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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.
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!
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".
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'
Another display will not increase the resolution (dpi) on the one display you have. I rarely wish more physical space on my display. What I'd like is higher resolution.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
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...
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.
We actually do have a vector-based GUI in Vista/7.
It works quite well on apps that are written to use it.
Aero is also a desktop compositing engine, which means that the GPU handles a lot more of the screen redraw and such.
It also handles such things as... raster-scaling GDI applications to the appropriate size (rather than relying on the GDI app to get the size right, they never do,) when you've got the DPI increased in Vista/7.
... Fourth, fuck you both Firefox and Opera. You both should do a better job of separating 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!
That's funny I can right now go to View -> Page Style -> No Style, and Firefox will display slashdot as linear context using my font and color settings in Tools -> Options -> Content tab. Of course this only works if the site only decorates the page using CSS. I think there's a Firefox add-on that allows you to override the site's CSS and replace it with your own in a user friendly manner.
This space is not for rent.
Because the stigma associated with the 32-bit LBA fields in the MBR (MS-DOS) partition table format. While a nearly-4TB drive could still be utilized in full, it would have to be divided up with the last partition starting at just under the 2TB mark, and be a size of 2TB. And this may not even work unless the implementing OS or partitioning tools handle the arithmetic with more than 32 bits. Windows 7, Linux, and most BSDs support the newer GUID Partition Table format (and even provide for an easy 128 primary partitions), drive makers know there will be issues that complicates the sale of the drives. Older OSes won't handle the size and/or the new partition table format. And besides, they are also working the 4096 sector size issue, too, which adds its own complications that minimize the market.
RAID arrays have already gone long past this limit (we have four 20-TB arrays at work) and use the new partition tables. But these are the exceptions, and they typically aren't even using drives beyond 1 TB (our 20-TB arrays have 24 drives of 1 TB). They will eventually get past these issues and you should be seeing 3TB and 4TB drives in a few months. But be prepared for 4096 byte sectors and a new partition table format (that is more powerful and even has a backup copy at the end of the drive or array).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
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.
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. That's why the iPhone as a ~200 DPI screen. So, the IBM T-221 display would be awesome for resolution independence, but typical monitors, "not so much".
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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.
Huh? A 24" display with 1920x1200 resolution is a completely boring 100 dpi or so. 27" at 2560x1440 is only 110 dpi or so. A high resolution display would be more like 150 dpi, ideally more like 200 dpi. Any idea where I can get a display that's at least 2560x1440, and at least 150 dpi?
It's worse then that even, they can't even decide what they mean. I've seen WXGA mean 1366x768, 1280x768, 1280x800, and 1280x720. I have even seen a projector that had a resolution that was a 17:10 aspect ratio. It probably wouldn't even bother me that much, except that many times, the only thing listed in the spec sheet is "WXGA" with no actual resolution listed.
As far as I know, IE8 is the only browser that behaves as expected given a high DPI setting. It is one of the very few advantages that IE8 has over the other mainstream browsers.
Note that DPI-awareness is very different from zoom functionality.
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.
Whitepaper or not, that's total bunk. Hasn't he heard of subpixel rendering? The font guys at Apple do that every day, maybe he should talk to them about it. Now, you might use the argument that widgets might become a bit blurry, but they sure wouldn't "jump around" unless you're doing something crazy-wrong.
Also, the iPhone doesn't have a 200 DPI screen, so in addition to being conceptually wrong, you're factually wrong. Apple's own webpage says it's 163: http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
Besides, even if icons "jumped around" by half a pixel, why can't I set the DPI in OS X anyway and just decide to take that risk? Could it be because (gasp) Apple doesn't have the fucking feature working yet, despite talking about it since 10.2? Ask your friend what the hold-up is... we all saw a mostly-working demo in the 10.3 dev tools, where's the finished feature?
Comment of the year
The problem with font embedding (and specifying fixed font size) is that this disregards user's preferences and disabilities (low vision etc).
To give a very simple example, I hate Arial with a passion for purely aesthetic reasons; my browser sans-serif font is sent to Verdana, and if a website comes with CSS which says something like "font-family: Arial, sans-serif" (so Arial always takes precedence if present), my first urge is to find the designer and punch him in the face. My second urge is to immediately leave the site, which is what I normally end up doing.