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Dell Offering 1600x1200 Laptops
Fervent writes "Dell has started offering laptops today with the new UXGA screens. These higher-res LCD screens proport better, clearer graphics at no extra power cost. Details on the new laptops are available at CNet." They don't say how big the actual screen is, but ya gotta be scared... I can see 1280x1024 on a 15" screen, but 1600x1200 is pretty scary... I find a lot of things to small at that res on a 21" monitor. Then again, just pump up the font size and everything is crisper... of course those icons on web pages sure don't get any more legible.
Will people please keep in mind that the size of fonts on screen is in no way proportional to the size of the individual dots on the screen.
Smaller dots means that an individual character of a certain size will be drawn using more pixels, leading to a sharper and more well defined representation of the character.
If you cannot understand this, then just memorize this little example. ;-)
In the old days (more than 5 years ago) laser printers printed at 300 dots per inch (dpi), now a cheap one prints at 600 dpi and good ones at 1200 dpi.
Text printed on a 600 dpi printer isn't half the size of text printed on a 300 dpi printer
BTW. 1600x1200 on a monitor with 18" viewable area gives around 120 dpi. 1024x768 on a monitor with 14" viewable area gives around 75 dpi.
Ok, I don't know if this would work or not, but most people's complaints about this seem to be that this resolution is too small to be usable. Well, how about using a fresnel lens like this? I guess that it might interfere a little with image quality, but you do still gain desktop space. Of course, you'd have to come up with some support mechanism other than a styrofoam box, but I'm sure that enterprising geeks could come up with something.
What do you guys think?
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Forgive my ignorance, but surely if the screen has bad pixels when you buy it then it is faulty, and you can legitimately ask for the laptop to be replaced?
Surely you cannot. The Fine Print explicitly gives the number of bad pixels that the manufacter defines as "acceptable"; less than that and you do not have a warranty issue because it isn't "faulty" by definition. I've seen fine print that allowed FIFTY dead or always-on pixels. Your only real choice is to make sure your vendor has a "no questions asked" refund policy, get your money back, and try some other store and/or manufacturer.
-- John Dierdorf, Austin TX
Modern browsers (heh) are supposed to actually retrieve the logical ppi (pixels per inch) from the OS, and render type that way.
.com/font_size_intervals/altintervals.html
Generally, it's either 96 or 72, and I'm sure that if it were 200 ppi it would work just fine.
Of course, those designers who insist on rendering every little thing as a bitmap are screwing this pooch... bitmaps don't scale or have a "size" per-se, outside of their pixel dimensions.
Some others have mentioned that Opera's renderer can zoom on the fly... which solves both problems.
For anyone who's interested in this stuff, there's an excellent (in-progress) related article here:
http://style.metrius
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Mucous membranes are the part of your brain that, like, make you think about mucous. --Beavis
Personally I'd prefer teachers/professors actually teaching instead of going from textbooks all the time, but I guess that's not quite as profitable. On the plus side, eBooks would be many times easier to copy than paper books, so I could end up saving money after all.
It runs linux better than it runs windows, and it has a screeen which is bigger than most monitors can display...
Shame I still need to reboot into windows to watch DVD's legally.
Any Slashdotters out there know how I can hack my Torisan 6x dvd drive to go Multi region?
Set things up so the popular Linux GUI environments can scale to vastly larger resolutions, and you get the following delightful result:
- screens continue to expand and expand so users can have DSWs and one-up each other in boardrooms
- MacOSX/vector/no problem!
- Linux/some hack or other/here we are at 16000x12000, fun fun
- Windows: ow ow ow!
If this REALLY gets going, Windows' legacy of holding 90% or so of the app mindshare will cause lots of major hurtingWhich sets of letters actually correspond to which resolutions? 1600x1200, 1280x1024, 1920x????, 1153x900, 1024x768, etc. Thanks!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Even though Mac OS X is based on resolution independent technology (a modified version of Display PostScript), the UI is still laid out in terms of pixels, and the numbers of pixels are hardcoded in the style guide.
This was a big mistake. Now that very cool things are starting to happen with X, I believe that we will end up creaming Apple.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
In 1995, the tolerance on my Toshiba laptop was at least 12 dead pixels (800x600). In 1999, on my IBM laptop, it was 8 dead pixels (1024x768) although in some cases, 3-4 if they were stuck in a color. Clusters of bad pixels (2 next to each other) make a stronger case. Most SGI 1600SW's I see for sale have at least 1 bad. A perfect screen still rare, despite all the improvements out there.
Most manufacturers will NOT accept the screen back under warranty as a matter of course. I have tried with IBM when a laptop showed with 1 bad. They said tough. I begged. I screamed. 1 bad pixel is "well within the manufacturer tolerance".
Unless you buy your laptop retail, and inspect it before you leave, you generally have 2 options -- return it to the manufacturer and then buy a new one (too much of a hassle), or try and make more pixels go out and make it look like a defect (harder than it sounds).
Manufacturers do make exceptions. However, in my experience, unless you make a really good case, you can forget about getting any satisfaction if you claim 1-2 pixels are stuck off.
because we're all wise enough to know you're too ignorant to appreciate it. sonny.
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This solves one of my main objections to traditional laptops -- that they don't have a suitable graphics chip to drive an external monitor at a decent resolution (read 1600x1200). I still don't feel a 15" laptop is sufficiently portable to be worth the effort, but it's a good sign for the future.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
You can get the IE power toys thing from the IE download site that lets you do this. I agree, It's pretty handy sometimes....
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
If you're having problems with legibility with your X server, you may well have the DPI set wrongly. It defaults to 75dpi if you don't set it, which is often wrong for modern, high-res screens. (eg. my 15 inch 1280x1024 display is about 120DPI)
See the tip on linux.com about it.
Make sure to read the comment by Andreas Plesch on the tip as well, as a better method for setting the DPI is given than the original suggestion.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
These things are sweet man. Yes the resolution does go that high and text is still readable if you have good eyesight. These systems use the ATI mobil rage chipset with either 8 or 16MB of video RAM. The chipset includes anti-aliasing technology. This means that you Can run it at 800x600 or whatever you want and it will still look good. Also there is no more problem with viewing DVD videos on both an external monitor and the lcd. (ATI rages with 4MB video ram would get a black picture on external monitor). Other than the processor, lcd and video card these are exactly like the original Inspiron 5000's. Now for what everyone wants to know. How often do they break (i do tech support for Dell.) Well the 5000e is a bit too new for me to make a solid judgement on it but I almost never get a call for the 5000's. Maybe one or 2 a week. Very good reliability. No stress fracture issues that I know of. Well made machines. As a side note I am not in sales. I am in tech support. I'm about as unbiased of a person out there who has actually seen one of these systems already ;)
Pithy, yet ultimately meaningless, phrase expressed with gusto!
The 15.4 inch displays are 1280x1024, only the 15" displays are 1400x1050. Very recently the 1400x1050 became available in 14" as well.
Back in the mid-80s, people talked about the "3M" machines: 1 Million instructions per second, 1 Million bytes of memory, and 1 Million pixels on the screen. Well, in the first two, we are nearly 1000 times up from a Million, but even 1600x1200 is only about up by a factor of 2. What we need are more pixels over a much bigger field of view. SWAG-ing it, I'd say resolution of 1 arc minute over a field of view about 100 degrees in each direction - this is 36 M pixels. When we are there, then displays will nearly fill the user's visual field, which will make the experience of computing quite different than now (compare pictures of the Grand Canyon to actually being there). So when are we getting the super displays. Not for a long while yet, I guess.
I agree with you
PCXL Forever!!!!
It's not really fair to compare the image quality you get on a monitor with that on a tft screen.
TFT screens are a lot clearer and dont suffer the same way that monitorimages do from blurriness.
What however would be really good would be a monitor mode which reported itself as 800x600 but whenever windows was called upon to render text it could use the extra resolution for excellent clarity.
That way you could have icons and graphics all at a decent size but with lovely crisp text. And programs like Coreldraw could be made aware of the resolution difference... just a thought tho.
Did I mention I afree?
PCXL Forever!!!!
Give me the modney!
PCXL Forever!!!!
By the time i'll actually be old enough to afford a 1600x1200 screen my eyesight will have faded enought that i'll run it at 800x600 anyway.
Just like how i'll be deaf by the time I can afford a decent hifi, and by the time i've saved up enough cash for a nice tvr sports car i'll be way past the age i need to be to pick up chicks in it.
Why cant higher quality stuff be sold cheaper than the low quality stuff so all the old people who dont know better subsidise me having a quality lifestyle.
what's a Troll?
PCXL Forever!!!!
Not to poo-poo progress, but does anyone see a need for super-high res 15inch laptop monitors?
I've really been impressed by the Dell laptops though. I work at a design firm that does a lot of CAD stuff, and one of my co-workers used one to finish up a highly detailed Pro/Engineer model on a plane ride. That's pretty impressive, considering the video demands, as well as the fact that that kind of work is pretty painful on anything less than a 21"
bla
PCXL Forever!!!!
Are there any fixes for this problem? What happens when we get 4000x3000 displays?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This should make for some really clear e-books. MS's ClearType and MS Reader (which, if you haven't tried it, really does blow the socks off of Adobe Acrobat in terms of readability and ease of use) now should display better than ever. I've course, I'm not going to spend the horrific prices that Dell is probably asking just to be able to enjoyably read Gutenberg e-texts, but I might buy one of these babies when TEXTBOOKS are commonly available in an e-book format. Imagine toting one slim laptop around, versus a back-braking collection of textbooks?
Does anyone know whether textbooks are available in e-book form?
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
How do you mean "they don't say what the actual size is"? Quote: Dell will offer UXGA on one of two Inspiron 5000e models introduced today. Consumers can choose from 15-inch UXGA and 14.1- or 15-inch SXGA+, SXGA or standard XGA displays.
Hooray! I am lucky enough to use the 1400x1050 display on a Dell Inspron 7500, and it is very good. Its main problem is vertical viewing angle, no matter what it is not possible to see a block of the same colour as the same colour all the way down the screen. I hope they fixed it.
:D
One good side effect of having such tiny pixels is that dead pixels are far less noticeable than they are on lower resolution displays.
I know what I want for Christmas
To keep this in perpective, keep in mind that print media (those of decent quality, that is) typically run in the 1200-2200 dpi range (on the original film from the imagesetter, at least). ;-)
Therefore, I strongly endorse the notion that we are now to the point where increases in screen resolution can be used to improve the quality of text display, rather than just making the old crufty 7x5 dot patterns illegibly small.
Remember, 9pt type should be 1/8" between baselines, NOT 9 pixels. (Obapologies for the American ruler and the implicit MICROS~1 bashing
Hold down the CTRL key and scroll your way to bigger fonts.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I am using a Sony Vaio C1XD at 1024x480(768 virtual) on a 8.9" TFT.
1. you sit closer to a laptop screen
2. there is no flicker
3. in the right conditions backlit LCD is brighter than CRT
I was scared at first, but is very readable with no apparent eye strain.
realkiwi
Isn't it about time more browsers had this?
That's not really a solution. OK, you can zoom in and examine a graphic in detail. (Does that icon really look like an eagle with an erection? Is that a mole?) But what about a page -- or application -- that requires a specific number of pixels to display? If you zoom out to get, say, a superwide HTML table in view, everything's too small to read. Zoom in and you can't possibly follow the thread of text.
Here's an example: when I upgraded to Win2K, I forgot to make sure a driver for my video card was available. So, using the generic VGA driver (640x480 only) I go to support.dell.com, enter my service tag, and am taken straight to the download page. But there's no download button on the download page! Being a nonvisual person, it takes me a while to figure out that all the page content is exactly 750 pixels wide, and if I already had the driver I was trying to download, I would see the download icons neatly aligned on the right.
Problems of graphic size and layout are symptomatic of two larger problems:
We have a Dell laptop with 1400x1050 on 15.4 inch and I really like it. The linux installation was a little bit difficult, you have to set a special video mode at boot time (vga=791), otherwise the display will be black as soon as you start X11. Their support pages had the required pointers to the internet to find out about it.
Oh, that sounds great! I'm running to the store RIGHT NOW to buy my own copy! Oh my goodness I'm in Rhapsody! *g*
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Pumping up the font size isn't going to work for everything. Is there an open Display Postscript? If not someone should get on it real quick.
On the other hand, no, on the SAME hand, I can't wait until my display device has comparable resolution to my hardcopy device.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
On my display, I have one pixel with stuck red. Under normal use, I don't really notice it. If I'm watching a film, or something, then it can be irritating. However, with smaller pixel densities, you would notice dead pixels less and less as their physical size decreases.
Unless they significantly improve the production process, there are going to be a lot of TFT panels sold with "stuck" pixels -- ie. stuck bright red, bright green, bright blue, or dead.
Every manufacturer sets tolerances for how many dead pixels are acceptable. What percentage would be acceptable to you? 1% of 1600x1200 pixels is a lot different than 1% of 1024x768.
The cost of manufacture must be very high no matter what. A bad TFT screen cannot be fixed -- it has to be tossed in the trash. I am thankful that my Thinkpad's 1024x768 screen has no dead pixels, but I am dreading the thought of my next laptop purchase. In my opinion, 1 bad pixel is one too many. It's a shame that none of the manufacturers feel the same way.
Hey now my new Dell will look like my Nescape on Linux!! Whoo Hoo
Screen size and resolution, and really laptops in general, are like Frames-Per-Second, # Polygons, and such to business-types. They can't impress each other with their Voodoo 9000's and Razer mice, so they trick out laptops.
Business Guy 1: So then accounts puts out this spreadsheet of quarterly projected earnings, and they don't even bother to break it down into multiple sheets! I'm scrolling all over the place looking at it!
Business Guy 2: Really? Cause on my new laptop with 1600x1200 resolution, I was able to view the whole thing on one page.
Guy1: Well, that's great, but I bet it took forever to load with that 1 Meg video card your laptop has in it. Mine, on the other hand, has a full 4 Meg of video memory, plus 256 Meg of RAM. I can load the Powerpoint Org Chart presentation in no time!
Guy2: Too bad you've got that 2 Gig hard drive in there. Mine, on the other hand, has a full 10 Gig, not counting the extra 6 Gig drive I can put in my expansion bay.
I'm only half kidding here; I've actually seen scenes similar to this. It's actually pretty funny to watch two 40+ mid-level managers have a pissing contest to see who the CEO likes best.
.. a look at this website, made by one of my coworkers. I found it very helpful:
Check it out
Isn't it about time more browsers had this? Are there any plans for Mozilla to include this functionality?
With difference between the top end and bottom end of display technology, and the tendancy of (less skilled?) web designers to create "best viewed in NxN" sites, html viewing software neads to be deisgned to cope with these differences.
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