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HDTV Has Ruined the LCD Market
alvin67 writes "Microsoft Evangelist Pete Brown rants about the lack of pixels available in today's LCD screens: 'OK, that's it. I've had it. I want my pixels, damn it! For a while, screen resolution has been going up on our desktop displays. The trend was good, as I've always wanted the largest monitor with the highest DPI that I could afford. I mean, I used to have one of the first hulking 17-inch CRTs on my desk. I later upgraded to a 21-inch job that was so huge, that if you didn't stick it in a corner, it took up the whole desk. It was flat-panel, though and full of pixels. It cost me around $1,100 at the time."
After some years of improvements, we've regressed, in Brown's opinion: "At the rate we were going for a while, we should have had twice or three times the DPI on a 24- or 23-inch screen. But nooo."
And it cost me an ass load 2 years ago.
When Windows Vista added better support for high DPI and scRGB for 16-bit-per-component color with higher gamuts, I was really looking forward to some awesome screens. Given that screens stopped being able to compete with response times and contrast, it seemed like the next thing for them to go for. Unfortunately, it's basically just been ignored.
Seriously, I used to hunt for pixels too, but after about 1280x1024 I stopped caring.
I don't like my desktop at much higher resolution than that, it becomes uncomfortable. I know gamers and drafters really want giant screens at massive resolutions, but besides them who else really wants it? 2560x2048 resolution doesn't exactly help me see my web pages or documents any better - in fact it can make them downright hard to see, so why do I need it?
Unfortunately for Pete Brown, I think more people fall into my category than do his, or he wouldn't have anything to complain about.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I've noticed something similar, pretty much every LCD monitor out these days at a reasonable price stops at 1920x1080, which is down from 1920x1200 a few years ago.
The flood of HDTVs on the market has basically locked everything at 1080p, with higher resolution displays nigh-upon impossible to find at a reasonable price, and nothing approaching a higher DPI is anywhere to be found except on mobile devices (which in a sense I can understand, but it's still disappointing.)
I guess it's no great surprise that in 2010 I am using a 1600x1200 display at work, which is the same that my laptop had in late 2001. Admittedly, I am using two...
But then I got two 30-inch displays and can't imagine needing more, although that's just me.
...Because I know you spend all day reading Slashdot instead of what you are supposed to be doing...
Would you please stop making disgusting sounds with your dentures???
Please?
I feel your pain. I have a 17" laptop screen that is 1920x1200. By that token a high dpi 30" screen should be a lot more than ~2500x1600
I would also love a second display for my laptop but good luck finding a desktop monitor of any size with the same DPI as the laptop. As a result I've got small windows and big windows.
Sheldon
I've always wanted the largest monitor with the highest DPI that I could afford.
Typical attitude of looking only at the numbers and thinking "more is better." While there is room for improvement, there are practical limits. For example, would you want a 50" display on your desktop? It would be rather impractical. How about a 30" monitor with 200,000,000 pixels of horizontal resolution. What would be the point, apart from requiring your graphics card to require its own nuclear power station and liquid nitrogen cooling? Your eyes would not be able to perceive the extra pixels.
Going much higher than current resolutions would be pretty counterproductive untill all our OSes and applications had completely resolution-independent interfaces, anyway.
... and then they built the supercollider.
What I do want is more vertical resolution. The 16:9 craze means today we buy displays that are physcially larger and have more pixels overall than ten years ago, yet do not provide any more area for vertical display. You still have to scroll down far too much. It would be nice if someone still made decent, affordable 4:3 displays; a 1600 X 1200 in 21" format is going to be a killer!
But where did all the cheap non wide-screen monitors go? You used to be able to pick up a nice 1280x1024 screen at a decent price, but now, it's all about wide-screen in the lower price bracket.
Why do we have to assume it's HDTV ruining things? Maybe there's a point of diminishing returns at which it makes more sense to focus on things like contrast ratios, refresh rates, viewing ratios and additional features. Maybe the average resolution is going down while size goes up because that's how consumers want to spend their money?
Maybe your average consumer or business just doesn't have that much need for a single display larger than 1920x1080 or so? In specialised applications multiple screens are frequently at least as useful, and I know many people who still find 1280x1024 perfectly adequate. Obviously at smaller sizes every additional pixel can be a big benefit, but this is less of an issue at desktop scales.
There are plenty of specialist screens with higher resolutions, but if 1920x1080 or so is a sweet spot for the average consumer - allowing 1080p video, two side by side pages, more than enough space to view any webpages etc - then higher resolutions won't benefit from economics of scale.
My 2.5 year old Samsung 275T monitor is currently retailing at the same location for appox $75 more than I paid for it at purchase. In 30+ years of building systems I think that may be a first.
(Freaking great monitor, btw.)
Some of this is of course due to currency fluctuations, I think... never seen a piece of hardware increase in price over time before.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
I agree with increasing DPI on a screen, to a point.
I find a 22" screen with 1680x1050 is perfect. The new 21.5" screens with 1920x1080 are a bit too "small" when dealing with XP and the native resolution.
Most business users I deal with still want 4:3 screens. 16:9 and 16:10 screens are far too short vertically. Many people still want to see a full page of text on a screen. Widescreen works well for spreadsheets and databases.
I would also like to see more screens with a lower DPI for older users. I have yet to set a 20", 21.5" or 22" screen at native resolution for older workers. Most tend to move to a ~1440x900 or even ~1280x800 from the 1680x1050 or 1920x1080. When I move to those resolutions, or any resolution that keeps the same aspect ratio, but is not the native resolution, the LCDs are blurry (even more troublesome for older users).
Not everyone watches movies on their computers all day, in fact, I would believe most people view more vertical than horizontal documents for the better part of the day - both at work and at home.
My monitor has ONE BIG PIXEL. It ain't easy to use but I get by.
The 2560 monitor that sells for $1200 or the 1920 monitor that sells for $200-300? the market has decided.
The 1080p standard is beneficial to both computer users and tv watchers in driving prices down.
1440p is probably the next stepping point thats 2736x1440, its less of a step than 2160p.
Yes, really. The 30" Apple has really high ppi.
Not an Apple fanboi, just sayin'
First, more pixels requires more graphics processing power. Next, more graphics processing power often means a new computer. Last, Microsoft makes it's money when people buy new computers (the only customers they really care about are the OEM's). Add this up - this may not be the story you think it is.
What bothers me most is that everything has gone widescreen. Displays used to be 4:3 (1.33 AR). My current two-year-old pair are 16:10 (1.6 AR). The current items are 16:9 (1.77 AR). With my dual-display setup I can look at four different source files at the same time, but what I'd really like is to be able to view more of one file.
I was running 1600x1200 15 years ago on fairly mid-priced equipment. One currently has to go quite high end to find that kind of vertical pixel count. I'd really like to be able to enjoy that again before my eyes rot out and I have to run 640x480.
My cell phone has a 265dpi display, yet my computer is stuck at one third of that. I'd love to see us move to quadruple-resolution displays, i.e., double the horizontal and vertical pixel counts, such that text is gorgeous but images can remain at their desired size without being resampled.
Display resolution and pixel pitch peaked back in 2001 with the introduction of IBM T220. Even now, no production display can top its resolution and pixel pitch.
Why aren't we all using WQUXGA, WHSXGA, or even WHUXGA display right now?
Simple, there's no demand for it.
Why isn't there any demand for it?
Because 90% of the consumers are still watching 480p DVD and DTV broadcasts.
Because lots of websites are still designed to be optimally viewing in 1024x768.
Because most operating systems and applications have their font sizes hardcoded (Windows 7 only allow system fonts to be enlarged by 150% while OSX cannot adjust its system font size at all).
The market is getting there. New 22" and 24" displays are coming out that have 1920x1080 (or 1200) resolutions, and recent 27" displays like on the latest iMac and a Dell 27" display have 2560x1440 (the 16:9 version of the 16:10 2560x1600 30" displays). You should be careful about some of these monitors, as many of them are large gamut displays that require calibration, and they're generally not going to be for gaming, as they're H-IPS panels. But they're really beautiful. I'm waiting for some detailed reviews on the new HP zr24w display - 1920x1200 (16:10 FTW!) with regular color gamut. I want the wide viewing angles, but I'm not _that_ picky about color. $425, I think.
I have a NVIDIA 9600GT, and it comes with outputs for not one but two, count 'em TWO dvi outputs. So I have two, not one but count 'em TWO Samsung P2270 monitors running (and I'm typing on one and watching TV through the TV tuner card on the other), although when I'm doing software development, a manual is on one, and the software is on the other (super handy). The P2270's are 22 inch (diagonal) and I have them set to the max resolution (1920x1080), so my actual resolution is 3840x1080. It doesn't hurt that the refresh is 2ms on these, or that the contrast ratio is 50000:1. I bought one of them about 2 years ago for 490, and bought another just after last Christmas for $188 (damn nice), after the old 17" panel died after 7 years in use and looked to be unfixable. Bonus: the new monitor uses 30% less power even though its 29% larger, the new monitor has a much faster refresh rate, and a better contrast ratio. When I watch HiDef digital (over the air), it is a *lot* better on these than on big (much bigger than these) screen TV's I've seen. I've had people gripe and complain! I try to explain that digital TV over the air (Wireless TV), is much higher resolution than what you get from cable or satellite as those two carriers compress the video and audio to fit, and also its analog, not digital. They don't want to hear it. (The grumble and complain and aren't happy, and try to tell me that its wrong to watch TV on a 1920x1080 computer monitor, especially a $188 one). Not happy, not happy at all!
If it was really just HDTV, we'd see 3840x2160 screens at maybe the 24" or 27" size. Instead, I think the primary factor is the operating system. Poorly scalable icons, widgets, and other elements of the UI. Websites too - many are either fixed width or simply horrible looking when stretched too wide. It's tedious to read Slashdot full screen on a large monitor because the text scrolls too far horizontally. Still, I long for the day when we can nearly eliminate antialiasing on fonts.
Some of these problems are non-trivial to solve. UI design is a lot easier when you can have pixel precision. SVG is only now being universally adopted and required re-doing icons in vector format.
Sure, some laptops have a higher DPI - I paid a premium on my Thinkpad to get a little better resolution. Yet I commonly see users with poor eyesight setting their LCD resolution below 1:1 to make everything bigger. Since XP lasted so long, there were only a limited number of ways to make it somewhat usable on a high DPI screen. Things like toolbars were still fixed in pixel size, though.
Many 22" screens are still 1680x1050, so not that many desktop displays have hit the 1080p size. On the other hand, Apple's 27" iMac is 2560x1440. Not that Apple will ship with blu-ray drives any time soon, so many movies will just be upscaled DVDs anyway. But 2560x1440 on a 20" screen? Most OSes would do pretty poorly with it (even Mac OS X).
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I have three 21" CRTs. My total resolution is 4800x1200. I can change the resolution to whatever I want.
Wanna know what I paid?
$150!
Hell, for another $150, I could have a six-screen setup. If my table/wall and my graphics cards would support it.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
they learned to never give your customers what they really want, just give them something barely adequate and a year later market something just incrementally better thus prompting consumers to buy again, rinse & repeat & rinse & repeat until you can afford that retirement castle on the mountain,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The problem with high DPI displays is bad software support. Two things need to happen for this to work:
1) Applications need to work properly with high DPIs.
2) The OS needs to do a good job scaling old applications that don't respect DPI. That may include lying to them about the resolution and DPI, and stretching the window.
For #1, we are getting better. But many modern apps *cough*iTunes*cough* completely botch it. In some cases text on buttons gets bigger but the button does not, so instead of "Configure" you get the top half of the letter C. Or maybe the text gets bigger, and it spaces just fine, but the column sizes still default incorrectly. It would be better if they just ignored DPI than supporting it half-way.
For #2, you basically need to scale the window and adjust the mouse coordinates to compensate. There's gonna be quirks, but it sure beats an app that is just too small to be usable. Also, scale it well (not bilinear!) so it isn't a blurry blob.
Making many assumptions, the human eye has about 500 to 600 megapixels of resolution.
But determining visual acuity is nontrivial. Lots of physics, physiology, and neuroscience enter into it.
Visual acuity depends on a number of physical limitations set by the optics of the lens of the eye as well as the sampling on the retina.
For example, the point spread function of the lens roughly matches the sampling of the retinal mosaic (well, within a factor of 3 or so). A nicely evolved system!
Our eyes' acuity are influenced by
- Refractive error (out of focus lens, often correctable by glasses or contacts)
- Size of the pupil (physical optics tells us that a wide open iris will reduce diffraction)
- Illumination (brighter scenes give more photons, and our neuroprocessing can do more
- Time of exposure to the field
- Area of the retina exposed
- State of adaption of the eye (night [scotopic] vs day [photopic] vision.
- Eye motion & object motion in scene
See http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html
For a good review of visual acuity, see:
http://webvision.med.utah.edu/KallSpatial.html
... and even the LCD TV market, is the lack of a guarantee of NO DEAD OR STUCK PIXELS. Very few displays have any pixel issues. The industry says that fewer than one percent have problems with any pixels. Yet when you read the warranty details, they will treat a few (usually somewhere from 3 to 8 depending on manufacturer and pixel location on the screen) bad pixels as not covered by the warranty. OK, so they are cheap skates and want to screw over the fewer than 1% of the buyers that luck out and get one of their lemons.
If the figure really is less than 1%, why not offer one of those "extended warranty"-like deals the retailers like to offer ... for a cost of say 3% to 5% of the purchase price ... but in this case an "absolutely zero dead or stuck pixels no matter what ... warranty"? If only 1% of units are bad, then they should make a killing at 3% to 5% of purchase price.
Of course, not everyone would buy that. But if I'm going to plunk down big dollars for a 76 cm 2560x1600 display, I sure don't want to get a lemon with a bad pixel. I'd pay the 5% more to be sure I don't get one.
They could even test units and segregate the stock, selling the flawless ones for more, and the flawed ones for a little less. Even if this price span is break even, this can attract more buyers ... some wanting the perfect units ... some wanting a discount. Come on you MBA bozos ... go after that market.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I dont understand why people settle for lower resolution LCDs
My fifty pound 22 inch 2048*1536 is the best...for taking a lot of space and weighing a lot.
Still, wouldnt trade it!
What I want to know is... why are hard drives stuck at 2TB? Did we reach some theoretical limit? Does the laws of physics start to fail at higher data densities? Don't get me wrong, I love my 2TB hard drive, but I want more!
I am d3matt
On a computer screen, I want as much resolution as possible! And.. even on my hdtv, I want as much resolution as possible. Even in my living room, watching a Bluray at 1080p, I still see the pixels from 10-12 feet away on the couch. Maybe I'm more picky than the average person.. or maybe I have better eyes (not really.. i wear contacts)...
But here's where I really get mad.. Half the people are posting that too high of resolution causes web pages to look too small.. or GUI's to look to funky.. That is where I have a problem! Why the hell don't we have vector graphics gui's by now? First, I blame Intel.. Intel sucks so bad at graphics that they cannot even run Aero properly.. still.. in 2010. Intel, your engineers are of average intelligence. And yet, your goddamn graphics chips are in half our computers. (Maybe some of you think Intel runs Aero fine.. but I'm still not happy with it.) Second.. WTF is Aero? It's a piece of shit GUI band-aid.. that's what it is. It adds like one 3d feature just so the dumbass consumer goes 'ohhh.. pretty candy'. Weren't we promised a vector-based GUI with Vista? So Microsoft, you suck too. Your management is incompetent and your programmers lack talent. Third.. Why the hell can't I take advantage of the contrast of a computer monitor and just have a black background? Why the hell am I pretty much forced with a white background and black text whether I'm running linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Apple, OS2, YourMom (an OS I wrote in like 5 minutes that's better than Windows 7.) Seriously.. every OS basically forces white background/black text.. Why not have vector-based black background with bright green text.. like in the 80's.. back when it was hilariously easy to read text on a crappy 14" CRT monitor? Fourth, fuck you both Firefox and Opera. You both should do a better job of seperating the CONTENT (read.. the fucking text) from the rest of the bullshit on the webpage. Let me, the viewer, decide what color I want for the background and text.. and figure out how to make it look halfway decent! IE, you don't even count because you are from Microsoft and therefore cannot innovate. Apple, do not think you're getting out of this.. You're still living in pixel land. Come on, Steve Jobs, force your overworked minions to develop the best goddamn vector graphics GUI in existence.. Then open the new OS to all platforms.. Then dominate the entire marketplace. Seriously.. the entire world will be scrambling to develop the highest resolution monitor.. Steve, if you don't do this, you have tiny balls. OMG, I almost forgot the monitor companies.. God you suck. I am using a Samsung 1920x1200 26" TV as my monitor right now.. Don't think I didn't notice you went from 16:10 to 16:9 behind my back.. I found the one TV on clearance that still had the 0:+1 more than everyone else.
So, imo, where the entire computer industry is screaming, "Look at me.. I'm soo great.. I have multitouch or I have a stupid 3d feature.. or I have 1080p!", remember that you still have a lot to do.. Please hurry up and get it done..
AMD, you get a free pass.
I have a lot more to bitch about.. but I'm busy.. and I only have so much karma to blow.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Do you know what causes the regression?
Phillip and Sony !
Unlike the great job Phillip / Sony team did for the CD, they have led a big let down on the LCD.
Sony didn't even want to go LCD - they thought LCD TV is just a temporary fad !
And Phillips? They pulled out of the LCD business (production side) altogether and sold their 50% shares to LG of Korea.
Which resulted in the Koreans (Samsung and LG) became the de-facto leaders of LCD manufacturing business and there were no competition for couple of years.
With no competition there was no urge of improvement. All the Koreans were doing was building larger and larger plants to produce larger and larger panels, while still giving us UTTER CRAP in terms of resolutions.
It took them like 5 years before they even gave us the HD 720i resolution, 3 more years before the 1080i resolution and another 3 more years before HD 1080p became available !
And the Japanese aren't making progress either. Toshiba / Sharp / Panasonic were all very late into LCD. Instead of concentrating on LCD, the Japanese were exploring other options and they wasted almost half a decade before realize that LCD is the way to go.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
how many pixels X pixels is the standard human retina? that is, is there a limit we can appreciate while our noses are less than a meter away?
4:3 is usable in 21" size, maybe even in 24", but you were not be able to place a larger 4:3 monitor into an ergonomic position: either your desk have to be too low, or the top of the display will be on too high.
Btw. there are 16:10 displays. 16:9 is really for TV, not for PC. Also if you rotate a 1920 X 1200 display into vertical position you get what you want.
> Microsoft Evangelist, Pete Brown rants about the lack of pixels available in today's LCD screens: 'Ok, that's it. I've had it. I want my pixels, damn-it! [...] "At the rate we were going for a while, we should have had twice or three times the DPI on a 24 or 23 inch screen. But nooo.
It's all about the market. TV makers want to make HDTV popular and then sell bigger screens with more pixels for premium prices; that is called planned obsolescence.
Which reminds me:
Ok, I've had it. I want my advanced OS, damn!
We should be using Linux everywhere, lots of virtual workspaces, instant user switching, copy-on-select, paste on single-click, focus on mouseover, longer lives for PCs... But nooo!
And don't forget blacks and response time too.
When I started university in 1981, I wrote all my papers and assignments either by hand or on a typewriter. By the time I finished grad school, I was using Microsoft Word on a Mac Plus. I liked being able to easily make changes to the doc, but I found one huge negative: with the word processor I couldn't see as much of the document while I was writing. With paper, I could set several pages on the desk and refer to them frequently with quick glances. With the word processor, I could see only a few paragraphs and switching between pages was distracting.
I noticed that this had a big effect on the flow of documents I wrote. I found it was much more difficult to construct a long chain of reasoning without being able to easily review at a glance what I had previously written. Same applies when writing software: it's a lot easier to write coherent code if you can see more context.
Displays eventually got better, but in my view, 1600x1200 is just barely tolerable. 1920x1200 is a big step up when writing text, since it nearly two full pages can be put on the screen, but displaying three or four pages would make a huge difference and is really what I want.
1920x1080 isn't the same thing at all: the 1080 vertical pixels just aren't enough to display a full page vertically. I would much rather work on a 1600x1200 monitor than 1920x1080.
I don't think more DPI is really going to make my ssh terminal session look much different.
Got Code?
Also if you rotate a 1920 X 1200 display into vertical position you get what you want.
I'll second that. I keep a second monitor, rotated to 1200x1920, dedicated to web browsing on my main system.
It totally rocks, I hardly ever have to scroll. However, I am constantly reminded that far too many web designers have their heads firmly stuck in a box of about 800x600 and do the multiple page thing forcing me to click "next" every couple of paragraphs and leaving around half of my screen wasted on empty space.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Frankly for most people the existing 'HDTV' resolution has more than enough pixels
Yeah and 640k was enough for everyone.
No sig for you!!
between a 300dpi printed sheet of paper, and a 1200dpi glossy magazine page? Most people can, pretty easily. By comparison, the standard 24" WUXGA monitor is a pathetic 94dpi.
The IBM T220 (22" @ 3840 x 2400, released 2001) was 204 dpi, and looked glorious. Modern phone screens are 250-270dpi, so we can potentially manufacture a 24" 5230 x 2940 screen, and it would look amazing, like a quality printed brochure but with full interaction, though still less than anyone with 20/20 vision can perceive.
This would be hugely useful for any number of visual-oriented industries (pre-press, photography, cinema, medical, data exploration etc), and a pretty large number of geeks too. What's stopping us? (Hint: it's not graphics cards - even cheap cards can manage 3840x2400 these days. It's idiot consumers who say "I want low & chunky resolution, otherwise my text is too small to see").
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I dont care about bigger screens, I want surround visual/sound virtual googles
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
YES!!!! mod parent up!
I've been sticking with a 4 year old laptop at work (IT usually gets their pick of the hardware, fact of life) Mainly for the 4:3 (or close to it) screen. I strongly agree, that wide screen is worse for viewing scrolling pages, which is lots of my work.
i love having and RDP window of 1024x768 without having to scroll, and being able to see my main taskbar still!
wide screen and i would loose this functionality.
QUESTION: is a 19" wide screen actually less pixels than an 19" std ratio??? meaning is it cheaper to make, less raw material??? letting manufactures sell us less for the same price?
-me
PS ok i also want the serial port in the old laptop, which seems hard to get these days, but that's off topic
Those who can, do.
Why I remember when we had 320x200 in 2 colors (black and green), the "graphics engine" produced only text, and we LIKED it. Why, that was a huge improvement over the previous generation, the teletype. The young these days. Pampered and always complaining...
Many monitors come with a rotatable stand, and most graphics drivers can rotate their displays. Have you tried a 9:16 portrait view yet? If you work on portrait-aspect documents, it really works well.
Except for ClearType - that doesn't work quite so well when rotated. Of course, at a higher resolution, ClearType wouldn't be necessary...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The bulk of the market consists of laptop users now. That means addressing quality in portable displays, which has been a big issue. The accuracy of a typical 8 year old laptop display is horrendous.
Now we have low-power LED backlit LCD displays that are more accurate than most other laptop displays made before them. And the situation is so good that I can plug a cheap Hanns-G desktop display into my MacBook and the colors will match!
Also, remember that big problems with LCD in general were dynamic range (lack of contrast ratio) and speed. We've seen improvements in both in the last few years.
Anyone notice that a *good* crt looks way better than nearly any LCD. Ive stopped buying LCDs and went back to CRT... sounds crazy but they just look sooooo much better.
One down side is that a mediocre CRT is really bad while usually a mediocre LCD is acceptable.....and since most people buy mediocre equipment most people saw poor CRTs and have no idea what they are missing..even ten years after they've essentially left the market.
A third area of improvement in LCD quality is viewing angle.
Agreed - I'm using a pair of 1600x1200 20" LCDs and as much as I'd like to upgrade, there's just nothing out there which really feels like an upgrade for sensible money. Oh well!
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
The 16:9 craze means today we buy displays that are physcially larger and have more pixels overall than ten years ago, yet do not provide any more area for vertical display.
A 19" 'wide screen' 16:9 is smaller (less sq in or cm) than a 19" 4:3.
As usual, advertising trumps.
Frankly for most people the existing 'HDTV' resolution has more than enough pixels, to get full benefit from increased number of pixels you would need a larger screen and sit closer to it.
He's not complaining about HDTV resolution. He is complaining about HDTV resolution slowing down the R&D for computer displays because everyone wants to sell "HD" displays now instead of computer LCDs. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but there is definitely a slow down in increasing computer display DPI.
As it is, reading text on these high DPI screens is hard enough, and I often find myself increasing the default font size. This issue is particularly pronounced in laptop screens.
As many others have stated, this is due to poor implementation of software/hardware for adjusting to the display DPI. In a realistic world, 10pt font would be 10pt no matter where it was. But the truth is most computer displays have their DPI settings incorrect because the display device doesn't tell the computer whatever it is hooked up to what DPI it has. Furthermore it wasn't till recent OSes that the OS has started to get DPI scaling correct everywhere. WinXP had DPI settings, but lots of things wouldn't look right. In short, the way it should work is your OS sets the DPI automatically based on your display, and a 10pt font will appear the same size no matter what the display device. Instead we have been dragging on with low DPI hacks (low dpi designed) such that people want to stick with the lower resolutions since the higher resolutions don't look right.
What I do want is more vertical resolution.
Rotate a 16:9 display to it's side. Now you have more vertical pixels.
Windows XP is running on 80% of the PC's and has 32 pixel icons that demand a lo-res display. The average retail of a PC is US$500, again demanding a lo-res display. Sorry that your own company ruined the PC industry by illegally monopolizing it and then failing to move it forward. App developers have to design for XP, even 10 years later, because that's when the PC got frozen in time. The lack of progress should not be a mystery to a Microsoft employee but the fact that it is should scare all of your customers. Or at least those whose PC's are working today, not rebooting their anti-virus scanners.
Pivot!
Get a pivoting display mounting arm, anchor it to your desk and off you go. Most LCDs support VESA-compliant mounts, so it doesn't matter what sort of stand the screen is bundled with.
In portrait orientation, a 16:9 (e.g. 1080p) widescreen is great for document work since you can see an entire page on-screen, and surprisingly good for a lot of other applications too.
You get much better use of screen real-estate, partly on account of window titlebars and toolbars being narrower. ClearType doesn't work as designed but I still like to have it enabled.
This has nothing to do with HDTV. Manufacturers saw the introduction of OLED over 5 years ago and knew right away that it was the end of life for LCD. They feared OLED because it’s introduction strongly indicated that all the research that went into LCD was a waste of money. They had very little incentive to put real research dollars into LCD from this point on, because they already knew, and had talked publically, about OLED being it’s replacement.
Given how well the manufacturing process for OLED has evolved in the past year, I’m pretty sure the end of life of LCD displays as an entire technology is less than a few years away. I’m sure it’ll have the same painful drawn out period where it costs more than LCD for no good reason other than to recapture research dollars before it becomes mainstream and completely kills LCD.
Lets just all hope that OLED becomes affordable in much less time than LCD did.
When you have a name like that on Microsoft Windows, how is anyone supposed to even know something better can and does exist? I was stumped to figure out what MS would call it. After some googling, it turns out it isn't referred to as Ludicrous Color (:-O!!!) but "Beyond True Color" or "Brilliant Color". Reference . Anyone know more than I do?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Oh quit complaining. If you want your precious vertical space go buy an iPad to do your websurfing. Otherwise, rotate your monitor 90 degrees and now your 16:9 is a 9:16
Fuck this moronic pandering to people who want to do nothing with a computer but watch 1080p videos: I want my vertical resolution back. Stop stealing pixels from the top and bottom and tacking them onto the sides where I don't need them for document work.
They're on the screen of my HTC Touch Pro 2 (259 DPI), and other smart phones like the Nexus One (252 DPI).
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Actually, it seems most people have lost resolution. I had an crt that actually supported 1600x1200 back in 97. Today, a 22" lcd has a resolution of 1680X1050, thats only 90% of the pixels and its 13 years later. Tell me thats not messed up.
I have low vision and the pixel density is very important. I have to a lot of external magnification to see. When my Gateway 22" Sony based crt monitor bit the dust last year, I began searching for a replacement. So far nothing has come close. The best I have found is an Apple iMac 22. I keep hoping someone will produce a higher density.
That's just an issue with font sizes being badly designed. If you could get a larger display with better fonts you could do more at once more effectively.
Yes!!! I completely agree. I'm typing this comment on a Thinkpad T43P with a BEAUTIFUL 15" 1600x1200 IPS screen and you just can't buy those anymore. Not only has the resolution gone down, but the displays aren't IPS quality either. The requirements of a TV screen are quite different from a computer - vertical pixels are much more important when you're mostly reading vertical documents and want to see as much of the page as possible.
As you noted, OSes do a bad job of it. Windows 7 is the best I've seen so far and it still need works, not to mention that many, perhaps even most, apps don't deal with it since they don't use the new APIs.
Another aspect is the difficulty in driving high resolution displays. It takes a TON of bandwidth. We are now getting connectors that can handle it, HDMI 1.4 does pretty high resolutions as does DP 1.2. However these are both new. DVI wasn't really suited to ultra high resolutions. That IBM display required FOUR DVI connections to drive it, and it could still only operate at 41Hz because of bandwidth limitations. So really it was a very infeasible situation. For a consumer display, you need a single cable that will handle things, and a single video transmitter that can drive it.
Yet another aspect is memory. More pixels = more VRAM needed. I suppose that isn't such a big deal if you take a modern high memory 3D card and use it with an older non-accelerated OS. However, modern OSes that use the graphics hardware to accelerate things and do composition need more VRAM. For a 1920x1200 monitor you need like 128MB of VRAM minimum. Means for that IBM monitor you are talking 512MB minimum, maybe more. That's doable on modern cards, but again only fairly recently at least for more midrange/low end stuff.
Finally there's cost. More pixels mean more transistors mean more money. So unless there's a good reason, you don't want to pack in a ton of extra pixels. You don't build an ultra high rez monitor "For future proofing," because it'll cost a ton.
So while things are starting to come together for higher DPI monitors, it really is pretty recent and still not all that wide spread. Let's see how things are in 5 years when we have more OS support and widespread availability of graphics cards with high bandwidth connectors and lots of RAM. Maybe then there's more reason to up DPI.
Also, it isn't like computer monitors can't exceed HD. 30" monitors have been around for quite some time and they are 2560x1600. Also LG recently rolled out a 27" panel that is 2560x1440. Dell, NEC, and Apple are all making monitors with it, maybe others too.
Sitting on one corner of my desk at work I have two 21" wide screens mounted in portrait mode running 1050x1600. For code and document work it's really useful. For anything else it can be problematic. But then it's a work machine, so I don't really game on it.
On the other I have two 19" 1280x1024 monitors attached to a laptop and port replicator. This set up is useful for general stuff and testing.
Yes, I have four monitors on my desk. Five if you count the screen on the laptop.
I think I need professional help. :)
I quite like my 23" 2048x1152 Dell SP2309W monitor I picked up on sale for less than $200. Of course I'd love a higher quality, bigger, higher resolution, higher DPI monitor, but the cost just isn't worth it.
But yes, BIGGER than 1920x1080 is better, and though this doesn't quite have 1200 lines of horizontal resolution (being 16:9, not 16:10 which would have been 2048x1280--and which I would have preferred) is DEFINITELY better!
You can get high gamut monitors all over the place. The problem is that very few apps deal with colour management. Windows Vista and 7 have powerful colour management built in so they can be aware of the gamut of different devices and let apps know. However most apps don't check, and even some of those that can don't by default (Firefox can, but doesn't unless manually told to).
Now if you mean panels with greater bit depth for smoother colour gradients, those are here though pretty scarce. The problem is that DVI doesn't handle more than 8-bits per pixel. So to do anything higher you had to hack something with using a dual-link cable sending two signals or what not. However DP supports high bit natively. As such, they are coming, but slowly as it is fairly hard to do. Heck many panels are still 6-bit panels that are dithered to 8-bit. NEC has some new monitors comming out, the PA series, that are 10-bit panels and will do that with DP input. Windows 7 has full support for that, though I don't know how many graphics cards do.
1600x1200 in 4x3? Meh.
I am sticking with my almost 5 year old Dell Latitude D810 because I have 15.4" 1920X1200 WUXGA screen on it. This 'laptop' is big and heavy, but the screen and the keyboard are great for programming.
You can't handle the truth.
I've been sticking with a 4 year old laptop at work (IT usually gets their pick of the hardware, fact of life) Mainly for the 4:3 (or close to it) screen.
I used to believe this, too, and then I actually started traveling with a laptop. The shorter, wider screen is a *lot* more convenient when you are, for example, traveling in an airplane, as you can open the lid farther, and as an added bonus, the whole thing ends up being more stable.
No, IMHO, for laptops, widescreen is actually much better (and I say this as a software developer, who's job is to read and write large volumes of text on a day-to-day basis).
You've got lots of choices in this regard. If 1200 pixels vertical is you thing, which I think is quite sensible I like it, then get a 24-28" 16:10 LCD. They are extremely common. While computers have HDTV 16:9 screens as well, there re plenty of 16:10 ones. In the 24-28" category, they tend to be 1920x1200. It's like your old 1600x1200 with some extra room at the edge. For games or the like that only support 4:3, it will display 1600x1200 nicely with bars on the sides. You also discover that at 24" 1920x1200 equals two letter sized documents side by side, no resizing.
Above that there's the 30" monitors, they are 2560x1600. So they've got as much vertical rez as yours has horizontal. Lots and lots of work space there.
However, maybe vertical is really the prime concern, you need tons. No problem, if you buy a quality 24-20" monitor, I recommend NEC's 90 or PA series, it'll come with an adjustable stand that features rotation. Simply raise the screen up, and rotate it 90 degrees. You then tell your OS the display has changed rotation (if you install the display's software it will often do this for you) and you are good to go. Have 1900 or 2560 vertical rez.
In general though, it is nice to have them wider than high. Turns out that matches how we see, we have a wider horizontal FOV and vertical. I agree you want a reasonable amount of vertical pixels, however I find 1920x1200 works great.
You can have what you want, just not if you want to be a cheapskate and buy a bargain basement 1440x900 19" display.
MAN! You coksuckers just can't get your shit together, can you? You're so fucking lame...
My several year old Dell 17" Laptop has 1920x1200 resolution (133 dpi?). Always wanted a great desktop monitor, but they all look so fuzzy. 1920x1080 is not nearly high enough on a 24" screen.
As someone who edits a lot of documents I can not understand why anyone would pick a 4:3 screen over a 16:9. I very rarely work with one document open at a time. The extra width aids multi-tasking. It's just short of having 2 4:3 screens side by side which is also a great help when doing pretty much anything other than gaming. I can read one document while editing another, compare documents side by side, or even edit two documents at once. This is a huge step up from what I used to do on my old 21" 4:3 monitor.
As for your desire of a 1600x1200 21" screen. Why not get a 1920x1200 26" screen (16:10)? You get the same vertical resolution, same physical vertical height, same DPI, AND you also have the added space around for doing whatever the hell you want. To top it all off you get to watch high-def movies at their native resolution too.
I don't know that you can attach a true megapixel number to human vision. Sorry, I don't have some study to reference, but like you said, the area of the retina is important. Eyes tend to have more detail in the area where they focus vs periphery vision. And if you notice, your eyes dart around all the time gathering information and stitching the whole scene together into one highly detailed photo.
They probably figured by constantly improving the refresh rate and increasing dpi, they'd eventually run into the uncertainty principle. So if we have to stop then anyway, why not stop now? We're already beyond the ability of (most) human eyes. Heck, why are we confined to just using the visual color spectrum? I want my monitor to display infrared!
. . . Actually, seeing body heat would add a new insight into porn. Hmmmmmmmm
a 1600 X 1200 in 21" format is going to be a killer!
It is. I have one. It's a CRT from a Dell that's got to be nearing a decade old now. Of course, I can't use it at that resolution, because I have two monitors and the brand new, fairly high-end LCD next to it, with the same vertical height, has far less vertical pixels. So either I have some really awkward L-shaped desktop, or I keep my big CRT at a measly 1280x1024
It's tedious to read Slashdot full screen on a large monitor because the text scrolls too far horizontally.
Then split your 1920-pixel-wide monitor into two 960-pixel-wide windows. In Windows XP, for example, control-click two browser windows in the taskbar, right-click one, and choose one of the Tile options.
The 16:9 craze means today we buy displays that are physcially [sic] larger and have more pixels overall than ten years ago, yet do not provide any more area for vertical display. You still have to scroll down far too much.
You can orient 16:9 monitors vertically in windows 7.
"On a computer screen, I want as much resolution as possible! And.. even on my hdtv, I want as much resolution as possible. Even in my living room, watching a Bluray at 1080p, I still see the pixels from 10-12 feet away on the couch. Maybe I'm more picky than the average person.. or maybe I have better eyes (not really.. i wear contacts)..."
Really that is shenanigans worthy. 12 feet away and you see pixels??? Just how big is your TV?
I have 20:15 vision and pixels are invisible at 5 feet on my 40" TV (I just broke out a measuring tape).
My monitor has ONE BIG PIXEL. It ain't easy to use but I get by.
Actually that's just the disk activity light.
Most people I know run at resolutions much lower than their screens can handle. Why? Demographically, America is old, and our collective vision is getting worse. I know a CTO who has 2 20" flatscreens that she runs at 640x480 each. Blame shitty UI design if you want, but when people want big fonts and clearly are tolerating some blocky pixels, where's the incentive? Personally, I'd rather see lower power, lower cost, better color (like the new yellow pixel), than my DPI going to 11.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I have a pair of 20" at 1600x1200 as well, they go great rotated to portrait layout and placed on both sides of a 2560x1600 screen.
1600x1200 + 2560x1600 + 1200x1600
Seriously my iMac screen makes all the other monitors on my desk look like crap even if they look fine by themselves. It's especially noticeable when dragging a window from one to the other. Bigger and higher res is always appreciated but the biggest thing I notice is how bad the brightness and contrast of other monitors is even with the settings maxed out and the color profile customized.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
My desktop has a 19" CRT running at 1600x1200 (105dpi). The main reason I've not switched to LCD is because if I want the same resolution, I'd have to get a larger screen. Sorry, but I'm not giving up triple-digit DPI for anything. In fact, I've seen some 21" CRTs on eBay that can do 2048x1536, and I'd rather get one of those and upgrade to 120dpi than downgrade to double-digit DPI. If I ever get an LCD for my desktop, it'll be because I've ripped the screen out of a 17" laptop with a 1900x1200 screen and modified it to be able to plug into my video card.
Low-DPI screens suck.
I guess I do more remote admin stuff on my laptop. Looking at the side dock (or whatever its called) feature of win 7 (or widget in other OS's) a big enough wide screen may be OK for some stuff. For me remote in to one system to remote in to another, the std ratio is better. Yes in Windows world that happens, especially with VM's.
As for wide screen being easier to travel with, i guess i never noticed. I tote my 4:3 big screen laptop every day to and back, and frequently on the road/air. I've usually got other cables (console and cross over and such) plus other bits and such that the standard ratio screen size laptop has not been really noticeable for me.
Of course my situation my be non-typical.
Those who can, do.
Yours.Newsletter.Subscribe(true);
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I often VNC/RemoteDesktop/etc into machines that have 1024 vertical resolution, so, yeah 1200 native is a MUST for me.
Scrolling around a virtual screen sucks if you don't HAVE to.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
My "old-ish" eyes can still see hi-res screens just fine (actually one of the reasons I have put off getting the LASER eye-job... I would love to see distance again without glasses, but I usually sit in front of a screen)
My Mid-80's dad also wants an Nx1200 screen... because it divides evenly into a crisp Mx600 screen for the non-jaggy "big-print" version screen.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I didn't understand what the problem was at first so this is what I get from the article:
If there wasn't a market for LCD TVs all LCD monitor producers would be EXCLUSIVELY focused in desktop/laptop/handheld monitors.
Because there is a usability limit in the size of monitors for desktop/laptop/handhelds, most of the progress would go on making them better (higher resolution, lighting quality etc).
Rather, thanks to the TV market, the technology is pushed in the direction of larger displays with shitty resolutions.
Yes there are desktop monitors with higher resolutions, but they are expensive because there is no competition in that market, yes competition in that market will grow, but only after the HDTV market gets saturated, take a number and wait.
But... the future refused to change.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
for SD/HD video, photos, side-by-side pages, single-page portrait, and it is fine for development and browsing if the display is large enough. For smaller displays though, there isn't enough vertical resolution. Making things worse, 16:9 is bad enough on the desktop, but especially obnoxious in notebooks. At approximately phi, it is also a nice all around pleasant ratio.
It is unfortunate that some marketing jerk recognized that higher aspects give you less space for the diagonal Inch. 16:9 displays are only good for one thing--16:9 video. They have too little vertical resolution for side-by-side pages, are too narrow in portrait, and are extremely wasteful while viewing SD video or photos. You also need an enormous display to have enough vertical resolution for simple web browsing.
If widescreen video is not important, another aspect ratio worth considering would be 14:10, as sqrt(2) is optimal for pages / columns / portrait. See paper size.
Sadly, 16:9 will probably win out in the end just like the awful TN displays did.
I sit at 2.5 - 3ft from my monitor.
At that distance even 100 dpi is kind of small, you can't see individual pixel, so what does more resolution buy you? Bragging rights?
If you want to have higher DPI you can get a Dell U2711 with 2560x1440 crammed into a small space. I guarantee if the old codger ranting had one of these the first thing he would do is crank up the size of everything in the OS so he could see it. So again what is the point?
In a world where there is a cost and tradeoff for everything, it makes sense to have DPI of your display stop near the same point typical visual acuity does, for typical viewing distance.
If you are running higher DPI monitors and then cranking the interface size in the OS, you are just wasting resources.
You need more bandwidth in connectors to drive it, you need more transistors for the pixels (higher cost and power draw) and if you game you need MUCH more powerful graphics cards.
It's just the inverse of the single-pixel camera. Nothing a little compressive sensing won't fix.
My buddy has several of IBM T221/T221 and Viewsonic displays (they are sometimes available on eBay) and
Electronic CAD programs look awesome on them.
Google Earth (registered version) looks gorgeous.
You can look at 6MP photos without any scaling, and they look better than on paper.
2 pages side by side of PDF look about right on such display and pretty much look like paper.
SupCom and TA looks and plays great.
UT2004 works on it as well, looks great. BTW, if you have 200dpi then FSAA is not necessary anymore, it is just a crutch for poor people with crappy monitors.
They are also heap of trouble since they have 4 single link DVI inputs and some insane configurations because of that. (For instance one monitor shows as two 1920x2400 monitors etc).
I am quite happy with my 30" Dell but I would be much happier if it was 200dpi. Especially that my dSLR is 14MP so I cannot even see the pictures without scaling.
For years my eye doctor consistently told me I'd have to stop using computers because it was hurting my eyes so much. Since I had aspirations of becoming an air traffic controller (radar, not tower) I knew I needed to change this. I replaced my computer monitor with a 42 1080p display and set it several feet from where I sit (around 4feet, I think). According to my doctor, my eyes have improved dramatically since then, as I am no longer focusing on something so close. My prescription gets weaker every time I go in to the office.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Not aspect or resolution, but color reproduction should be the next focus. LCD screens don't come close to the old CRT I just discarded, which didn't come close to the color reproduction of a glossy magazine, which in turn is laughable compared to the view out of a window.
The 24-inch 600dpi display he so desperately wants requires a resolution of 12,000 x 7,500 pixels. A 600dpi, 24-bit colour 12,000 x 7,500 @ 60Hz display requires a 129.6Gbps communications bandwidth, which well and truly exceeds any (currently available) display bus connectivity.
HDMI 1.4 has a maximum video bandwidth of 8.16Gbps. Even a 4-lane DisplayPort connection has a maximum bandwidth of only 17.2Gbps. It's not HDTV that's limited the progress of desktop display resolutions, it's the lack of a decent high-bandwidth display communications link.
All this is academic, though. How many people would *really* be able to tell the difference between a 96dpi and 200dpi display on their desktop (IBM makes 200dpi displays, by the way), let alone a 600dpi display.
Trolling this guy is so fucking simple ... check out my comments on his site.
Have you guys noticed he owns an amazing pedo-smile? http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=spot_the_pedo
Yeah, I'm bored.
Autostereoscopic (i.e., 3D without Glasses) type of displays is why we want large screens with high resolution.
Both Lenticular and Parallax Barrier autostereoscopic displays provide additional viewpoints at the expense of resolution. The more resolution you have, the more your 3D image looks like a hologram that you can walk around.
This is why you see displays like the Synthagram (9 viewpoints, coarse lenticular screen superimposed on ~ 3000x4000 LCD) or the now discontinued Sharp 3D LCD (similar principle) which you would not really want in your living room versus very nice looking 3D prints (48+ decent looking viewpoints enabled by a 1440 dpi print and a fine lenticular screen). Geeky technical details aside, the more resolution you have, the better looking "glasses free" 3D you can enable on a monitor.
I realize that this is a true niche right now, but with 3DTVs making it to market, and the technology actually making it possible, we should see these type of displays in the next 5-10 years (sooner, I would hope, but things rarely happen so nicely in the real world).
Pixel density beyond 120 DPI is beyond the limit of the human eye. Better to spend your money on a larger monitor with accurate color saturation.
Both Microsoft and Apple are probably partly to blame here for failing to add resolution independence to their operating systems (which they've both promised for years). Who wants an extremely high DPI display when you can't scale up your Operating System so that it's usable?
or best buy. They have an unconditional return policy. Oh, you want it from newegg.com for 70% of the cost of buying it in town? Doesn't work like that...
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2002 called, they want their complaint back. Seriously. No. One. Targets. XP. Anymore.
Electrical tape works wonders, you know.
Put a strip of it on each side of your 16:9 monitor, and the dimensions are so much easier to deal with.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I bought a 19" Sony LCD five or six years ago that's 1280x1024. That's 86 DPI if my math is right.
Current LCDs with this resolution are shipping in a max. 19" form factor. So for that resolution the worst-case DPI has remained constant.
The next highest (popular) resolution is 1440x900 available in 19" for a DPI of 89.
After that is 1600x900 on a 20" panel for a DPI of 92.
Next is 1680x1050 on a 22" panel for a DPI of 90.
Next is 1920x1080 on anything from a 21.5" to 27" panel. The most popular is 23" which yields a DPI of 96.
Next is 1920x1200 on anything from a 24" to 28" panel. The most popular is 24" which yields a DPI of 94.
Are we sure DPI has gotten lower over time? Seems roughly constant across all native resolutions, unless I just screwed up the math.
And overall I want more screen estate, before dealing with crazy high definition.
Though I'd prefer to have a monitor that can display a game in high-def without anti-aliasing the living sin out of it.
I don't like the way it looks. I want to see the shrunk smbc-comics icons at a scale where the text is legible... I dont want to be able to see the pixels in the letter f, and no I don't want to anti-alias it.
We've moved the responsibility of making text look right from the monitor back to the GPU or CPU depending. It's a cludge fix, and the right way to make this happen is in monitor land. Antialaising is taking up all of the memory of a 4x or 16x megapixel monitor, without providing a great looking picture, not shabby, but it has issues. Really AA leaves blurry letters. it's better than chunky letter, but high definition is the way to go..
The other spot, is that High definition monitors lead to high definition TV's that can be used as monitors. And a monster workspace can be pretty awesome to deal with. So when I can buy a 40" monitor with 200 dpi resolution for a months pay I will.. Till then I'll just keep spending ~$200 at a time for ~20% upgrades.
Storm
To solve this issue I have 1 monitor in landscape (games, icons, taskbar/sidebar, IDEs, spreadsheets, etc.) and the other in portrait (browser, Word, non-IDE text, etc.)
The whole point of the two monitors is to have a proper aspect ratio for the proper task.
On the laptop I had to resort to moving the taskbar to the left and hiding it.
For 99% of people there is no driving need to have much more than we currently have on the screen sizes available. For moving graphics, anti-aliasing the res we have looks plenty good enough. Throwing more pixels at the problem is going to use a lot more bandwidth and RAM to process them...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You can zoom anything very easily irrespective of the program you use. I don't know whether it is the standard setting, but I hold the control-key down and scroll with the scroll wheel of my mouse. If that doesn't work for you, pay a visit to System Preferences>Seeing>Zoom options and then the last option.
Bert
To all of the people complaining about the terrifying specter of higher resolutions:
1. Relax, no one is going to take away your lower resolution monitor. Those will always be available. Those of us who want higher resolutions will have to pay extra for them. We're expect that.
2. Some people use computers to do something besides browse web pages and use MS Office. If you're a typical Photoshop user or otherwise involved in graphics either professionally or as a hobby, no resolution is high enough. If I could get a 36" inch screen with a resolution ten times higher than what I have today, I'd sell my firstborn for it.
3. Learn how to set your DPI properly and how to adjust the default font size. Most applications let you enlarge documents easily, too.
4. Go to an optometrist and have your damn eyeglass prescription updated. Odds are my vision is at least as bad as yours -- 20-200, for crying out loud -- but I've had my eyes examined in the last decade, so my glasses actually work properly.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I want to see a LOT of information at the same time without having to tab around and flip back and forth between viewing overlapping windows because my display is too limited to see everything at once. I honestly don't care about DPI (I just lean in when I need to see something smaller), but I care heavily about pixel count, otherwise known as "screen real estate". Inches are not a measure of usable screen real estate.
Sure, I'm a programmer and want to see lots of source code, documentation, wiki pages, etc, all at once, but even "normal" computer users have their email windows, IMs, facebook, etc, open while surfing the web or do other "normal" things. Keeping a glancing eye over to the other stuff is far easier than again having to tab around to everything.
Don't any of you people play Quake anymore?
The 16:9/16:10 trend, is the worst thing it could ever happen to programmers (or similar computer usage users).
The other day I went to my local computer shop and I asked for the biggest monitor with the biggest amount of vertical pixels (24").
At that time, I knew a 1920x1200 Samsung model T240-HD existed. All the time, they were showing me "1080" vertical resolution models. The third time I got that answer FROM A COMPUTER SHOP (not a mass consumer electronics dealer), I was forced to say, a bit outloud (on purpose), "1080 resolution is for 'poor' people!". Some of the other customers had to laugh, because they felt I was kind of right. At the end, I just went to another shop where I got the LAST monitor they had on the main shop window. I didn't mind. I'm now the happy user of a 16:10 monitor. Showing 1920x1200 pixels.
I wish something like "1920 x 1440" existed. That would be just wonderful...
On the other had, I have NO USE for the integrated TDT decoder. If I'm using my PC I can't see TV with it!!! Now I feel "computer usage and resolution" as a marginal feature of a typical TV set... gosh...
BTW: I was in Japan 5 months ago and the DPI I observed on the displays of the mobile phones sections, was JUST INCREDIBLE. When you compared these displays thoroughly against the plastic mock-ups counterparts (there are TONS of this stuff), boy, it was HARD to know which one was a sticker and which one was a real display... I WANT THIS resolution for my screen also! For all the screens that surround me!
And I also want antialias for my fonts, even having a high DPI number!! Once you combine both methods (japanese mobile phone screens showed antialias), you don't want anything else...
Greetings
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Eh, you might want to consider if there is perhaps another reason that they want you to press next... (*reloads his banners*)
*= Well unless you have adblock etc running, but then they don't really have much reason to cater to you anyways.
Windows XP is running on 80% of the PC's and has 32 pixel icons that demand a lo-res display.
Actually, stock XP application icons come in varieties up to 48x48. And the OS itself supports up to 256x256 (though it won't handle PNG, and most Vista icons of that size come in PNG format - but you can have them uncompressed if you want back-compat - and they will still work in Vista).
Furthermore, this doesn't affect developers, since no-one stops them from providing larger icon sizes for their applications. Indeed, Vista UI guidelines suggest providing up to 256x256 - all stock apps coming with it out of the box do that, and many third-party apps are following suit.
XP just ignores the sizes that it can't handle, and will fall back to the smallest one that it understands, so it's all perfectly backwards-compatible. Anyway, as noted above, you can have XP draw icons up to 256x256 if desired.
You know what, you almost have a point. What's with some websites requiring more than 1200 pixels in width? A portrait setup works fine for what I do, but I hope the trend does not continue.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Did you try to change the size of icons ? As in rightclick desktop / properties / appearance / advanced / icons (drop down menu) / change to any size you are comfortable with.
When these kinds of topics come up I always reference the screen on the Dell 8100 laptop. It was a 15" LCD with 1600 x 1200 pixels. That's HUGE resolution by today's standards. If it was carried out to a 30" 4:3 display you'd be looking at 3200 x 2400, putting the real 30" displays to shame at their measly 2560 x 1600.
I've done the DPI calculations before and don't care to do the math again, but that was the highest DPI consumer LCD I've ever worked with and it was awesome. Until it fried itself and started throwing magenta pixels all over the image.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I was thinking about getting a 4 Eyefinity6 cards, and 24 of those phone style 4.1' 480x800 displays. Then set-up as 6x4 and make a 16.2'@3200x2880 array, the mother of all Hi-DPI eyefinity setups. ;)
But seriously, where are the hi-rez and dpi displays, it's cant just the display connector issue, graphic hardware can do it, we've got the hi-DPI phone displays, are the company's making the cable standards(and possibly scalar chips, though if ya using scalar why have a hi-rez?) really holding up everything, or is there more to this story...
Lister: Any problems? ... closer, hmm, to the object.
Kryten: Well, just one or two. In fact I've compiled a little list if you'll indulge me. Now then, uh, my optical system doesn't appear to have a zoom function.
Lister: No, human eyes don't have a zoom.
Kryten: Well then, how do you bring a small object into sharp focus?
Lister: Well, you just move your head closer to the object.
Kryten: I see. Move your head
Windows XP is running on 80% of the PC's and has 32 pixel icons that demand a lo-res display.
The numbers are more like 64% for XP and 26% for Vista and Win 7. Operating System Market Share
The average retail of a PC is US$500, again demanding a lo-res display
Walmart's in-store price for a 64 Bit Win 7 Home Premium Dell desktop with a 23" 1920x1080 screen is $800. Dell Inspiron 570 Desktop. The 1080p monitor at Walmart is $200, and there is nothing much to be gained by paying substantially more or less.
I remember when Opera was the only browser that could really zoom into a page to compensate for extra high resolutions
.
You can get a 30" 2500x1600 screen for under $1000. That's a really good deal. It's also pretty much at the limit of what makes sense, both in terms of absolute size and pixel density. If you want more, you can always use a dual or triple screen setup.
Yes. It's all about the yields. AFAIK, there is no way to bin screens with dead pixels (other than "good" or "trash"). You can't just allocate the bad pixels away with a low level format, or bin them - no one wants that screen with the dead/stuck pixels. There is also probably some relation between DPI and error rate that is greater than 1:1.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Instead of increasing the font size, why don't you just increase your DPI setting ?
Making many assumptions, the human eye has about 500 to 600 megapixels of resolution.
The human eye has about 6 million cones, so that's its resolution (in the sense of a digital camera): 6 megapixels. The human eye can scan a scene and the brain can detect some finer detail, but so can a camera; it doesn't change the resolution. However, since monitors and cameras count resolution differently, that 6 megapixel resolution correponds to a 2 megapixel color display screen resolution.
You get the higher figures through eye and head movement. But instead of surrounding yourself with monitors and moving your head, you can just... move and manage your windows. That way you have many gigapixels at your fingertips. The human brain is remarkably adaptable that way.
Give the industry a little time. Windows 7 is slowly eating away at XP's marketshare. More and more people I know are making the switch to it. Whether by choice or not.
The author is right: as you buy bigger screens, you expect a higher pixel count. But this just isn't true anymore. In fact, pixel counts are down from what they were 20 years ago.
The premium 4x3 monitor from Dell: Dell UltraSharp 2007FP, 51 cm ( 20,1" ) has a resolution of 1600x1200.
Twenty years ago, I was running a 21" Viewsonic CRT 2560x1920. Now, their best 22" monitor (not TV, monitor) boasts only 1680x1050.
I understand that LCD-monitors and televions have overlapping markets. What I don't understand is that high resolution monitors are now almost unabtainable. Anyone who does any sort of development surely wants more pixels.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
As long as we don't have resolution independent software, we're pretty much stuck with 96dpi. I have a 128dpi display, and it's a nightmare to read anything on it. I'm able to use the web thanks to NoSquint, and my Gnome desktop has large-enough fonts already at 96dpi, and has no problems scaling to larger dpi settings. We need faster processors if we're going to use a good scaling algorithm for web and other legacy contents. We need more resolution-independent toolkits and software. Apple got there first as usual, but the Gnome desktop does a pretty good job also, but it will still not scale icons according to dpi settings, even when most of them are SVG. I think a mix between vectors and OpenGL desktops will make the trick. Until then, there's no point for manufacturers to continue cramming more pixels per square inch. I think Apple is doing it first, as it's OS already supports it. The rest will follow suit if only to compete.
I have yet to see ClearType (subpixel rendering) work correctly on an LCD monitor that is rotated 90 degrees. I believe I read rumors that it's Better in Windows 7, but I've not sprung for that, nor can I use it at work.
I love my giant Emacs window, but wish the ClearType worked right so it would be more legible.
Firstly Nokia thinks a camera phone can kill off the DSLR market and now Microsoft is moaning about TV resolutions?
TV has always been slow to improve, there are damn good reasons why.
Firstly, TVs are expensive. We don't all work for Microsoft and aren't all able to upgrade it every 6 months.
Secondly, the transmission technology for TV is slow to improve as well. Masts, cables, satellites etc.
Finally, media formats have been slow to improve, the journey from VHS to Bluray took about thirty years and TV resolution has only up about 2.6 times in that period.
Nobody wants to buy a TV and then wait for a year or three before something comes out that takes advantage of the resolution.
Someone's suffering from RAS syndrome
I saw a lot of people doing this mistake.
Stop scaling DPI or good forbid use a non-native resolution and bring your monitors closer to your eyes. Just because its bigger than your previous monitor it does not mean you have to watch it from 2 metters away.
I used the same view distance(0.4 m / 1.3 feet) for 14,15,17,19,20,21 inch monitors and now for my 30 inch beauty. No problems.
I see people making the same mistake with HDTVs too, they get a 40inch TV, watch it from 8 meters away and they complain they don't see any difference between 480p and 1080p.
Well that's not a question of resolution or size, but simply aspect ratio. As Monitor sizes increase the hight also gets bigger. So the real question is merely "when is big too big". And the simple answer is that widescreen formats are much better at using the human field of view. Even 16:9 isn't really wide enough. If my monitor were much bigger vertically I couldn't see all of it without having to look over the rim of my glasses or moving my head.
I love it when people tell me what I want. There's nothing wrong with screen real-estate being outside the ideal viewing angle. I can look at my keyboard when I need to, I can look at the bottom of the screen when I need to see the bloody clock or taskbar (which I could make much bigger if the space it occupied wasn't in such a valuable area of my screen).
Considering that much vertical space is wasted by taskbars, title bars, menu bars, button bars, link bars, I prefer those to be slightly "outside" my ideal viewing angle, which would be possible if the fucking screen was higher. As it is, I'm usually sitting too close to the screen so these "bars" are basically outside the ideal viewing angle. That wouldn't be necessary if the display simply was a few inches higher (24" at 1920x1200 just invites you to sit too close).
I find that with my wide-screen, I tend to keep windows only covering 2/3's of the width at most (pretty close to the size they would have been if it had been a 4:3 monitor). I also find myself placing windows next to each other, and only using one at the time for extended periods (ie, the other half of the screen is wasted). However, almost ALL windows are still occupying full vertical space.
I'm glad atleast 16:10 displays still exist, that way 1920x1200 atleast wasn't a downgrade from my old 1600x1200 display that way (which I unfortunately couldn't replace with a new one as they were getting prohibitively expensive compared to the newer crop of displays -- Iiyama even stopped making them AFAIK). Rotating vertically isn't an option either, as then the screen would go below the minimum WIDTH I would find acceptable. 4:3 was pretty ideal as far as I'm concerned, I don't think 10:16 could compete with it.
I'm currently using a pair of SyncMaster 2443bw monitors. They're both running at native 1920x1200.
People tend to be surprised by my setup, however, because I have the left monitor in landscape orientation, but the right monitor in portrait orientation. I find that some things (such as spreadsheets) look better on a wide display, whereas other things (like web pages) look better on a tall display. It's the best of both worlds - I just click the content over to whichever screen it looks best on. This is especially easy to do with a program like Ultramon.
Try the 'autopager' plugin for firefox.
I feel your pain. I "upgraded" to 1920x1200 displays so I atleast wouldn't lose vertical space (I had no choice, the old displays broke and their replacements were more expensive than the wide-screens). I find myself wasting much of the extra 320 pixels at the side fo the display, although sometimes they do come in handy for putting two windows next to each other.
Twenty years ago, I was running a 21" Viewsonic CRT 2560x1920. Now, their best 22" monitor (not TV, monitor) boasts only 1680x1050.
I am writing this on a computer with CRT. A 22" CRT with, you guess it, 2560 X 1920 resolution.
Reason is simple - I need the pixels to do perper CAD/CAM.
PS. I do feel your pain.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Manufacturers use the size of the diagonal as a major parameter. 16:9 has less area than 4:3 with the same diagonal and therefore must be cheaper to manufacture. From the user's standpoint displays become smaller, not larger.
In the good old CRT days they used to add an inch or two to the size, so "17 inch" was actually 16 inch and so on. Now we've got and LCD version of the racket.
If text is hard to read, your DPI isn't high enough. CRT TVs are hard to read, because they have small DPI (30-70 dpi). Paper is easy to read, because it has high DPI (300-2400 dpi range, most laster printers are 600 dpi).
Higher DPI means more pixels per letter at the same point size.
Youll get the 4Kx2K monitor when 4Kx2K video becomes mainstream.
My home PC had a Dell 20" 1600x1200 LCD monitor about 10 years ago, and it was joined by a Sony laptop with a 17" 1920x1200 LCD display seven years ago. Were these "mainstream" resolutions at the time? They were more expensive than typical alternatives at the time, but still quite affordable. Both are still in use, along with a pair of recent 24" 1920x1080 LCD monitors. A comparable step up in size/resolution from 1080 displays today involves a proportionally larger price increment, if you can actually find anything worth upgrading to.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
> There's nothing wrong with screen real-estate being outside the ideal viewing angle
I can of course look wherever I want, but I quickly notice the bad effect of looking in awkward view angles, like upwards. This is one reason why touch typing is worth learning. I don't need to switch between the keyboard and the display anymore. I use the exact same 24" wide display you wrote, but I don't have to look at it from close. Actually, I read your post from 1 m (that is 40"). And that is not an unusual case, I read web pages from even longer distances (using Opera with a default 180% magnification). Both the task bar and the tab bar is in vertical position. The remaining screen estate is almost exactly 4:3, which you preferred.
He could just buy a massive 96dpi screen, or collection of screens if you can get some with bevels small enough not to bother him, and sit further away.
Zoom function? Just bring the object closer to the eyes.
The human eye has about 6 million cones, so that's its resolution (in the sense of a digital camera): 6 megapixels. The human eye can scan a scene and the brain can detect some finer detail, but so can a camera; it doesn't change the resolution. However, since monitors and cameras count resolution differently, that 6 megapixel resolution correponds to a 2 megapixel color display screen resolution.
You get the higher figures through eye and head movement. But instead of surrounding yourself with monitors and moving your head, you can just... move and manage your windows. That way you have many gigapixels at your fingertips. The human brain is remarkably adaptable that way.
It's not that simple.
First, the resolution of the eye is much higher at the center of the retina than it is at periphery. So you need much higher resolution overall if you want to keep the same quality of the image no matter where the eyes are centered.
Second, the numbers of rods and cones vary significantly, I remember ratios of 1:4 and even up to 1:10 between people.
If you do some testing with people, you'll notice that maximum required resolution to cover the whole visual field uniformly is somewhere between 12M and 50M pixels. I'm not excluding possibility that there are a few sharp-eyed individuals which can discern more than that.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was perfectly happy with Windows XP on 1280*1024 resolution. But now that every OS and application is phasing out sharp native fonts, all text looks blurry. You need a lot more pixels to compensate for that.
Cheese... there was lots of "I googled this" and "Google told me".
The first link is almost totally rubbish.
What I do want is more vertical resolution. The 16:9 craze means today we buy displays that are physcially larger and have more pixels overall than ten years ago, yet do not provide any more area for vertical display.
xrandr --output default --rotate left
solved that for you
as the other poster said, widening your window should create multiple columns on websites
Read a multi-column PDF on a netbook or other PC with a screen that isn't tall enough for a full page. Notice that you have to scroll down, back up, and down over each page to see all the text. Do you want this back-and-forth extended to the web?
/.'s "News for Nerds" text on a 300 DPI screen would be unreadably small.
CSS defines "px" in terms of angle subtended at the eye, with the result that typical computer display distances are treated as 96px per inch.
It's not that simple.
It is that simple. The resolution of the human eye is about 6 megapixels. In fact the useful resolution (fovea) is about 0.2 megapixels. Moving your eyes doesn't increase their resolution any more than a panorama head increases the resolution of your camera.
If you do some testing with people, you'll notice that maximum required resolution to cover the whole visual field uniformly is somewhere between 12M and 50M pixels.
You need to divide those by three, which places the upper bound for a display at about 4-16 megapixel. Anything beyond that is not going to be useful.
But that doesn't show that going to the upper bound is useful. For example, a 16 megapixel flat display isn't going to be useful because you see the pixels at very different angles. You need a wraparound display.
You can already get 4 megapixel displays for under $1000. Get four of those and hook them up to your machine and you're pretty close to what makes sense given the human visual system.
Many people care about the level of detail that their screen can give them.
I have been following virtual reality and 3D TV's since I went to college (10 years ago). They all used to rely on shutter glasses or two screens and polarised light.
Now you can get 3D without glasses... But to do this, the TV's need about a lot more pixels than a standard HD screen. For example you could have 42 times the number of pixels and this could allows 42 different viewing angles (using a lens system on each pixel). Each angle supplies a different image to the left and right eyes, but this the 3d Effect drops out, the further you are from the TV.
More pixels = 3D without glasses
The reason why there are few advances in resolution or gamut is because there is a failure to support it with software. Sure you may argue that many OSs support it. Yes, I know I can adjust my PPI and at uber-high resolutions my icons and desktop text are just peachy and displayed sharp and crisp.
The problem is, I don't really fucking care how well my OS supports it when practically none of the software that runs under it supports those very same features. So once I open up an app that actually does something deemed useful, all that I am blessed with at the higher resolutions is text sizes comparable to that in a contract lawyer's wet dream and icons of equally miniscule and microscopic proportions. Thus you're left with the option of tolerating the eyestrain and dialing down the mouse speed so you can have the precision needed to click on microscopic things at the expense of dragging the mouse across the pad multiple times in order to cross the screen, or you can dial down the resolution past the point of that supported in the hardware such that the software is reasonably usable again. (But then comes the obvious question, "Why did you spend all that $$$ on such a high-res screen?")
If you want some extreme examples of this, pull up some ol' games in DOS-Box that only have VGA support. Now run it windowed and dial up your resolution. I'd be willing to believe that 90% of the current software has this same handicap, but supporting only XGA or thereabout as a native resolution. When the software makers finally get around to implementing the idea that not just text but _ALL_ UI assets must be scalable and resolution-independent as a standard practice, maybe then we'll start seeing people on the hardware side implementing improvements once again.
I'm all for higher resolutions being available on new monitors. But the reason it's not happening is current implementation and usefulness is piss-poor at best.
Some LCD panels can rotate by 90 degrees. I used to work with two Dell 1600x1200 displays, both turned on their side. You can have a nice tall Emacs window in one and a web browser or mail client in the other.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
oooh nice - what size is the center screen, 30"? That's an interesting idea - thanks!
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Ummm... no. The widescreen thing is a marketing gimmick to make small screens appear bigger. Screen manufacturers pay per area of screen space, but market based on diagonal. A square display gives the most viewing space (what costs money and users want) for the lowest marketing spec (diagonal length). A 24" square display would be 288 square inches. A 4:3 15" display is only a little smaller, at 276 square inches. By the time you hit 16x9, you're at just 246 square inches -- roughly the same area as a 22.7" 4:3 display.
You also end up with fewer pixels. The 15" 1440x900 on Apple's highest-end laptop has fewer pixels than 1280x1024, but it starts with 1440, so it sure SOUNDS bigger.
As a manufacturer, you're selling something that costs less money to produce with what appears to be the same spec to 99% of the buying population. Imagine I hadn't just done the math for you. You're at a computer store. You see a 14" display and a 15" wide display. Both are the same price and appear identical other than size and shape. Which do you buy? Most people would go for the 15. Gosh. It's 15" -- that's bigger. And not only that, it's WIDE -- it's EVEN BIGGER, when in reality, the two are almost exactly the same area and size. It's just that movies fit a little bit better on the wide-screen, while documents, code, and spreadsheets fit much better on the 4:3.
I've been looking for laptops, and pretty much all 15" laptops have the ridiculously low resolution of 1366x768. That's fewer pixels than a cheap 15" CRT I bought 15 years ago could display.
In some ways I agree, but the technology is still in rapid advancement mode for flat panel displays. You have the increase in refresh rates going on right now, with the move from 60Hz to 120Hz to 240Hz going on right now, and it really IS better to have a display that can refresh the screen faster than the image changes. With that said, I agree that we have a problem where resolutions are NOT increasing, and there are also two different aspect ratios that are being pushed, which adds to the problem. Do you have a 1920x1080, or a 1920x1200 display for example, and many applications do not scale themselves for the different resolutions, so you may find some things get distorted. Once we hit 240Hz and things stabilize(not much point going beyond 240Hz), then we may see a push for higher resolutions again, but for now, the technology of the panels themselves is evolving, and most people want higher quality displays with zero dead pixels FIRST.
Now, this will also open the door for a lot of problems going forward when it comes to how to make things look correct on a screen once resolutions start to climb again if vendors start to push unusual aspect ratios. Again, will 1920x1200 become the norm for computer displays with 1920x1080 being the norm for TV displays? Once an aspect ratio REALLY becomes established(remember, 4:3 was the accepted ratio until wide screen displays started to dominate), we will be safe to go with higher quality displays that meet that ratio. We all know the old 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 for 4:3 displays. We need to see wide screen really continue that trend of more mainstream displays, and those that really are high quality displays. But, until the aspect ratio becomes more standardized, it will be a risk for display manufacturers to push displays other than 1920x1080 or 1920x1200.
My 17" laptop display has a native resolution of 1920x1200, but I've got to go to like a 23" desktop display to get the same?
any 20" desktop display I've been looking at here in Korea doesn't go above 1600x900 or 1050 (depending on the aspect ratio)
I've been using this laptop for years and I'd appreciate keeping the same resolution when I finally change back to a desktop, but I don't want to have to put some honking monitor on my desk that is going to take half the thing up.
The most pixels you could fit into a square screen, and the less in a screen of zero height. Those 16:9 and 16:10 screen ratios are because typical field of view is more "wide" than the 4:3 used typically. 4:3 was used because it was easier to make CRTs that way.
Some people even use a 2.24:1 screen for viewing movies (instead of the 1.78:1 of the 16:9 monitors)
I used to have one of the first hulking 17" CRTs on my desk
Why on earth did you need 17'' for VT100 or maybe VT220?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
It's called being nice to normal users, something which won't make sense to a lot of people on slashdot. A lot of people with netbooks, old monitors and so on wouldn't be able to cope with anything more.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Do you really need 3 monitors just to wank off to anime?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I desperately hope that someone at the LCD-display manufacturers will see the light before these two monitors (acquired for US$50 each, used) both need to be replaced. I am a software developer. I want to see the code, as much of it as possible. I want to see it all at once, now. And I want to be able to do this without getting neck strain from swinging my head from side-to-side on a 16:9 screen. This is a market: it's not as wildly profitable, perhaps as the widest possible consumer market, but there is demand for this kind of product as replies to TFA and some comments in this page make clear. Is anyone listening?
4:3 screens of higher resolution may, actually, all be going to other markets. On a recent knowledge-transfer trip to Israel, I saw a lot of quite high resolution 4:3 LCD screens on my colleagues desks. Is that all it is? Does someone know?
cheers...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Uh, I think that's what he said he wanted--more dpi.
Actually, looking at games like Crysis, I realize that in term of pixels, we reached a point where we don't actually need more pixels unless we want much bigger displays. Personally, I don't care much for resolutions like 4K x 2K, but I would really like to see full HD wearable displays like Vuzix Wrap 920 but with higher resolutions.
Maybe not everyone, but I wouldn't mind having a 640k p monitor. I probably wouldn't want to PAY for one. Or lug it around. But really, 1,137,780x640,000 would be somewhat cool.
Moreover, the universal use of 800x600 has another advantage: it is possible to configure a default zoom in the browser which works well with 95% of the web sites.
I've been looking for a new laptop and REFUSE to buy one with a 1366x768 screen... Hear me laptop vendors!!! I will not buy a laptop with this crappy screen I want at least 900 pixels and preferably 1050 or more.
I recently had my laptop with a 1600x1200 screen at work replaced with a laptop that has a 1440x900 screen. Oh do I miss those pixels. In fact I have requested an external monitor to make up for this loss.
Back in the day, NextStep Boxes used Display PostScript to drive screen output. It would be a snap to scale that to modern screens at any rate.
The concept never made it through, largely due to gaming, and expectations of cheapness that PCs bring with DMA graphics boards.
What bothers the heck out of me is the fact that with the advent of HDTV for whatever reasons some technology seems inexplicably abandoned.
I have a PC. It has a high end LCD monitor and as such is 4:3. I have a HDTV, it is for watching movies, etc... and it is 16:9.
The MAX resolution of my PC LCD is pretty high at 1920 x 1200. However the max resolution of HD is 1920x1,080.
This means I have to set my PC resolution to 1280 x 1024 and then using software "stretch" 1280 to fit 1920.
I am using a ATI 1950PRO with dual DVI outputs and a DVI-to-HDMI cable.
Can someone tell me WHY with all the technology we have that I somehow cannot run, either due to the video card drivers or the OS (Vista in this case), two different resolutions on two different monitors? Am I the only one that thinks this is insane? How long has HD been out now, and seemingly no one has been able to figure this out? Also I seem to remember using stuff like Hydravision that essentially did this more than half a decade ago? What the hell is up with that?
As near as I can figure, unless the drivers or OS is changed somehow, my options are 1) Buy a new LCD monitor for my PC that is 16:9 and be FORCED to use HD resolution on my PC or 2) (and I am not even sure if this one will work) buy a second video card (and it would have to be legacy PCI as I only have one AGP slot) and run two video cards, one for each display... Of course, then what is the point of having dual DVI or TV-Out or any of that BS if that is what you have to do.
Anyway this is something I messed about with in frustration for awhile before I gave up and just settled on stretching 1280 x 1024 and using that as my default PC resolution. Anyway it seems silly to me that this cannot be done.
I clearly remember having a choice of going 4:3 or 16:9 when I bought my new system. At the time, pretty much all games only ran 4:3, and only a few 16:9 with the rest having kludges to make them work with wide screen. This being the case, my thinking was I plan on playing video games on my computer not watching movies on this thing... Now you would have to WORK to find a 4:3 aspect ratio computer monitor, as everything is 16:9 now, which is totally attributed to HDTV as that specification has nothing to do with PC's whatsoever. So ya, I feel the posters pain.
3 years ago I bough a pair of DVI/HDMI/VGA input supporting 22" widescreen LCD monitors for under $200 each and they came with 1200 vertical lines of resolution and a snappy 6ms response. They replaced a 19" CRT that was a 1600x1200and a 17" LCD that was 1200x1024. Now most of the 24" screens only have 1080 lines, heck half the 17" ones do too! Over 24" I would not even CONSIDDER a screen that could not do 1600 vertical lines. at 30" 1600 or higher should be the ONLY options.
Thanks to everyone wanting to watch "HD video in native resolution", and they think that's an UPGRADE from previous technology, all the damned screens are 1080... I want my 120 lines back damnit!!!
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Rotate your display by 90 degrees.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
It's about how ti looks, and 1080P HDMI monitors are sweet.
This idiot think DPI and monitor size is how to judge the quality and not how it actually behaves and look? Jeez it's like he works for Micro... err nevermind.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You know, I really have wonder if the "pixels" that this guy sees are blocky artifacts in excessively-compressed video.
Are you adequate?
For my aging parents I want quite the opposite, they wanted a bigger screen to have things bigger and easier to read, but it's actually harder for them. Lowering the resolution makes the fonts fuzzy and almost unreadable. I really wish there was lower good resolution on LCD monitors that worked.
Also the fact their computer desk is from the 80's where everything has a special compartment limiting the size of things . . .
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Sharp just built a new $4.6 billion LCD facility in Sakai, Japan that is capable of producing more, cheaper, and more advanced LCDs than anyone else in the world. This plant has helped them produce 10th generation glass substrates with UV2A technology that most other LCD companies will be purchasing from them. They are also going out on a whim and pioneering the new RGBY technology for an increased color gamut. I believe I've heard that Sony co-funded this research, so we're likely to see RGBY sets from Sony in the future, too.
Make no mistake, the Korean companies have "dominated" the LCD market, but that depends on your definition of dominate. Samsung has premiere floor space at about every major retailer, but I'm fairly certain that's more due to marketing and back-room deals than anything else. Sony has been making technically superior (white LED,lighting, for instance, and therefore costlier) TVs to Samsung for years, and I'm not the only one with Samsung quality issues (18 pages, the size of that page is unbelievable).
And in the field of professional displays, I don't think anyone would say that Korea is doing what we'd call, "dominate".
I much prefer 16x10 displays. So much more room to get work done. 16x9 stinks to high heaven!
Why aren't we all using WQUXGA, WHSXGA, or even WHUXGA display right now?
M-O-U-S-E!!
I love Disney!
I haven't tested this in all web browsers, but I've seen the Zoom feature of IE8 used to enlarge Flash applets. It works pretty well - maybe a little fuzzy, but easily visible, and the interactive portions of the applet enlarged and shifted with the image. Given that all major browsers have a full-page zoom feature (as opposed to the older text scaling, which didn't help with Flash applets), this really shouldn't be a problem anymore.
I'd test it right now (from Opera 10.5) but that would require downloading Flashplayer... :-/
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Yes, at last someone who hates widescreen as much as I do. It's just a marketing gimmick to sell cheaper to produce LCDs that have more inches. A 19", 4:3 is a lot bigger than a 19" 16:9, stop buying into the advertising.
The laptop market is even worse. It's near impossible to find a high-res laptop nowadays.
Sure you can find a 10-11 inch display at 768p, that is high-res, but the same resolution at 16 - 18 inches sure isn't.
.sig? Get your own damn
Yes he did, and he's absolutely right. In print media (color or black&white) 300dpi is considered a bare minimum, yet on computer displays we get a measly 96dpi? Yuck! We have to employ all sorts of anti-aliasing tricks to mask the problem but if we had 300dpi we wouldn't need anti-aliasing at all. And text would be much easier on the eyes.
In my experience this simply isn't true --whenever I specify a custom dpi for windows it handles it pretty well (I have noticed that you some apps look janky until you reboot, but fine afterwards).
Ironically, this is one UI issue that XP/Vista handles way better than OSX, I just got the 15" macbook pro with the optional 1680x1050 display, and the only way to change the dpi is with the developer tools (and when you do the UI is a total mess).
This *is* annoying but hopefully will be getting better. Shitty web developers are finding out that if they specify "pt" instead of "px" their content is still readable on high-dpi devices like iPhone/Droid.
Sadly, you've got a point. I would love a 300dpi display, and I think people would come around if they saw the potential, but until the OS and content can maximize that potential the manufacturers won't be motivated.
No, you're getting his point wrong.
The issue is that there are fundamental limits on the ability of the human eye to resolve distinctions between two images of different resolutions at a given distance.
And the only thing I miss from a LCD is the aspect ratio. I hope it lasts...
But for movies, I have my Kuro downstairs... Discontinued too... A trend maybe? ;-)
I finally gave in and settled for 1680x1050 in a 19" monitor. That's it though, I just do not want a bigger monitor. I'd like to have about 2Kx1200 or 2kx1600 in about 19", max.
I am still using a CRT at work - they keep trying to take it away from me, and I say "fine, if you replace it with an equivalent LCD - this is 19" at 1600 x 1200.
The standard deploy here is 1280x1024 - seriously, that's horrible res. Yeah, the LCD lines are really sharp, but I need to get a lot of windows on the screen.
When the CRT dies, I'll probably just have to move to 3 or 4 monitors on my desk to place enough windows (I currently have the CRT and one 1024x1280 LCD (portrait mode) as my browser monitor). Those extra 2 or 3 monitors will draw more power than the CRT.
My obsviously informative answer got "0", while the OP rant gets 2 (I don't know why it deserves 2, but anyway...).
From the time Pentium100 was not here and I had a PC which *was* a Pentium I 100MHz, these points not only meant karma, but they were used to separate signal from noise.
Now what is it? An incentive to get registered users, whoever they might be and whatever they might post?
You need to divide those by three, which places the upper bound for a display at about 4-16 megapixel. Anything beyond that is not going to be useful.
Assuming you never move your eyes.. Which isn't true. Your field of vision is fairly narrow, so you want ~6Mp in an area say 8x8" on a monitor 2.5 feet away. Then you want a lot of area, because humans have spatial memory. I'm sitting in front of 4 1600x1200 monitors right now. I find having different documents (source files) on each monitor is far more useful than alt-tabbing between two things i'm looking at. My eyes can switch and locate multiple lines on diffrent monitors with ease. It doesn't require any thought.
An IT admin?
IT admin to wet-cleanup on aisle 3!
You are assuming that every pixel has to be updated at 60Hz/whatever. I've never understood why that's necessary for anything other than games or video.... and the thing about those, is that the human brain's ability to detect resolution rally goes down when dealing with moving data (ever heard of motion blur?)
There is no reason why the framebuffer shouldn't being the display device, and what gets communicated from the computer are Postscript-style instructions on which pixels to change for the next display cycle. For most computer applications, hardly anything changes per display cycle, so the required bandwidth gets far, far smaller this way. As for games and video, those can simply use a more video-like resolution (1080p is plenty) and then rely on the display device to scale it up.
Refreshing every pixel is a leftover of non-persistent displays (CRT's), long obsolete since the advent of LCD.
It's called being nice to normal users, something which won't make sense to a lot of people on slashdot. A lot of people with netbooks, old monitors and so on wouldn't be able to cope with anything more.
That's some twisted logic there.
Think about it for a little bit.
No matter what, the guy with the small screen will never be able to see more than what fits on his small screen - whether the page is forced to 800x600 or just left to scroll freely.
So that isn't 'being nice' to anyone. You aren't making the 'user experience' one iota better for the guys with small screens, but you are screwing it up for the guys with big screens AND you are crippling it for everyone - big or small screen. How so? Ever try to search 10 different pages for a keyword? That's 10 "click next" plus 10 control-f's at a minimum. Compared to having the entire article on one page which is just a single control-f - or if their are multiple hits you can easily bounce on the control-f rather than having to grab the mouse to hit "next" and then let go and move your hands back to the keyboard for every new page.
So if you are a real web-developer who justifies that brain-damaged design of pretending that web pages don't scroll - you need to start thinking about how the web really works rather than play that faux ivory tower baloney you got going on right now.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If your assessment were true, any startup would be able to step in and offer people what they "really" want. The real issue is that once the price/performance ratio starts increasing, the number of customers diminish at least proportionally, if not more. Unless there's a large target audience that isn't being adequately served by the current product offerings *and* is willing and able to pay more for a product tailored to their needs, the product won't exist (for very long, anyway).
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I still use a CRT at 1920x1440. Today it started giving off a burning smell. I'm looking but so far this monitor seems irreplaceable and I'm going to be stuck with a fixed and lower resolution LCD. Every time I see people refer to resolutions with a p after them I rage.
Also I'm in Ottawa if anyone knows where I can get a CRT.
The resolution of your eye may be 570 Megapixels, but your brain doesn't come anywhere near processing that. We don't have the ability to continually process all that information, so the data is almost immediately dumped after reception (lasts less than a fraction of a second). Your brain will only hold a small representative part of that information for 1 to 3 seconds, and even less after that.
Try reading text when you are not looking directly at it, and you will notice your eyes have very high resolution in only a small portion of your vision. Most people can only make out a couple of words on either side of their center of focus. The rest of your vision is just a vague impression noticing only high contrast and motion for the most part. Vision is fascinating, and how our brain interprets and deals with it is even more fascinating.
I was inspired by your post and decided to add some more info. Thanks for the educational input! Its stuff like this that keeps me coming back to Slashdot.
I have 2x20" 4:3 1600x1200 LCD's, sitting one on each side of my couple of hours old LED 24" 1920x1080 screen (which looks gorgeous BTW). ;)
They look really primitive now, but the pixel density was the best I could get for a desktop screen at the time, not sure you can get better now either. I ditched a really old 21" 1600x1200 LCD to make way for the new monitor, 3 barely fits on my desk as it is
My preference would be for super-high pixel density, and you just choose whatever resolution (in the appropriate scale) you're comfortable wth viewing.
Boolean logic: True, False, and File not found.
>> more pixels overall than ten years ago
Maybe more than ten years ago, but not more than 5 years ago. The 16:9 "craze" is a bullshit scam. They call them "widescreen". What they really are is "narrowscreen". Multiply it out: the total number of pixels is way down on average. That why the corporate hounds introduced the "craze". Fuckers!
Social Credit would solve everything...
The answer is obvious. The market right now wants CHEAP, CHEAP and CHEAP.
Who typically buy computers? The wealthy 1 to 2% of the world's population.
How many computer users own stocks that tanked since 2007? Homes? Derivatives? Or had their jobs threatened? The other are poor debt ridden college students and offices.
Offices buy by the cheap! If a higher DPI screen does not give a bigger ROI then why upgrade? Also, most businesses have refused to upgrade to vista and are trying to boost their share prices that collapses since fall of 2008. Computers get in the way of these magical ratios that Goldman Sachs crave.
The technical enthusiasts who drive the market need to have their outsourced jobs back and have job security and be better off financially before putting down the cash for high end equipment. Just the facts. ... that or the accountants at all these companies just look at the majority market and refuse to invest in anything else.
http://saveie6.com/
QUESTION: is a 19" wide screen actually less pixels than an 19" std ratio??? meaning is it cheaper to make, less raw material??? letting manufactures sell us less for the same price?
That it has less pixels has been explained by Calinous in a sibling post. But then, it is still cheaper to make because there is more demand for wide screens. One of the reasons is that wide is good for video, and computers are increasingly being used for watching videos. So manufacturers get more economy of scale when manufacturing wide screens.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
In short, the way it should work is your OS sets the DPI automatically based on your display, and a 10pt font will appear the same size no matter what the display device
While you are right that we could do with better collaboration between the screen and computer - but distance also matters. So size of 10pt font shouldn't always be the same just based on DPI.
For different types of devices, the typical distance of the user from the screen is different. The following list is sorted in increasing order of the typical distance (in my opinion) of the user from the screen:
1. Mobile phone
2. Laptop
3. Desktop
4. TV
5. Projector - I hope for high DPI affordable projectors within a few decades
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
going back to the original title, i.e. the affect hdtv has had: the trend to make laptop screens the same native resolution as HD ready TVs or Full HD tvs is a bit annoying: 1280x800 resolution was more usable vertically than 1376x768, because the extra width of 1376 adds very little in practical terms but the loss of 34 pixels vertically is quite a lot in practical terms, so in that respect we have gone backwards! Why is every manufacturer so obsessed with this resolution on a netbook or CULV based laptop!? People aren't buying these laptops to connect to their TVs and watch HD films because moer often than not, the CPU isn't up to it.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
I'd appreciate a 3:4 display such as my first monochrome monitor for my Atari ST, since my region's defacto document format is A4, a format with more height than width.
A high-res 4:3 screen which can be rotated 90 degrees would be perfect for reading documents and a "killer device" for our corporate laptops.
I really don't need a "cinema display" at work since like most people, I'm not in the movie or television industry.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
Widescreens are the scourge of the early 21st century, and hopefully, will one day be looked on as being as ridiculous as the 5" monitors on early luggables or the nearly-as-useless 9" monitor that was Steve's idea of all we needed for half a decade.
Laptops make the problem worse - I recently bought a new laptop (hp dm3, an excellent machine except for an ill-advised effort to save cost by choosing a dodgy ALPS touchpad instead of Synaptics), but, like almost all laptops available now almost regardless of price, it's a step backwards in terms of VERTICAL pixel resolution. The dm3, like all other compact laptops on the market, sports a wimpy 1366x768 screen, and I really miss those extra 32 pixels from my previous 1280x800 screen. I will never again buy a screen less than 1K pixels high. At least give us the option of a 4:3 aspect ratio again. (I need a new desktop monitor, but I'm not buying one (or three) until I can get them in non-widescreen again!)
Vertical pixels are the only ones that actually have any value to most people: Most laptop users *never* watch movies on their PCs (that's why they have TVs, duh), and the activities people use laptops for almost always value screen height over width: web browsing, e-mail, document creation, PDF viewing, reading, and even spreadsheets, if they're used more for data organization than financial analysis, which I'd argue is the more common use.
I'd buy a portrait-format laptop in a heartbeat - The best thing about the iPad may well be that you can actually view an entire page on it at once. Apple realized that 1024 was the minimum pixel height for good page-viewing - and they also knew they'd be selling cases of them to companies just looking for a decent portable documentation viewer.
How about a laptop with a 14-15" portrait screen and the keyboard from a 12" netbook? I really don't think the notebook/netbook folks realize how much volume they stand to lose to the iPad and its ilk if they don't start producing screens people want to use.
DEATH TO WIDESCREENS!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
honestly, of all the problems with LCDs what we need to concentrate on is more pixels?
how about color accuracy, deeper blacks, homogeneous contrast ratios?
you fuck yourself over more pixels. i want more pixels too, but when older technology like a good CRT can still slap around most of todays LCDs, well, youve pissed me off.