Excellent quality badge are all exactly what they were before this update.
Worked example: reading both new figures together
Here's a hypothetical, illustrative comparison of two example phones to show how the bucket table and PPI² complement each other:
- Phone A (example): 1080×2400 on a 6.5" diagonal → roughly 400 PPI. That lands it near the top of the XXHDPI bucket (~480 PPI range) but below it, so it would sit closer to the XHDPI/XXHDPI boundary in practice.
- Phone B (example): 1440×3200 on a 6.7" diagonal → roughly 525 PPI. That's solidly inside XXHDPI-to-XXXHDPI territory.
Looking only at PPI, Phone B seems modestly sharper — about 31% higher. But run the PPI² figures side by side and the area-based gap widens to roughly 72%, which better reflects how much more fine detail Phone B's screen can pack into the same physical patch of glass. Meanwhile, the bucket table tells you both phones would likely ship XXHDPI-or-higher assets, so from an app-asset standpoint they'd probably look similarly crisp despite the real PPI/PPI² gap.
Why these two, and why now
Both additions came from the same observation: plain PPI is a great single number, but it doesn't answer every question people bring to a pixel-density calculator. Developers and designers exporting Android assets needed a bucket reference; anyone comparing two close-PPI screens benefits from seeing the area-scaled gap spelled out rather than doing the squaring in their head. Neither changes the core Screen PPI calculation — they're both read-only additions layered on top of the same formula the tool has always used: PPI = √(width² + height²) ÷ diagonal(in).