What is the difference between capacitive touch screen and resistive touch screen ?

1. Touch sensitivity.

Resistive touch screen: Pressure is required to enable each layer of the screen touch. You can use your fingers (even with gloves), nails, stylus, etc. It is very important to support stylus in Asian market, where gestures and text recognition are preferred.

Capacitive touch screen: The finest contact come from the surface of a charged finger also activates the capacitive sensing system at the bottom of the screen. Inanimate objects, nails, and gloves are not valid. Handwriting recognition is more difficult to access.

2. Accuracy.

Resistive touch screen: The minimum accuracy is a single display pixel, which can be identify with the stylus. It is easy to distinguish by hand writing ,also the reistive touch screen is helpful to operate under the interface of small control elements.

Capacitive touch screen: The theoretical accuracy can reach several pixels, but it is actually limited by the finger contact area. It is difficult for the user to accurately click on a target of less than 1 cm² .

3. Cost.

Resistive touch screen:  very low cost.

Capacitive touch screen: the price of capacitive screens from different manufacturers is 10% to 50% higher than that of resistive screens. This extra cost is trivial to the flagship models, but it may discourage phone models of middle price level.

4. Damage resistance

Resistive touch screen: Due to fundamental features of the material ,the top section is soft ,which enable it can be pressed down. This makes the screen easy to be scratched. A protective film and relatively more frequent calibration is required for resistive screens. The advantage is that the resistive touch screen is wearing resistance and less prone to breakage, and the resistive touch screen device using the plastic layer is generally less susceptible to damage and less prone to breakage.

Capacitive touch screen: The outer layer can be made ofglass. Although it is not indestructible, and it may break under severe impact, but for darly friction and smudges, glass is much better.