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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."
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.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
...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?
My monitor has ONE BIG PIXEL. It ain't easy to use but I get by.
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.)
Comment of the year
... 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.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
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.
monitor.RotateInDegrees(90);
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!
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.
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.
http://blog.nexusuk.org