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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.
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
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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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!
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.
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?
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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.
You mention Windows, so I'll add that Win16 and Win32 have always drawn their GUI elements as a multiple of ::GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXBORDER) (and SM_CYBORDER). However, none of the drivers I've ever seen have ever taken them up on it... all drivers define those metrics as one pixel.
It's probably a self-defining problem: since most app writers are lazy or don't know this, they write THEIR apps to measure in pixels and not border-multiples or logical points. Any driver manufacturer that experimented with adjusting these metrics probably found 30% compliance and 70% noncompliance with all the apps out there.
Thus, you can see why device drivers would find it hard to decide what gets drawn bigger, and what doesn't.
I would imagine the same sort of "uneven compliance with standard methods" would appear in X, Motif, Qt, etc., but I would also imagine that mentioning this will invite lots of followups that say such things wouldn't happen to their beloved platforms.
[
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:
Well... originally the meanings were as follows:
(digital RGB)
CGA = 320x200x4 colors
EGA = 640x400x8 and lower
(analog RGB)
VGA = 640x480x16 colors
SVGA = anything better (even 640x480x256!)
Later, it was altered:
VGA = 640x480x* (any color depth)
SVGA = 800x600
XGA = 1024x768i (interlaced - IBM's original XGA)
EXGA = 1280x1024
The Unix modes 1152x864 and 1152x900 never got
those silly acronyms, since the Unix world is
typically more precise.
The SXGA, SXGA+, and UXGA labels are just
marketing B.S., moreso than the originals... at
least they were named after the video cards that
supplied those resolutions. (you just _knew_ if
a monitor was advertized as VGA it could _not_
display 800x600!)
FYI: Dell's versions are:
XGA = 1024x768
SXGA = 1280x1024
SXGA+ = 1400x1050 (wierd!)
UXGA = 1600x1200
A great place for history and info is the Winn L.
Rosch Hardware Bible (I think that's the right
spelling)
Later,
Kevin
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
I've noticed various weird display problems on Windows and Linux systems when the display resolution is smaller or larger than the system the application was developed on. Plus, some of the operating system provided graphics and fonts do not scale well. Are there any fixes for this problem? What happens when we get 4000x3000 displays?
;-), wavelets, whatever. Outline fonts too.
Yes, of course there are fixes. First, it's possible to do a decent job of scaling *anything*, even bitmap fonts and pictures, if you take a halfway decent approach to the problem. Hint: do you know what a sinc filter is? If not, you better find out fast, or you have no business writing a bitmap stretcher.
Second, a lot of the formats that are now becoming popular are inherently resolution-indenpendent, for example, any lossy image compression format - jpg (DCT), fractal encoding
We need to carry this kind of resolution-independent design all the way through the entire system - from Web design to automatic screen geometry to font rendering. A huge task, but it's underway.
Probably the biggest obstacle is entrenched page/screen designs that were for some incomprensible reason, done with the assumption that screen resolution would never change. For a good example of this, just go to Yahoo. Notice how it's increasingly taking on the appearance of a postage stamp in the middle of your screen. (Note: screen resolution doesn't just *increase* over time, it decreases too. If you don't believe me, check out IBM's Linux-on-a-wristwatch.)
Even in the face of thoughtlessness on the part of web designers, we can patch up the resulting stupidity with scaling techniques. Check out Andy Hertzfeld's Eazel project and you will see that somebody out there is actually thinking about this.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
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.
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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