Capacitive or Resistive: What is the Definition and the Difference

We’ve been using Ciphone C4 for a couple months now, and our first impressions mainly consisted of “CiPhone C4 Capacitive Touchscreen makes Windows Mobile a gazillion times better to use”. But how can you figure out what the difference between Capacitive and Resistive Touch screens really are?

For the professional technical details, please read the Wikipedia articles on Resistiveand Capacitive technology.

Cell Phones and other personal electronics devices such as tablet PCs are sometimes equipped with touch screens, while in the cell phone industry there are two major categories of touchscreen displays: capacitive touchscreens and resistive touchscreens.

What is capacitive and resistive touchscreen?
Capacitive touchscreen displays rely on the electrical properties of the human body to detect when and where on a display the user touching. Because of this, capacitive displays can be controlled with very light touches of a finger and generally cannot be used with a mechanical stylus or a gloved hand. Examples of devices with capacitive touchscreen are the Ciphone C4 and Ciphone 4 A3 Android.

Resistive touchscreen displays are composed of multiple layers that are separated by thin spaces. Pressure applied to the surface of the display by a finger or stylus causes the layers to touch, which completes electrical circuits and tells the device where the user is touching. As such, resistive type touchscreens require much more pressure to activate than capacitive touchscreen. Examples of devices with resistive touchscreens are the A4 Touchscreen GPS Phone and 4G+++ WiFi Phone.

What’s the difference between Capacitive and Resistive?
A capacitive touchscreen measures the interaction between an electrical signal on a transparent grid above the screen and the user’s finger. A capacitive screen is beautifully smooth to operate because it just requires the presence of your finger, not any pressure. The flip side of this is that you can’t use a stylus. Well, actually there is a kind of chunky stylus that mimics the capacitance of a human finger, but it’s not elegant to use.

While a resistive touchscreen has two thin layers of conductive but transparent film above the screen, and measures the change in resistance between the two layers due to the pressure of touch. Resistive touchscreens are cheaper to make, but don’t support multi-touch. If the user presses with more than one finger the device can’t determine the position of the multiple fingers. Multi-touch for resistive displays has been demonstrated in the lab, but is not currently practical for consumer devices. A resistive screen can be made pressure-sensitive, so that applications may distinguish between a light and a heavy touch. A capacitive screen just knows “finger present” and “finger absent”.

To be quite honest, the only positive I’ve heard about resistive touchscreens, is that it is a screen tech which works with gloved hands and a stylus. But personally, I’ve found that using even a resistive screen with outdoor winter gloved hands is just about impossible. I feel capacitive is a lot more responsive on average and I quite prefer how the screen needs to only be touched, not pressed. I also like that Capacitive touchscreen which is much more durable and scratch-resistant. So what’s your opinion? Leave your comment and share with us.