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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."
You're doing it wrong. You should be increasing the DPI setting in your operating system, which will let you increase the size of things but will let them have far more detail. This should lead to a better browsing experience because the text will be more legible.
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).
This only works, to varying extents, in the more modern OS's.
For example, the relevant application(s) has to be DPI aware as well as either have additional higher resolution raster based graphics or use something like SVG
This is just another in a long line of examples of why Flash is Evil.
Nathan's blog
This is a lot better on Vista/7. Legacy programs at high DPI are bitmap enlarged to maintain correct proportions. (Although yes, this does make some programs look fuzzy.) Smarter programs that handle DPI properly can set a flag in their application manifest if they handle different DPI properly. .NET programs written using WPF are entirely vector based, and so scale to any resolution.
This was wonderful for my grandparents - they had been running XP at 640x480 because of their poor vision. When they got a Windows 7 computer, we ran the screen at its native resolution and just turned the DPI settings way down.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Because NeXT is dead... :(
An explanation, for those who don't know:
NeXT supported "Display PostScript," which is basically what it sounds like. Thus, unlimited scaling and DPI, splines, fonts, etc.... Basically, applying laser printer techniques to your screen.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
DPI is different than resolution. Think about it this way - imagine, the circle that indicates that you close a window is physically .25" in diameter at 640x480. (Obviously that's a made up number). Now imagine you have more pixels avaliable. You can either make that circle smaller (same number of pixels, but the pixels are a smaller size), or make that circle more detailed (increased number of pixels used to render the shape at the same size). Changing your resolution accomplishes the first situation - the higher you set your resolution, the smaller everything on your screen gets.
On an LCD screen, one issue that comes up is that the display looks "best" at it's native resolution. So making things bigger, also tends to make things blurry or ugly or distorted, etc. If you could make things bigger by adjusting the DPI, AND your operating system/application supported it, you could take advantage of those small pixels to render your big object more clearly.
On today's screens, if you have great eyesight you might say "So what? Things look pretty good right now... and I like how everything is small."
However, what some people want are high DPI screen - ie, screens where the number of dots per inch approaches the equivalent of printed text. So where a screen might have 72 DPI (lets say dots are pixels), so a native resolution of 72 pixels per inch, what some people want is a screen where that might be instead 300 DPI, or 600 DPI... or whatever.
The benefit of this would be that - if your screen has so many pixels that the eye physically can't distinguish one from the other, then text that's 1" high is gonna look smooth. A game rendered at the new ludicrously high resolution, wouldn't need anti-aliasing, because you wouldn't be able to distinguish between the pixels anyway, so stuff wouldn't render "blocky". Etc.
The problem is - when you can't adjust the DPI, instead of having something look crisp, you'd just have something that's really tiny. That .25" circle becomes too small to see. All that 12 point text becomes illegible greyish lines. However, the other problem is, when you CAN adjust the DPI, SO many applications break, because they've all been developed to ASSUME a certain DPI, so either the layout breaks, or the text doesn't flow properly, or raster graphics look ugly when scaled up, etc.
Which is why, say, Apple getting rid of the ability to change the DPI could be frustrating to people who want high DPI devices - because if the OPTION doesn't exist, then you can't even see what WOULD break. And it indicates that the developer of the OS probably doesn't care too much about things breaking.