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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.
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
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?
Living With a Nerd
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.
Yea, I tried that but my desk isn't long enough for my legs.
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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?
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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stop upgrading to shittier technology.
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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.
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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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?
I'm not sure what you're on, but reading narrow columns is way faster than reading wide lines. That's why newspapers have columns. One of the many deficiencies of CSS is that it's practically impossible to a newspaper-like layout which works at any screen size (adapting the number of columns as needed).
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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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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.
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.