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Why Are We Losing Vertical Pixels?
An anonymous reader writes "Switching from 1600x1200 to wide 1680x1050 to HD 1600x900, we are losing more and more vertical space, thus it is becoming less and less simple to read a full A4 page or a web page or a function call. What's the solution for retaining the screen height we need to be productive?"
Buy a different monitor or buy two or turn one sideways.
This depends entirely on the monitor you buy.
I went from a 1600x1200 CRT to 1920x1200 LCD. In other words, I lost no vertical resolution.
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As you loosen the screen requirements to a less-stringent format, the vertical pixels flatten since the horizontal pixels cannot support the additional weight.
-AC
Is to make sure they are fastened down properly!
Geez, get a new editor!
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Where did this obsession with Widescreen come from anyways? I understand for "widescreen films", but why are all monitors wide now? It's weird that it kind of slowly crept into the norm..
The linked article was talking about laptop screens, where that's not really an option. I could see some humorous results if you tried. The solution is just as simple: Develop on an external monitor (optionally rotated 90 degrees).
http://www.len.ro/2010/10/why-am-i-loosing-screen-height-on-each-new-laptop/
Maybe because you haven't tightened it enough?
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It's getting hard to find 4:3 displays bigger than 19", or with higher resolutions, or with better underlying technology.
It's sad, but it seems everyone has fallen for the 'wider is better' idea.
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The low-end computer monitor market is using commodity HD TV LCD's. The solution is to pony up and buy a middle tier monitor that does proper 1600 x 1200 or something aspect ratio appropriate.
You get what you pay for.
why is it suddenly so hard to find a laptop with a good screen?
it is nearly impossible to find a laptop with anything other than 1366x768.
my 4 year old 14" dell has a 1440x900 screen and at the time a fairly high end cpu/memory combo (core duo/1gb). I paid $650 for it.
today I can't get a laptop with an equivalent screen for under 850. nearly all laptops don't even offer high res screen options anymore.
just because you can market a 1366x768 screen as HD does not make it good enough. especially if we are talking 17" laptops.
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We're now a culture that prefers consuming the latest HD pulp over reading.
All the monitors are 16x9 now (1920x1080). I have the same problem - I don't want to go "up" to 1920 from 1600x1200 (20" 4:3 flat panel I have from 2002 - cost 1000$) and lose 180 vertical pixels!
I tried to find a 16x10 but there are none in the stores and hard to find even on newegg etc. I asked on some forums and it's just because they aren't making them anymore.
Bummer.
Yea, I tried that but my desk isn't long enough for my legs.
You think that's hard, you should try switching to Dvorak!
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I too find it disturbing that displays have gone to 2MP and stopped. We were this close to being able to actually read a PDF on 100% zoom without squinting. WTF is going on?
The solution is just as simple: Develop on an external monitor (optionally rotated 90 degrees).
Now figure out how to carry a portrait monitor and power supply on the bus. I thought the whole point of having a laptop was to be able to work in a vehicle or in a restaurant.
But then my neck hurts at the end of the day from turning my head....
Have you ever actually benchmarked video performance on a rotated display? Even with hardware supported rotation, the framebuffer read-out order is no longer consecutive which completely fucks video performance.
I seriously can't believe the suggestions... It's like saying "What happened to all the compact cars?" and you reply "Stop whining, just crush your car down to size." Why can't we just buy something in the form factor we want?
Would that not put the second monitor looking down against your desk? |/_ ??
Is it more productive for coding because now you cannot surf Youtube or read Slashdot when you should be coding? That would increase my productivity too. :)
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What monitors do you recommend that have worthwhile vertical viewing angles? I tried rotating one of my screens but it seems the cheapo Dell displays at my office just aren't designed for above/below viewing. Makes me wonder who was on the design team that thought adding rotation to a cheap panel that has no vertical viewability was a good idea...
+1 Disagree
I rather think it depends on what you're doing. I work in publishing, and there are reasons most books are the way they are. Wide columns of text can be difficult to read. Obviously on a computer you're not just reading columns of text, but it does make a difference.
If you've got a iPad, Kindle, what not, try reading in landscape vs portrait. Not everybody likes the same thing, but in general I prefer narrow columns.
Do you read?
Books, magazines, etc print text in portrait mode.
Heck, the newspapers even print the text in several columns to avoid very long lines, as that makes text more difficult to read. (I hate programmers that create 200-character statements on one line.)
For people using computers for text (documents, programming, etc) rather than watching movies, the vertical resolution is valuable.
)9TSS
Actually no.
DPIs are now static because they expect us to use them only for movies. 1080 vertical pixels is all that you should need.
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Nope, facing the ceiling. But, I have a mirror installed up there so it all works out.
I think you hit it on the head.. this whole fixation on 1080p crap. If anything, DPI for computer monitors has been declining the past five years after a slow march to near 100dpi from 72 dpi. I am running two fairly ancient Formac 1600x1200 20"ers which are eactly 100dpi - circa 2002. Is it asking so much that 8 years later we have 2400x1800 on a 20" monitor for a reasonable price? Its become hard now to even find 100 dpi monitors at 20".
If your work is done on a laptop keyboard you obviously don't care about ergonomics so you can't start complaining about the ergonomics of the monitor!
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stop upgrading to shittier technology.
check out my comic: Essential Tremors
:-(
And then?
Even large ones have ridiculous aspect ratios designed for entertainment. I am typing this on a 22in Iiama 1920x1080 which has about the same usability as a 19" classic 4:3. If not less...
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Apple used to have an A4 monitor: portrait and indeed the size of a sheet of A4 paper, and "paper white" CRT type. From the time that a colour monitor was not standard. It never gained much traction, but for word processing it was pretty cool (I've actually worked with one for a while).
I can imagine web browsing also works quite well on such a monitor - but well at the time the www was barely there yet.
OTOH: those modern widescreens you can consider as two portrait monitors seamlessly linked together. Even though I've an older (non-widescreen) monitor I do tend to have my windows narrower than the screen already...
Mod +1 impractical. TFA is talking about laptops.
16:10 computer displays were great for watching 16:9 video on a computer. They had room outside the video for playback controls or status information. With a 16:9 display, you can't reasonably have any permanent status or controls without them overlapping the video.
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I once had to initialize a string with a very, very long (non-SQL) database request and couldn't even split that. I ended up with a single line over 2000 characters long, which ended with ";//sorry
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What monitors do you recommend that have worthwhile vertical viewing angles? I tried rotating one of my screens but it seems the cheapo Dell displays at my office just aren't designed for above/below viewing. Makes me wonder who was on the design team that thought adding rotation to a cheap panel that has no vertical viewability was a good idea...
People want monitors cheap, so the manufacturers make cheap monitors. The most common type of panel is the Twisted Nematic (TN) - which has fairly limited viewing range and color depth. (According to Wikipedia - most TN panels are actually only 6 bit per color channel, they fake 24-bit color via flickering and dithering)
I got the HP ZR24W - it's a 24" 1920x1200 monitor that sells for around $400. It's my first LCD monitor (apart from laptops). Its panel is some variant of the In-Plane Switching technology (IPS) - which is generally said to have slower switching time than TN panels, but better viewing angles and better color.
Really, it's kind of low-end as IPS panels go. The black levels are brighter than I'd like, but in general I've really enjoyed the monitor. It's a great improvement over the two 19" CRTs I was using before (combined total resolution: 3200x1200 pixels - but the clarity wasn't nearly as good as with the LCD) I've also got it mounted to a monitor arm (E-Bay special! Dirt cheap!) so I can move it around and rotate it and stuff. I do use it sometimes in rotated mode - the main problem there is that it's such a wide monitor, when rotated it becomes a very tall monitor... Almost uncomfortably tall. I find myself longing for the old 4x3 aspect ratio. :) But I'm very happy with my purchase. Going to a better IPS monitor would have meant spending at least another two hundred dollars... And going cheaper would have probably meant a TN panel or a loss of vertical resolution, or both. (There is a 22" model, the ZR22w - which is basically the same except smaller and only 1080 pixels high instead of 1200...) Viewing angle was a big issue for me, as was vertical resolution...
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Fair enough, but that is more we are gaining horizontal pixel but not vertical pixels. Not losing vertical pixels to the degree the article indicates.
Try scrolling your document to see the portions above or below the screen using the handy scroll bar to the right or left of your document. It's amazing! You only work with one page at a time anyway, get over not seeing all of it, or just print it out, gammit!
Also, why can't I have a screen view that flips 180 so I can watch movies upside-down? Fix that before we "fix" not being able to scroll, I mean, "view" your +5 Tall Document of Nonsense. Don't make me come down there! Get on my lawn and subscribe to my newsletter!
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Have you ever tried to use a 16:9 monitor turned sideways? It's ridiculous. The viewing angle on the vertical (now, the horizontal) part of the monitor is terrible so you have to be sitting exactly in front of it or you can't see it. This is no good if you have 2 monitors. The monitor is so tall that your focus on the top and bottom parts of the monitor are different.
The trouble with turning an LCD monitor sideways is that text looks terrible. I use a widescreen monitor rotated for code visibility purposes. The excess cruft of IDE subwindows is much less disruptive. However, text (and even code) is significantly more readable (and less painful) on the smaller, non-rotated monitor.
Windows doesn't seem to properly do sub-pixel rendering on a rotated monitor -- all of the ClearType profiles are based on the configuration of subpixels in a normally-oriented monitor. Moreover, the settings don't seem to be on a per-monitor basis, which means that I would get to choose to have one of my two monitors look terrible and one be legible. Does anyone know of a ClearType (or similar) tool for Windows which properly adjusts to rotated screens? (I'm off to Google it... maybe it's easier to find this year?)
Then there's the issue of viewing angles -- most LCDs have a wide horizontal viewing range, but a narrow vertical viewing angle range. Rotating the monitor flips that. (It's not as big of a deal as you'd think, in that I sit in generally the same place, but it makes it harder to read stuff there if someone is sitting next to me.)
In modern America one is not limited to purchasing things in the town you live in. Try the internet sometime. It has all the stuff you could ever want to buy for sale. Even monitors.
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It's not an improvement and there's no way to sugar coat it with the excuse that you're getting more pixels overall. In almost all use cases text is rendered on screen horizontally (even in East Asia). Losing vertical resolution reduces the amount of information you can fit on the screen for any particular task. The extra horizontal space doesn't factor in since the only way to leverage it is with long lines of text which has negative consequences for ease of reading.
We're getting less vertical resolution because there is a convergence of resolutions used for HD television displays and humdrum consumer level monitors. The manufacturers are taking advantage of the economies of scale. For those of us that were enjoying 1600x1200 back when everyone was wallowing in 640x480 and 800x600 it's a step backwards. Most people don't know what they're missing out on so there is no demand to do better.
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Certain operating systems (naming no names) have a GUI developed on the assumption that you don't have a terribly high res screen and so you only want one thing on the screen at a time.
This pervades the entire platform to such a degree that actually using the full space for several things becomes surprisingly difficult.
I totally agree. I tried "rotated" for a while and performance and overall experience was bad. The colors looked slightly different and unbalanced. My guess is that viewing angles are optimized for using the monitor in "normal" (un-rotated) mode, and the average viewing angle may not be normal to the screen surface. So when you rotate the thing it all gets messed up. There are also more subtle issues: how to handle sub-pixel anti-aliasing (like in Windows ClearType) when one monitor is rotated and the other one is not?
Do not try to rotate the monitor — that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no monitor. Then you'll see, that it is not the monitor that rotates, it is only yourself.
Most people are impressed by 1920x1080 HDTV, because they had been watching analog cable or broadcast TV, and those formats are only ~440x486.
So basically it's a 9 times jump for them.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
not really - right now i'm using a 17in 4:3 with 1280x1024 res.. show me anything under 20in with more than 1k vertical? we are losing vertical - they might be gained on the horizontal.. but actually most of the new ones have overall less pixes for the same quoted screen size in inches..
also note the last time you saw a monitor quote it's dot pitch? LCD's don't apply to the prior way of measuring it because they don't have separate sub pixels but what dot pitch did enable was easy way of comparing pixel density from one monitor to another..
considering that higher density screens are more expensive to make and are more likely to have defects in large runs - there no doubt in my mind that monitor makers where happy to stop using dot pitch and not replace it.
the fact that when you go to buy a laptop you can get a 15in screen with a 1367x768 which which would be equivalent to a .278mm dot pitch - keep in mind you could get CRT's with dot pitch ~.2mm around 10 years ago. where is my LCD with that option?
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A year or so ago, I picked up a Dell 30" monitor with 2560x1600 resolution. It pretty much solves all of your monitor issues. The only concern, is that you need a video card capable of dual-link dvi output (Nearly all recent gaming cards).
If you've got a 1366x768 panel then you don't have a 1080P display, you have a 720P display. The fact that many 720P displays can handle 1080i/p signals doesn't make it a full HD display, and I've never seen one advertised as such.
Please provide examples of a tv claiming to be "Full HD" that doesn't have a 1920x1080 panel.
Then still, some sort of reference please, because I've looked on google, can't find anything and I genuinely want to know.
Hell, the reason TVs were marked differently (and confusingly) in "HD Ready" and "Full HD" was exactly that, the HD Ready models had 1366x768 resolution, and Full HD models had 1920x1080.
You're not losing pixels, you're just throwing numbers out there without actually knowing what you're talking about. 1600x1200 is UXGA. 1650x1080 is WSXGA+, which is the widescreen variant of SXGA+ (1400x1050). If you want widescreen based on the 1600x1200 resolution, buy a WUXGA monitor(1920x1200). Pretty simple, really. You only "lose" pixels if you don't research the monitor you are purchasing.
Don't be wedded to opening everything full screen.
I do just fine by sizing my apps so they fill about half the screen horizontally. Added bonus that it leaves me half my display for another app.
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I suspect it's Windows he's talking about. The common way to use Windows is to have all your windows maximized and most apps are written with this in mind. And most people using Windows have a nasty habit of having fairly low-res monitors (I know several "hardcore" gamers who have $2,500+ rigs hooked up to cheap-o monitors only capable of 1440x900 or so, but great response times though).
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I disagree, big pixels are not so bad, esp. because the price for higher DPI is probably poor colors, contrast..
similar to cameras.
You're not losing vertical space, you're gaining horizontal space.
Just don't tell that to your wife.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
There is no significant difference in latency or duration for vertical vs. horizontal saccades (eg: see ), and you're dead wrong about reading speed: In English, the optimal column width for fast reading is somewhere between 50 and 100 characters per line, depending on exact circumstances.
However, there are two other relevant facts: 1) The lower visual hemifield has a larger cortical representation than the upper visual hemifield, and shows modest improvements in visual performance (this is unsurprising, since our hands/tools/ground near us is usually in our lower hemifield) and 2) We can move our head side-to-side more rapidly, and with a larger range of motion than we can up and down, which changes some saccade distributions.
Irregardless of the mechanics of the situation, reading is a highly trained activity, and direction of reading is not universal. Chinese, for instance, can be read top-to-bottom, or with either horizontal possibility as the initial direction, with the reader cued by slightly differing strokes and punctuation . I'm not aware of any bottom-to-top sequential reading in any culture, which is probably due to the above mentioned processing differences. However, there are also mixed reading sequences that use multiple horizontal and vertical elements in a single block, like Mayan hieroglyphs (2x2 blocks LR->TB within block, blocks are read TB->LR ) or the Korean Hangul system (variety of block sizes, read TB->RL). Arguably, the latter systems are most efficient in terms of leveraging the early geometry of the visual system (log-polar, with resolution dropping exponentially with distance from the fovea.
we have them all over the place here, they all look fine. People use them to look at scanned legal documents. Usually they have one monitor 'normal' and one turned 90 degrees
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It really bugs the hell out of me the way manufacturers like sony and asus have the cheek to put out a laptop with a 1440x900 screen or a 1600x900 screen and call it "Full HD". As far as I'm concerned Full HD is 1080 pixels vertical and 1920 pixels horizontal, since when does 900 = 1080 and 1440 = 1920????? :) If anyone is interested I used a panel designed for a sony and fitted it to an asus g70. It cost me about 160ukp for the panel and about an hour to fit. I was able to try my g70 on a 1920x1200 panel first to see if it would drive it. Most LVDS LCD panels are interchangeable provided that they use the same backlighting technology.
Unsatisfied with the screen res on my laptop I decided to upgrade it myself.
Luckily after a long phone call to a supplier, I was able to convince them to send me a 1920x1200 LCD panel that was a direct replacement for the 1440x900 panel, They told me it was unlikely to work, but it works great
Size and aspect ratio can be an issue too. I'm sure that case modders could make even a screen of totally the wrong aspect look ok. I guess it boils down to having the bottle to mod your brand new laptop. Yeah yeah I know someone is going to reply telling me the g70 is 2 years old, well simplyasus were selling off old stock cheaply, so I got a bargain.
...Nearly, because you want to be viewing it from just slightly above...
That is not physically possible since the monitor is taller than my torso. It is a 22" display.
My 22" display is about 25" tall including the border, but not the stand. The stand, at the lowest possible setting, adds another inch or two. With my chair at the highest setting my eyes are about at the center of the display. I cannot comfortably reach my keyboard at that height and 5'9 my feet barely touch the floor. So the goal of getting my eye level to the top of the display seems impossible unless the top of my desk was at my knees when I sit down.
I don't understand how anyone can use a display this large in portrait mode unless they are 7 feet tall.