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

Higher DPI and Gamut, please!

[PhrostyMcByte]

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.

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!

[bar-agent]

Because NeXT is dead... :(

An explanation, for those who don't know:

NeXT supported "Display PostScript," which is basically what it sounds like. Thus, unlimited scaling and DPI, splines, fonts, etc.... Basically, applying laser printer techniques to your screen.

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.

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?

[PhrostyMcByte]

You're doing it wrong. You should be increasing the DPI setting in your operating system, which will let you increase the size of things but will let them have far more detail. This should lead to a better browsing experience because the text will be more legible.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[dangitman]

People with good eyesight who use complicated applications or requirements.

How does one use a requirement?

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Neil Hodges]

How does one use a requirement?

Well, some people often abuse requirements, so using a requirement is probably similar to that.

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?

[Bourdain]

This only works, to varying extents, in the more modern OS's.

For example, the relevant application(s) has to be DPI aware as well as either have additional higher resolution raster based graphics or use something like SVG

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:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Tumbleweed]

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

This is just another in a long line of examples of why the word 'kneejerk' is 50% 'jerk'.

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[Z34107]

This is a lot better on Vista/7. Legacy programs at high DPI are bitmap enlarged to maintain correct proportions. (Although yes, this does make some programs look fuzzy.) Smarter programs that handle DPI properly can set a flag in their application manifest if they handle different DPI properly. .NET programs written using WPF are entirely vector based, and so scale to any resolution.

This was wonderful for my grandparents - they had been running XP at 640x480 because of their poor vision. When they got a Windows 7 computer, we ran the screen at its native resolution and just turned the DPI settings way down.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, web developers -- the Wal-Mart cashiers of the computing industry...

Re:Perhaps nobody else cares?

[macbuzz01]

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

To the guy in the adjacent cube...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Because I know you spend all day reading Slashdot instead of what you are supposed to be doing...

Would you please stop making disgusting sounds with your dentures???

Please?

Re:To the guy in the adjacent cube...

[zill]

I was deliberating whether to mod you "troll" or "offtopic" when I finally realized you were talking about me.

Sorry, I'll stop now :(

Not everyone wants more pixels, but better aspect

[slashuzer]

Frankly for most people the existing 'HDTV' resolution has more than enough pixels, to get full benefit from increased number of pixels you would need a larger screen and sit closer to it. As it is, reading text on these high DPI screens is hard enough, and I often find myself increasing the default font size. This issue is particularly pronounced in laptop screens.

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!

Bloody luxury.

[gklinger]

My monitor has ONE BIG PIXEL. It ain't easy to use but I get by.

Do we really WANT higher resoltuion displays?

[zill]

Display resolution and pixel pitch peaked back in 2001 with the introduction of IBM T220. Even now, no production display can top its resolution and pixel pitch.

Why aren't we all using WQUXGA, WHSXGA, or even WHUXGA display right now?
Simple, there's no demand for it.

Why isn't there any demand for it?
Because 90% of the consumers are still watching 480p DVD and DTV broadcasts.
Because lots of websites are still designed to be optimally viewing in 1024x768.
Because most operating systems and applications have their font sizes hardcoded (Windows 7 only allow system fonts to be enlarged by 150% while OSX cannot adjust its system font size at all).

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.)

Re:Do we really WANT higher resoltuion displays?

[Namarrgon]

Windows 7 only allow system fonts to be enlarged by 150%

Not true. The Set Custom Text Size setting allows up to 500%, i.e. 480dpi.

Re:Do we really WANT higher resoltuion displays?

[Tumbleweed]

How is a mortal human being supposed to know what the holy shit "WHUXGA" means in a practical sense?

I'm pretty sure WHUXGA is a volcano in Iceland.

Re:Do we really WANT higher resoltuion displays?

[rthille]

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".

high-DPI displays

[MobyDisk]

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.

Resolution of the human eye: about 570 Megapixels

[Cliff Stoll]

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

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.

I have a big problem with everything

[brxndxn]

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)...

But here's where I really get mad.. Half the people are posting that too high of resolution causes web pages to look too small.. or GUI's to look to funky.. That is where I have a problem! Why the hell don't we have vector graphics gui's by now? First, I blame Intel.. Intel sucks so bad at graphics that they cannot even run Aero properly.. still.. in 2010. Intel, your engineers are of average intelligence. And yet, your goddamn graphics chips are in half our computers. (Maybe some of you think Intel runs Aero fine.. but I'm still not happy with it.) Second.. WTF is Aero? It's a piece of shit GUI band-aid.. that's what it is. It adds like one 3d feature just so the dumbass consumer goes 'ohhh.. pretty candy'. Weren't we promised a vector-based GUI with Vista? So Microsoft, you suck too. Your management is incompetent and your programmers lack talent. Third.. Why the hell can't I take advantage of the contrast of a computer monitor and just have a black background? Why the hell am I pretty much forced with a white background and black text whether I'm running linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Apple, OS2, YourMom (an OS I wrote in like 5 minutes that's better than Windows 7.) Seriously.. every OS basically forces white background/black text.. Why not have vector-based black background with bright green text.. like in the 80's.. back when it was hilariously easy to read text on a crappy 14" CRT monitor? Fourth, fuck you both Firefox and Opera. You both should do a better job of seperating 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! IE, you don't even count because you are from Microsoft and therefore cannot innovate. Apple, do not think you're getting out of this.. You're still living in pixel land. Come on, Steve Jobs, force your overworked minions to develop the best goddamn vector graphics GUI in existence.. Then open the new OS to all platforms.. Then dominate the entire marketplace. Seriously.. the entire world will be scrambling to develop the highest resolution monitor.. Steve, if you don't do this, you have tiny balls. OMG, I almost forgot the monitor companies.. God you suck. I am using a Samsung 1920x1200 26" TV as my monitor right now.. Don't think I didn't notice you went from 16:10 to 16:9 behind my back.. I found the one TV on clearance that still had the 0:+1 more than everyone else.

So, imo, where the entire computer industry is screaming, "Look at me.. I'm soo great.. I have multitouch or I have a stupid 3d feature.. or I have 1080p!", remember that you still have a lot to do.. Please hurry up and get it done..

AMD, you get a free pass.

I have a lot more to bitch about.. but I'm busy.. and I only have so much karma to blow.

Re:I have a big problem with everything

[bhtooefr]

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.

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);

one big pixel?

[Fubari]

My monitor has ONE BIG PIXEL. It ain't easy to use but I get by.

Actually that's just the disk activity light.

Pete Brown is an idiot

[scdeimos]

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.

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.