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

Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Bigjeff5]

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.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[dotgain]

I know gamers and drafters really want giant screens at massive resolutions, but besides them who else really wants it?

People with good eyesight who use complicated applications or requirements.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Tumbleweed]

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?

This is a combination of bad UI in operating systems and programs, and user cluelessness about how to make use of high resolution displays. What you want to do is configure your system to display things larger. The OS and programs should make sure they either default to that on a high res display, or at least make it really apparent that you should with popup boxes when you first set up the machine/program.

Some OSes and programs also don't always work well with very large size fonts, though modern ones should.

You really WANT super-high res displays with 'normal' size letters - your text will be far crisper that way than even font smudging, err, anti-aliasing, at lower resolutions.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Bigjeff5]

Most would just get another display, or several - particularly if it's multiple applications. I could see it for a single complicated app though.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Jazz-Masta]

This is a combination of bad UI in operating systems and programs, and user cluelessness about how to make use of high resolution displays.

It is mostly bad UI.

Changing the font size or DPI settings in Windows wreaks havoc on many programs. Some mainstream applications handle it nicely, but a change to either setting destroys a number of industry applications that my clients use.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[tsotha]

This is a combination of bad UI in operating systems and programs, and user cluelessness about how to make use of high resolution displays.

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. It sits in the upper left corner of my monitor and I need a magnifying glass to read it. A higher DPI makes for some ultra-smooth fonts and allows for detailed images, but only if the moron creating content didn't decide to do everything in pixels.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Freedom Bug]

30" screens are great for developers, too. Everybody knows how useful multiple displays are, but nobody seems to realize just how much better a 30" 2560x1600 screen is than a couple of 21" screens, even though you're pushing about the same number of pixels and display area.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Chuck Chunder]

2560x2048 resolution doesn't exactly help me see my web pages or documents any better

I think for people who are mostly a "consumer" of information (and that is most people) you are pretty much spot on, there are diminishing returns.

On the other hand if you are in some way producer, especially of something remotely complex, then the increased resolution is definately useful as it provides room to both see what you are producing and have the relevant tools available (eg an IDE or photoshop) and possibly some additional reference material.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Zan Lynx]

I guess you're incapable of finding the DPI settings in your OS. You probably also wish we were still using dot matrix printers with a DPI less than 100. All those extra dots in modern printing must hurt your eyes.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most browsers will zoom the entire page these days, rather than just the text. Just set the default zoom (Firefox requires an addon for this, but it's doable) to something managable and it works fine for non-flash content.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[mario_grgic]

Actually it's opposite. If you have higher DPI you use more pixels to describe each element on screen. So typical 10 pt font that is perhaps 12 pixels high would be 24 pixels high on a 2 times higher DPI screen. This means more, smaller pixels to finely define edges of complex things which means less aliasing for everything.

This is the same as printing with dot matrix printers of old vs printing with modern laser printer at 2000 DPI. Which one looks better? Laser of course. Same height letter is described with hundred times more smaller pixels.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[EdIII]

but only if the moron creating content didn't decide to do everything in pixels.

Uh huh. Riiiiggggghhhhhtt.

What about those pesky things called pictures? We have enough problems just trying to make our websites render properly on IE fucktard version X, and even different versions of Firefox. Not to mention Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.

We are expected to make a website that renders 99.99999999% the same on all browsers, and now... we must cater to YOU or be called a moron too?

Unless we find a way to scale those pictures, and sometimes backgrounds, up in size without any reduction in quality (impossible) we need to find a consistent reliable way (multiOS-multiplatform way) of determining your viewable browsing area and then giving you effectively a whole other website to visit with bigger images. Sure, we can make a website that can expand and fit the viewable browsing area dynamically. Not really impossible, but just more effort to give you a website with access to higher resolution pictures which leads us to.........

Bandwidth ain't free. Your big ass pictures needed to render the page nicely on your big ass screen cost considerably more bandwidth per user, and why we would do this in the first place if you represent an impossibly small fraction of the potential website visitors?

Development ain't free either. The vast majority of websites don't even take the development time to create versions of their websites that render well on smartphones which is much the same situation as you are in. That's why websurfing on smart phones has been such a pathetic joke for the most part, and especially on WAP. A lot of companies made a lot of money trying to come up with conversion solutions to force fit regular websites on to smartphones. The really nice smartphone browsers these days allow to zoom in to certain spots and then zoom back out instead of trying to convert the site.

Nahhh..... You're right. Web developers are just lazy morons.

If you want to understand fucking ridiculous, any web developer, or firm, that has its/their game-face on will need to do a target market analysis to determine the average screen size and average viewable screen size before starting development.

Ohhh, and throughout all of this we have to balance a development budget. We could come up with some super duper awesome stuff to account for every conceivable use case, but we are constrained by time and money.

How many times have you heard of the horror stories of major companies spending millions on some website only to have it crash and burn and not be worth its weight in piss?

Sorry, buddy. I feel your pain, believe me, I have 8 monitors right now all at 1920x1200, but it is just not as simple as you think. All of 'us' can't just click our red ruby slippers and have Web 2.0 +20 INT magically appear... Too many other considerations and we have to be a lowest common denominator development community overall.

P.S - If that were not enough there are web standards we have to deal with and browsers that still cannot handle everything we want do because they don't fully support CSS3/HTML5 yet.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[msuarezalvarez]

The arrival of 2000DPI printers did not result in people printing in 0.02 point font sizes, did it? (And, by the way, the size of text set in 10 points does *not* change with the DPI...)

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

His complaint is about non-scaling small fonts in Flash, which are virtually unreadable on high resolution monitors. I don't think any of your post addressed that.

Yes, you must cater to your users or be called a moron. If a site is unreadable on some of your user's monitors (1920x1200 is not rare), you have failed.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[peas_n_carrots]

Bitmap pictures are easily scaled. Loss of quality is a minor issue compared to a postage-stamp-sized pic that shouldn't be so small.

Maybe your ilk of web designers should stop getting so defensive and start finding solutions. You know, kind of like how engineers find solutions.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[shutdown -p now]

We are expected to make a website that renders 99.99999999% the same on all browsers

No, you aren't. You are expected to make a website that renders correctly on all browsers, which doesn't mean the same. The latter is clearly impossible, because there are too many things you don't control with respect to layout.

For example, fonts - you cannot guarantee the presence of any particular font on the user's machine, and even if it is there, depending on the OS and its settings, the exact metrics of the font can be different (e.g. OS X uses ideal layout for fonts, while Windows snips vertical lines to pixel boundaries - so text is wider on Windows, and the difference can be as high as 20%).

If that were not enough there are web standards we have to deal with and browsers that still cannot handle everything we want do because they don't fully support CSS3/HTML5 yet.

There's no browser today that claims, much less truly supports, 100% of CSS3/HTML5. It would be rather tricky, anyway, given that they're still not finalized.

Given that, the only sane course of action is to design the website such that, for any reasonable font size - and with images not scaled up/down - the layout remains consistent and accessible. If you do that, then you may as well use DPI-independent units for font sizes.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[macbuzz01]

If you measure it in pixels, it's jerk is really only 45% of the word.

Laptop pains too

[stokessd]

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

Re:Display Shrink

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than DPI, it's the aspect ratio that I find annoying.

First we had to put up with 'widescreen' at 16:10. Now that's considered normal, and widescreen has become 16:9, exactly the same as TVs and some film stock.

I want my 4:3 back.

Re:30 inch HP LP3605 here @ 2560x1600

[WrongSizeGlass]

I think Mr 'Evangelist' Brown should accept the fact that cramming more and more pixels into displays will make them more and more expensive. Since LCD displays have become commodity items in the PC market people want them to be good quality and cheap, not super duper mega high quality & pixel count and very very expensive. The normal consumer doesn't have a need for a shit load of pixel so he needs to find an HDTV maker who will deliver on to his desk so he can stop whining about it.

BTW, if this is his biggest complaint about things then he's got it pretty easy and obviously doesn't have enough to worry about.

Need small native resolution screens too!

[Jazz-Masta]

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.

Re:Display Shrink

[Anonymous Coward]

I want my 4:3 back.

I wanted the CRT contrast ratio and viewing angle back too (via OLED or whatever), but what can we do? :(

what the TV industry learned from the PC industry

[FudRucker]

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,

Re:Do we really WANT higher resoltuion displays?

[Blakey Rat]

Why aren't we all using WQUXGA, WHSXGA, or even WHUXGA display right now?

Hopefully regardless of our opinions of pixel density, we can *all* agree to STOP USING THOSE RETARDED ABBREVIATIONS. How is a mortal human being supposed to know what the holy shit "WHUXGA" means in a practical sense? Just give us the actual resolution (in NUMBERS) and call it good. Thank you.

Ahem.

Anyway, I agree with your general sentiment about OS support for high-res displays, although it's getting much better. Progress has been slow. Maybe in another 5-10 years it literally will not matter what your DPI is, and desktops will all look the same regardless.

I also want to add that is Pete Brown wants higher-res displays, he's perfectly welcome to start up a business providing same and seeing how well he does. If he's right, and there's a huge demand for these, he'll make a killing. (My guess is he's not and there isn't and he'll go broke.)

Another stupidity in the LCD display market

[Skapare]

... 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.

Re:Another stupidity in the LCD display market

[Skapare]

So, in a program with 4,096,000 lines of code in it, you'd insist on fixing it if 0.000024% of those lines let any hacker in? I would!

It's Phillip / Sony that lead the let down !

[Taco Cowboy]

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.

Re:30 inch HP LP3605 here @ 2560x1600

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh.

I don't agree with GP but I understand that as things are moving to newer display technologies trying to wring more and more out of what is now a low cost and low profit-margin technology isn't the smartest move.

Invest heavily in trying to get the last drops out something that's going to be passé in short order? Nice knowing your company.

Bye bye.

Re:Not everyone wants more pixels, but better aspe

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:Not everyone wants more pixels, but better aspe

[aztektum]

Frankly for most people the existing 'HDTV' resolution has more than enough pixels

Yeah and 640k was enough for everyone.

Re:couldn't agree more: 1920x1080 sucks

[MayonakaHa]

Honestly if you're working on papers on your computer most of the time, flip the monitor to vertical. Pretty much all of the "paperwork" based terminals I saw when doing printer maintenance at hospitals were mounted vertically for quick review of documents.

Re:Not everyone wants more pixels, but better aspe

[radish]

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!

Re:Price has gone up...

[Tumbleweed]

Some of this is of course due to currency fluctuations, I think... never seen a piece of hardware increase in price over time before.

Haven't priced a Ford Mustang made in the 1960s lately, have you? :)

Re:30 inch HP LP3605 here @ 2560x1600

[DMalic]

He's not a "normal consumer" so he has different concerns. He's lobbying them as best he can and if you don't share them, maybe you should STFU about him being a whiner? The availability of more 4K displays would not suddenly drive up the price on your 1080p screens so that you could no longer afford to buy a monitor.

Re:Not everyone wants more pixels, but better aspe

[jedwidz]

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.

I want my VERTICAL resolution back

[macraig]

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.

Re:I want my VERTICAL resolution back

[Skapare]

Especially with applications that put row after row of junk buttons along the top and bottom and never on the sides, making the vertical space crunch even worse. Everything from Firefox to OpenOffice has this issue. We need to knock some developer heads around.

Re:I want my VERTICAL resolution back

[musikit]

monitor.RotateInDegrees(90);

Re:Higher DPI and Gamut, please!

[djrobxx]

People with less than perfect vision find modern screens with high DPI tough to read - and frustratingly, the only fix that works with everything is running at non-native resolution. Vista definitely improved higher-DPI support. IE8 was another huge step. But large fonts support still breaks lots of applications, even popular ones. Try using large fonts with Trillian or many Adobe products. OSX still doesn't support DPI changing at all. It seems to be a dropped Leopard feature. There's some hacks you can do to modify DPI, but the result is more broken than XP's large font mode. I really don't get why we've been able to have printers scale documents beautifully from 150DPI to 1200DPI, but we're unable to solve the same problem on the display!

Re:Higher DPI and Gamut, please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because NeXT is dead... :(

BS: Or you have a ridiculously huge TV.

[guidryp]

"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).

Re:Not everyone wants more pixels, but better aspe

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Bloody luxury.

[Kohath]

Try adjusting the contrast.

Re:Higher DPI and Gamut, please!

[mrchaotica]

NeXT supported "Display PostScript," which is basically what it sounds like.

And of course, OS X uses "Display PDF" which should still do all that stuff too... yet it doesn't, for no good reason.

Re:30 inch HP LP3605 here @ 2560x1600

[Mad Merlin]

There's actually a lot wrong with displays these days, and the trend towards shrinking resolutions, especially with the shortscreen (16:10) and shorterscreen (16:9) fads taking off is only one of the problems. The other problem is the overwhelming majority of panels produced now are TN, meaning they have outrageously bad viewing angles and only 6-bits of colour per channel instead of 8. It wouldn't be so bad if you could actually tell what type of panel an LCD used, but the manufacturers don't list it anywhere, so it's basically impossible to tell unless you can see one in person. Good luck finding any laptop nowadays that doesn't come with a TN panel, Thinkpads and Apples included.</rant>

Re:30 inch HP LP3605 here @ 2560x1600

[BobPaul]

That's only 100dpi. His complaint is specifically that we're still stuck at around 90dpi or less. 100dpi is still in that ballpark. When you get a 150dpi, 200dpi, or better monitor, let us know.

Re:Do we really WANT higher resoltuion displays?

[shutdown -p now]

According to a friend of mine who worked at Apple and did a white paper for them on resolution independence, you need ~200 DPI on the display before you can get away with scaling all the UI elements without them jumping around by 1/2 pixels, etc and it being annoying to the user.

I don't understand this part at all. A button misplaced by 1/2 pixel will hardly be noticeable (especially on 150dpi and above!), and it's not like it will jump back and forth all the time - it will only happen once when user changes DPI setting.

Re:Do we really WANT higher resoltuion displays?

[evilviper]

you need ~200 DPI on the display before you can get away with scaling all the UI elements without them jumping around by 1/2 pixels, etc

That's assuming brain-dead "nearest-neighbor" scaling (only whole-pixel steps). Plenty of other methods perform far better. bicubic is the first one that comes to mind.

Re:Higher DPI and Gamut, please!

[cgenman]

Second this. Vista / Windows 7 were both scheduled to handle resolution-independent UI rendering, and neither of them can. Until the OS can render icons at 3/4ths of an inch at super-high DPI, most people will want a screen appropriately sized for their inputs. Similarly, web pages and other rendering will need to be resolution-independent... though the OS comes first.

I'm a bit surprised this rant is coming from a Microsoft Evangelist, considering that this is something that Microsoft has promised to fix for years.

Re:30 inch HP LP3605 here @ 2560x1600

[iamhassi]

"He's not a "normal consumer" so he has different concerns. He's lobbying them as best he can and if you don't share them, maybe you should STFU about him being a whiner?"

Did you bother to read his reason why he wants a ridiculous 300dpi display? "I don't want the super high DPI to fit more info, I want super high DPI so I can get extra smooth text and screen elements. "

Did he seriously just say he wanted a 6000x4000 24" LCD with a 0.08mm dot pitch (compared to average CRTs with 0.22-0.28mm) so he could look at smooth text?

Also, does he realize this is all his employers' (Microsoft) fault? XP was set by default to 96 DPI. Sure you could set it to "large size" 120 DPI when running high, but that usually ended up distorting everything. Websites didn't look right, text would be all over the pages, some text would be larger but other things wouldn't be, like text in Flash or on images. What looked normal on your screen looked huge on other's meaning you couldn't do web design any word processing. So why would manufactures offer 300dpi when customers would just set them back to the 96 DPI they're use to?

Further proof that no one cares: Steam's Hardware Survey March 2010. Most prevalent resolution amongst gamers? 1280x1024, at 19%. Second place is 1680x1050, at 18%. Neither of those are particularly high, with the highest resolution in the survey being 1920x1200 at 6% and "Other" is only 3.4%.

Besides when his eyes go in a few years he won't care about the high resolutions anymore.

Re:Microsoft Evangelist, Pete Brown

[spongman]

err... since your ssh terminal session is all text, it's probably the thing that'll benefit most from higher resolution. assuming you're not using bitmap fonts.

Re:30 inch HP LP3605 here @ 2560x1600

[FireFury03]

Further proof that no one cares: Steam's Hardware Survey March 2010. Most prevalent resolution amongst gamers? 1280x1024, at 19%. Second place is 1680x1050, at 18%. Neither of those are particularly high, with the highest resolution in the survey being 1920x1200 at 6% and "Other" is only 3.4%.

Since when were gamers ever a good measure of display resolution? Gamers have *never* pushed their hardware up to really high resolutions because high frame rates are more important to them (which makes a lot of sense - you can't appreciate high resolutions on fast moving video anyway).

The people you should be paying attention to are graphic designers, programmers, people using CAD, publishers, etc. These are the people who were using 21" 1600x1200 CRTs when "normal people" were happy with their 15" 800x600 displays and gamers were trying to squeeze high frame rates out of 320x240.

Re:30 inch HP LP3605 here @ 2560x1600

[Anonymous Coward]

I've f'ing had it with all the "when you eyes go" apologetics and rationales. I lost count how many people said this, and yours is the comment that broke the flamer's back (to massacre a old saying).

I'm 50 years old. I can STILL see the pixels on my 24-inch 1920x1200. I want MORE pixels. And I want then NOW, while I can still enjoy them, and not in 30 years after I'm dead or senile.

2560x1600 isn't much of an upgrade, but if I could get that on a 24-inch or smaller form-factor, I would pay over a thousand to do it. Why one needs to go to a minimum of 30 inches to do it, I do not know. I'm not interested in a 30-inch desk-eating monster. I'm prefectly fine with the 24 inchers. ALas, they are not made.

Also - those "studies" of what gamers use: how much of it is biased by the fact that gamers tend to be younger, often still in school, and generally don't have much disposable cash to spend better, more expensive stuff. The teen who plays at 1280x960 because that's what got handed down to him, can't be said to have actively chosen this resolution over all others.

Re:30 inch HP LP3605 here @ 2560x1600

[Rockoon]

Microsoft had bet that high DPI displays (significantly greater than 100) would become common, even going to far as to upscale/resample program windows that dont declare themselves as "DPI aware" within their manifest.

The reality is that the only place you see 200DPI or better is in cell phones and MP3 players.

As many programmers will tell you, the DPI setting in Windows is a problematic farce.

The most important thing to understand is that it lies. It has absolutely nothing to do with the DPI of the display. If the setting happens to match the displays actual DPI then its merely a coincidence. This value is actually used both in practice, and as a matter of policy, as a global scaling factor. So people with bad eyesight are EXPECTED to have this value set to completely lie its ass off.

Instead of blindly betting the farm on higher DPI displays becoming common, they should have solidified what this value means, to an actual DPI setting (with prominent warning that if its set incorrectly that some programs may not render themselves in a satisfactory manner.)

If I am expected to make "DPI aware" programs (and I am, thanks Microsoft), then at least give me access to an actual god damn DPI. If you want a global scaling factor, you can have one of them in addition to the DPI setting.

WARNING: *** Text in this post may appear larger, or smaller, than it is.

96dpi is crap, we need better.

[nobodyman]

Did he seriously just say he wanted a 6000x4000 24" LCD with a 0.08mm dot pitch (compared to average CRTs with 0.22-0.28mm) so he could look at smooth text?

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.

Also, does he realize this is all his employers' (Microsoft) fault? XP was set by default to 96 DPI. Sure you could set it to "large size" 120 DPI when running high, but that usually ended up distorting everything.

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).

Websites didn't look right, text would be all over the pages, some text would be larger but other things wouldn't be, like text in Flash or on images.

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.

So why would manufactures offer 300dpi when customers would just set them back to the 96 DPI they're use to?

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.