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."

Comments

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[npsimons]

This is something that drives me crazy. I bought a screen with a relatively high DPI, and on half the websites I visit now the content is provided on some kind of fixed size (in pixels) flash thingee.

This is just another in a long line of examples of why Flash is Evil.

Re:Higher DPI and Gamut, please!

[kevinmenzel]

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.