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Windows 8 and Screen Resolution: WXGA Still Most Popular
jones_supa writes "The Building Windows 8 blog comes up with a detailed post explaining the improved support of Windows 8 regarding different screen sizes, resolutions and pixel densities. Early on, the Windows team explored an inch-based scaling system, but found out that bitmaps would look blurry when scaled to unpredictable sizes. They ended up choosing three predefined scale percentages: 100%/140%/180%. The article goes on pondering the best solutions to make each app look good on different screens. Also shown: the distribution of resolutions being used today with Windows 7, 1366x768 having a huge lead at 42%."
Also known as the cheap laptop screen.
I hate this resolution. I seems to me that screen resolutions have gone backwards, it's nigh on impossible to do any development with this shitty resolution. My old 5 year old Dell laptop supports 1600x1200 compared to my more modern Acer laptop despite the Acer having a far more powerful graphics card. It's not even a native HD resolution so your graphics card has to scale the 720p image up to display it on fullscreen... which totally defeats the purpose of 720p as the scaling hardware is probably crap. It seems to me that laptop manufacturers are shooting themselves in the foot with this crap.
This is slashdot, right, so why do we have to put up with these idiotic, nonsensical marketing terms which are meaningless to everyone but the person who created them, rather than being told the resolution itself straight away? Things like "1080p" are somewhat understandable, but the ones like the one from the title are just pure nonsense.
Please stop it with these 16:9 ratio displays. I can't stand having a two foot wide desktop with 6 inches of vertical height.
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I'm still using a CRT with standard aspect ratio, and two spare CRTs/LCDs in the basement. I won't be going widescreen for awhile.
But an up-and-down resolution of only 768 would feel cramped to me. I'm used to 1024 pixels of room, so I can comfortably read documents and books (which are oriented vertically).
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No, the clue was that they tried to do an inch based resolution (like everyone else) but were still using bitmaps, which looked wrong. If they had used SVGs maybe we could finally get people on business desktops to stop setting their LCDs to the wrong resolution.
I've been using 1920x1200 and/or 1920x1080 for the last 8 years and lately trying to get something better than that. But there's nothing without a huge price jump (think x3 for the closest resolution and most screens are actually x10). When are we going to get an improvement in screen resolution ?!? And fuck the iPad3.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Before 1080p LCD's were commonplace, 1920x1200 screens were common. Now they're hard to find, and expensive and I really miss them. It's the perfect resolution for a desktop, allowing full HD playback with subtitles on the black bars, plus it's tall enough to have two pages of text fit nicely.
Once 1920x1080 LCDs started being mass produced and used in both monitors and TVs, the superior WUXGA screens became much harder to find.
I don't really get the whole 1366x768 screen. I'd rather have 1280x800, as it's to 720p as WUXGA is to 1080p.
16:10 all the way. Stupid TV industry has pushed computer monitors to use 16:9.
Half the images in TFA were broken links. Of course, to Microsoft's credit, the broken link icons were scaling very nicely.
Another cramped resolution. Why wouldn't people use the higher 1280x1024 on their screens?
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Microsoft had another option which they have completely ignored. SVG is a standard graphics format which is vector based. The code to support it has already been written over and over again. MSIE already supports the format from MSIE 8 and above. SVG does not have to mean the rendering is slow in the least and can easily mean bitmaps are rendered from SVG sources before displaying and only has to be updated if the screen resolution changes.
Of course, they could also have used WMF but... yeah... just no.
They could have selected any resolution after basing icons and other graphical bits on SVG and it would ALWAYS look as sharp as it needs to look.
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The app developers are the ones that will be using bitmaps, not MS.
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You can't convert all images to SVG. Try zooming a PDF which has images, and see how the images get blurry while the text remains sharp.
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This is why it would be great if we could have 5-20k+ screens. Scaling and blurring wouldn't be an issue anymore (hardware or in software manually), and we won't have to rely on tricks such as subpixel anti-aliasing (or even *any* anti-aliasing, so that scaling is faster, and where there are less artifacts if you work in graphics). Reading text would as clear as reading a book. And we would take one step closer to true resolution independence where all icons, gadgets and widgets would resize accordingly.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Does this mean that Microsoft is actually putting some thought into their OS for a change?
An example of too much thought being put into an OS: Hurd.
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Fucking RMS cock sucking cum guzzler... I'll bet you were really holding yourself back not to say "Micros$oft".
Good grief.
He tried, but Hurd does not support the $ symbol yet.
There is a lot of thought being put into how to implement the support.
Especially amongst the professional crowd, there's clearly a demand for displays with more vertical pixels. If someone just created laptops with 1920x1200 and 1280x1024, matte coating, hell, put a IPS panel there (they are cheap enough to make). It would sell like hot pretzels in Oktoberfest.
Really?! Who would have thought that.
But do I understand correctly that Windows 8 (Metro) will pretty much abolish higher resolutions? Higher resolution, but still the same amount of screen estate.
I don't know why my W510 has this resolution. My old DELL Latitude D810 with WUXGA display has 1920x1200 resolution, but that laptop is now impossible to use, it's so old and underpowered and it overheats immediately and responsiveness is near 0. But I want that screen on my new laptop, WTF is wrong with this picture that since 2005 the screen resolutions have gone down as opposed to going up?
You can't handle the truth.
Does this mean that I have to go update all my webpages that proudly declare:
BEST VIEWED AT 640 X 480 ??
Haha, very true. My comment was clearly meant as a joke... I love to poke fun at ms, but I have to say I've been impressed with my experience with win7. Here's to hoping 8 is even better
OFFS! Lighten up. I apologize if I offended your delicate sensibilities with my pathetic attempt at humor...
Windows has flawless high DPI support since Vista. It scales everything properly vector based to any level you like. You can try it on a system if you want, crank up the scaling and watch it go.
All MS apps do it as well. IE, Notepad, the calculator, all the things that come with windows properly listen to the size requests for them OS. Even thing like images, IE will upscale images properly. They don't gain resolution, of course, but they are the right size and the resampling algorithm is quite good.
The problem is apps. Some flat out don't listen, Steam is one of those, it just won't scale at all. Some want to do their own thing. FF is one of those, it can scale, but won't listen to Windows for scaling. However there worst is some scale some things. They'll scale their text (because they use the Windows text renderer) but not the boxes the text is in (because they use their own pixel based controls).
So that's the issue. Developers have to start following the spec. If they use the provided Windows controls, it is no problem they scale themselves. If they make their own also no problem, they just have to write in the scaling logic. Problem is they don't, they are lazy about it.
The graph on that page shows that in 1024x600 only "desktop apps" will be supported, not Metro, which will require a minimum of 1024x768. ....Which means that a large percentage of currentNetbooks won't be compatible with Win8/Metro.
You may have a different definition of "die" from some people. I've seen TVs from the 70s... In my view they were dead. The convergence and focus on all of them was AWFUL. Images were extremely blurry and poorly defined, even by the standards of NTSC. They also weren't very bright, the phosphors having decayed with those decades of use. Even if the goal was just an NTSC CRT, they failed in my opinion.
Then there's the fact aside of better technology. Even a flawless NTSC CRT I don't want. The reason is I want better resolution. HD is easily noticeable to me. I want that higher pixel count. I also want the better colour. NTSC is lousy at colour reproduction in a number of ways. A nice digital HD set has no trouble with that.
I'm quite fine with not throwing things away arbitrarily, but keeping them well past the point of usefulness is silly as well.
Dell and HP do make systems with IPS screens in them, matte coating. However it is like an $800-1000 on a pro laptop and few people are willing to pay the price. Same is true on the desktop as well. Despite the claims that everyone would flock to a great display, IPS screens are not heavy sellers because of the price. It is easy to pay a grand for a good professional one. Even at $500-600 the U2410 isn't all that popular.
People want cheap monitors. They want size over quality and that just is what it is. So with laptops, where screen options are more limited, TN it is for the most part.
As I said, you can have IPS in a laptop, extremely good quality (HP's Dreamcolor screens are even 10-bit) but you will pay for it. That is just life. You can't demand that by magic they make things both cheap AND good. If they could, they would.
Call me when they design a non-toy UI that scales properly at 3840x1080.
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Microsoft had another option which they have completely ignored. SVG is a standard graphics format which is vector based.
and a quote from the actual article...:
Windows 8, the platform natively supports vector graphics. Any images exported as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) or XAML art will scale without getting blurry.
No, the real idiots here are you and the wazzocks who rated you 'informative'...
What I failed to say clearly was that Microsoft should simply abandon a standard for bitmapped icons. If they want icons, great... let the OS scale them to fit and if they look back, point them to the SVG standard and say "make new pictures."
Microsoft needs to stop enabling bad programming and bad design. If they want to remain relevant anyway...
It's a Laptop brand laptop. It's like cartoon branding.
Snicker!
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It is a VERY simple piece of research that is also obviously flawed and out of date. Reason? The iPad 3. That device will probably sell millions and raise tablet screen sizes ( tablets are a target for Windows 8) to a size rarely seen on PC's, even those with multiple screens. It is a gigantic pixel size.
So... either Windows tablet hardware will lag behind in screen resolution which won't help them sell (although MS should be used to that) or they have to ignore their "evidence" and realize that any statistic you record now is outdated data by the time you analysed it. Those rotters at Apple just refuse to stand still.
Since this screen now clearly exist, its production will no doubt scale up and it will become available for others. There is no reason it can't be added to laptops. Might Apple put it or a similar sexy screen in their laptops? I don't think it is impossible.
And MS will be unable to cope because their next-generation OS, still not out has been build for what people have been using, not what they are going to use.
It is very difficult to get it right, you can easily produce a product so far ahead of itself that nobody can run it. But making a product for the past... that is not possible either.
Mind you, Windows 8 is touchscreen, that is futuristic because the fast majority of screens out right now are NOT touch sensitive. Intresting choice, build for the resolutions of yesterday and the input device of the day after tomorrow. SMART!
Forget Vista and ME, this is going to Bo(m)b
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And I have a laptop from 2004 with a 17" 1920x1200 resolution LCD built-in. A replacement with similar resolution is nigh on impossible to find
The 17" Macbook Pro for a while now has had a 1920x1200 display. In fact all MacBooks eschew the HD fad and use a more realistic aspect ratio for display. You can even choose glossy or matte.
The system is due for an update later this year possibly to an ever higher DPI display...
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And always will be.
I have a 19" 1280 x 1024 screen, and I don't think I will ever buy a larger screen. I tried a 24" widescreen (or 'normal' screen as they presumably call them now, because you simply can't buy a new 4:3 screen any more (two words, by the way...) unless I've missed one), but didn't like having to look so far left and right to see all the screen - (duh) - I would rather alt-tab to see different programs running. The only thing I would ever have used the extra width for would be watching a video while using other programs - but only then because I would be looking at the main program 99% of the time, and the video would be in my peripheral vision. I'm really pleased that I found out that I already had the optimum size screen (for me), 19", and that they are now dirt cheap second hand.
And Windows 8 is a joke, and it just shows how arrogant the 'interface designers' at Microsoft have become - they are idiots, who can't admit they're wrong, and are going to lost Microsoft billions of dollars because of it.
We don't have them where I live. This is not the USA (thank god). There is a whole world out there beyond your little enclave/gated community.
So get off your Grammer Naxi high horse and relax, chill out, get real.
buy three 1920x1080 and rotate them vertically, then you get to play with 3240x1920
I'd like to make a minor apology to the Ubuntu guys, yes your new UI sucks but compared to Win 8 its a God damned masterpiece. I thought for sure nothing could top the suck of Unity but now I have to give the Ubuntu devs credit, at least Unity is consistent and discoverable
And, if you still don't like it, easily replaceable: sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
Win 8 is just a fucking mess. It TWO different UIs jarringly jammed together with no rhyme or reason
Something like the "At Ease" and "Finder" UIs of classic Mac OS?
Who the fuck thought have a touch designed UI as the MAIN UI on a NON TOUCH desktop or laptop was a smart idea?
Apple, in roughly 1993. But seriously, the Metro style start screen just replaces the start menu, and you're back to the desktop once you start a desktop application or close the start screen. My impression is that the biggest change compared to Windows 7, unless you install a bunch of Metro style applications from the Windows Store, is that the start menu is now full-screen instead of the bottom left corner.
I know Windows has an option to change the text DPI. 96 is the default, and 120 makes everything bigger (even though the monitor itself doesn't change). I think the reason that exists is 1. some people want things bigger, perhaps they're having trouble seeing fine detail, and 2. Windows can't find out the size of the monitor to calculate an appropriate value itself. The monitor/screen can change at a moment's notice, so that's understandable, but what kills me is it seems no hardware maker ever provides the actual size (and in a way that Windows can access). Either that or a computer seller selling both a computer and monitor will set the DPI to 96 regardless what the monitor's actual DPI at the recommended screen resolution is. In other words, it's up to the user to set the correct value. And they won't, they'll just use the default because it looks good.
Some apps might want to scale their content via inches/meters. Text DPI is their only way of doing that. If all computers had an appropriate DPI, then the app would be the same physical size on each screen, and that'd be convenient to work with when deciding whether there's space to add more content. But let's say it scaled to screen resolution instead. There's just no telling what the DPI will be on a given screen. A small tablet could have a low resolution, like the early iPhone models, or it could have a high resolution like the ones coming out now. Say the same tablet were to change between a low resolution and high resolution. What was easy to read on a low resolution could now be too small on a high resolution. If the app scaled to the resolution instead, this wouldn't be a problem, but then the UI elements might look too big on large monitors.
Granted people won't change monitors or resolutions often, but wouldn't it be better if Windows could adjust the text DPI automatically to match the given monitor and screen resolution?
After all it is not the resolution but the touch friendliness, that is key.
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If they want icons, great... let the OS scale them to fit and if they look back, point them to the SVG standard and say "make new pictures."
You can do that when you're already dominating the market. When you're trying to get into a whole new one which is dominated by someone else (tablets, in this case), you have to suck it up to developers, because otherwise they'll just rightly tell you to GTFO.
And, given that vast majority of apps today still use bitmap icons, including on those new platforms like iOS, it's here to stay.
16:9 is not better than 16:10 for side by side given the same horizontal resolution, it's worse.
Someone hasn't discovered that about:config pref.
The "just about readable" resolution. Since most programmers don't give a shit about people actually being able to read their interfaces, and since windows scaling sucks big time, most of us don't go too big on resolution.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The textures on the 3D bubbles would blur out at huge densities.
I'm under the impression that Microsoft's clout means PC makers will stop selling netbooks altogether in favor of, say, Atom tablets. They're already gearing up to do so: witness "ultrabooks", which combine tablet thinness with a keyboard, and Dell's discontinuation of the Inspiron mini line.
I find a 16:9 much more useful if I move the menubar onto the left-hand side. This makes the "usable rectangle" somewhat similar to what I had on a 4:3 with the menubar at the bottom.
I agree with parent. What's up with the low vertical resolution in the business laptops? The Macbook Air 1440x900 in a 13" package. Why is that higher than Dells standard 14" resolution?
I'm currently running two 1920x1080 LCDs over/under. It's inconvenient, and this is just home use.
A human can resolve about 7000x4000 without moving his head. I'd really like to see that, and I'd be willing to pay about $1500 for it - if a video card were available.
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I don't know why the market is dominated by bitmapped icons, though. I have an Android phone and an iPad, and for 99% of the icons, there's just no good reason why they need to be bitmap graphics. They're usually relatively simple geometrical arrangements in a very restricted colour palette (often greyscale). I see no reason why those assets couldn't have been created and displayed using a vector format.
Yet... I know you're correct. I've seen commentary on the new iPad display talking about how some developers might find it harder or easier to support based on "how they created their assets". Well, if they'd used SVG and just exported to a raster format at the end, they wouldn't have a problem, would they?
I'd be interested in commentary from Android and/or iOS developers on whether those OSs actually have good support for storing and rendering icons & graphics in native vector formats like SVG. As the article says, Windows handles it pretty well.
Interestinly enough, this exact resolution (1366x768) triggers a bug in remote desktop that prevents it from going fullscreen when the window is maximized... switching to 1360x768 or any other resolution makes the issue go away as a workaround, you can use CTRL+ALT+BREAK to go fullscreen Please MS. fix this! it's really annoying
...the fact that cheap laptops are generally 1366x768??
I have one (Toshiba L755D), and while the laptop itself is friggin' great (6GB RAM, 500GB hybrid HDD, HD graphics and HDMI port), the panel SUCKS! So I use that for the desktop functions when I'm at home, with a 1440x900 HP 19" plugged in. OK it's not that much bigger resolution wise than the internal 15.6" panel but it increases my available desktop space to something semi-usable.
My previous laptop was another Toshiba (Satellite P100), same size laptop but with a dual core Intel instead of AMD which this one has, and the 17" panel (lid overhang on the machine was a totally weird design decision, but still...) went to 1600x1200. Still have the panel, might see if it'll fit the base on this one...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Its not an accident. (768/9) * 16=1366 (+/- 1) . Its basically the widescreen 1024x768.
I guess 42 really is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and as it turns out, the ultimate question is: which resolution has a huge lead on Windows 7 machines? I'm sure it isn't quite what Deep Thought had expected, but there you have it.
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There's a reason Apple can and is pushing higher resolution with their "Retina Display": they do both HW and SW so they have more control of the two halves that much be simultaneously changed to push resolutions up both at all and faster.
16:10 aspect ratio for some reason feels a lot better than either 4:3 or 16:9. I got an ASUS 24" 1920x1200 monitor about 4 years ago. I can no longer find any monitor with that resolution, it's all 1920x1080. I would like to upgrade but there's nowhere to upgrade to.
Few applications use images for icons unless
by erroneus (253617) on Saturday March 24, @03:59PM (#39462167) Homepage
What do you think icons in programs are moron? They're images stored as resources, nothing more. Quit talking out your ass like you always do. You evidence to people that have actually programmed that you're a talk-a-lot know-nothing wanna be.
i just don't see how you are gonna get DirectX, an API designed for killer graphics above battery life, to run on your average ARM tablet
XNA is a managed wrapper around DirectX, and it is the primary game graphics API on Windows Phone 7, an ARM-only operating system.