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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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: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.

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

[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: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

[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.