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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."
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!
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.
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
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.
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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I think Mr WrongSizeGlass should accept the fact that cramming more and more gigabytes into hard drives will make them more and more expensive. Since HDDs have become commodity items in the PC market people want them to be good quality and cheap, not super duper mega high capacity & low latency and very very expensive. The normal consumer doesn't have a need for a shit load of gigabytes so he needs to find an HDD 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.
do you realize how weak/stupid your argument is?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
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.
Have you thought about trying Eyefinity? As it seems to me Eyefinity is gonna be the way things end up, as it is cheaper to go triple monitors than it is to make one mega screen. And if you are wanting it for coding according to Jeff Atwood you just can't beat coding on triple monitors.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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?
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