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Where Are All the High-Resolution Desktop Displays?
MrSeb writes "Ever since the release of the iPhone 4 with its 326 pixels-per-inch (PPI) Retina display, people have wondered about the lack of high-PPI desktop displays. The fact is, high-resolution desktop displays do exist, but they're incredibly expensive and usually only used for medical applications. Here, ExtremeTech dives into the world of desktop displays and tries to work out why consumer-oriented desktop displays seem to be stuck at 1920x1080, and whether future technologies like IGZO and OLED might finally spur manufacturers to make reasonably-priced models with a PPI over 100."
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It's because of 2 reasons.
1) It's currently "good enough" for most people
2) Because of the 1080 standard which has a large advantage due to economy of volume sales which would be lost with constant incremental improvements
Basically, the cost is not justified for it's marketability (in most manufacturer's eyes).
Neither of the most popular desktop operating systems (Windows, OS X) work very well at arbitrary DPI. Windows is surprisingly ahead of OS X at the OS level, but lots of windows applications misbehave if you change the DPI settings. For example hard-coded interface layouts can mean that controls will be displayed outside the window area and are therefore inaccessible.
2560x1600 30" is 100.63dpi. This is exactly what the article writer was complaining about; stagnent DPI.
If that resolution was on a 9" screen then you would have roughly the equivalent DPI as an iPhone.
Rod Taylor
The DuraVision FDH3601 from EIZO is one example.
Expect to pay tens of thousands of dollars for it, though - these are targeted at oil companies and government.
Conveniently, the latest Intel chipsets can apparently handle such "4K" resolutions.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
That might have been high dpi, but the resolution was nothing special. In 2001 IBM blew that out of the water @ 204dpi covering a full 22", and nothing sine has come close. It's the only piece of computer hardware where "I wish they made 'em like they used to" comes to mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T221
Things are about to change. In a couple of days, Apple will refresh all of their laptop and desktop machines with Retina displays. Once they do this, it won't be long before PC manufacturers start moving to higher-res displays, in order to keep up. Exactly the same happened with the MacBook Air and Intel's Ultrabook initiative.
Not me. I'd rather have current resolution and anti-aliasing than a slightly higher resolution. Also I like not needing to have Quad-SLI to run last-gen games at low settings.
I'm currently running a 19" monitor at 1440x900, when the next-gen graphics cards come out I'll probably upgrade to 1920x1200 (or 1080 if I have to) in the 20-22" range, and that will be good enough for me.
High resolution without AA > low res with AA.
Yeah, this article's assumptions about pricing already seem like some quaint notions around three years out of date. These higher-res monitors are now appearing in retail:
EQ276W 27" LED Monitor
Da Blog
Anyway, wanting something nice, I had a major surprise trying to find something larger that 1080p.....I shopped around and finally found the best deal I could on a Dell u2711....2560x1440.
I paid about $800 on it, most priced it then about $1K.
I was shocked, not so much at the price, which was steeper than I'd thought...but at the sheer lack of higher resolution monitors out there even available.
I mean...nice that TVs are all nice 1080p, but the influence has seemingly killed the computer monitor market.
I guess like how the general public has forgotten what good sound reproduction can be, and the value of it.....we've lost how nice a higher end resolution monitor can be for working. Sure...multiple monitors are nice, but why not START with a nice big high resolution one...and later..save and pair THAT with a 2nd nice one?
Sure is nice having a LOT on one screen....having multiple 'screens' with lots of real estate on them is even nicer.....double that eventually..and..well...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Interesting. The Shimian and Catleap have been around for a few months now, at least, at under $350 shipped. Not only are they both 2560x1440 IPS displays, but the Catleap was able to do 120Hz, and a new set of 120Hz capable Catleaps are being produced.
Sucks to be you.
Looking around my office most people sit about 20" from their monitor but hold a smartphone 12" away from their face. With 20:20 vision are humans able to see 326ppi at 20"? I would guess not.
I stopped thinking I was unique when I found out everyone else was to. So does that make me the average user???
40/40 vision is the same as 20/20 vision. 20/20 vision is considered to be "normal"; 20/40 is half as good as 20/20, while 20/10 is twice as good. The numerator refers to the distance of the observer from the chart in feet. The denominator is more complicated, but essentially refers to the distance between lines on the chart (according to Wikipedia this is measured in mm, which I find odd given that the numerator is measured in feet).
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity (Wikipedia.com)
Indeed. 1080p is kind of a downgrade for those of us who had higher resolution monitors from yesteryear.
I am John Hurt.
A few months ago I got a used IBM T221. 3840 x 2400. It makes ALL the difference in the world! I can actually easily fit 3 browsers up side by side even when viewing all those fixed-width fullscreen-expecting websites out there, and they all look sharp and crisp. I can have a tall browser, tall IDE, and two extra large xterms all within instant field of view, all rendered clearly. A pleasure to look at.
My coding productivity has gone up simply by not having to constantly click around to uncover one buried window or another. I can fit dense text, code, and references on the screen without making it unreadable due to too few pixels per character.
And then there's picture editing. You haven't truly seen godly image quality, until you've seen a well-composed picture taken with a good-quality camera rendered in all its glory at better than 4x the resolution of HDTV. And, of course, video editing: a full-resolution HDTV clip takes up one corner of the screen. Plenty of room for menus browsers and even a second or third video source.
Simply put, you have no idea what you're missing. It really is *that* good.
Bureaucracy and penny-pinching can often override logical technical decisions that would actually result in a good product that people are willing to buy.
I have a 17" laptop with a tiny, cramped, unusable keyboard on it that was clearly designed for a much smaller laptop. There's something like 6 cm of unused area on either side of the keyboard, but every key is mashed up against every other key to save millimeters of space that don't need saving.
If any employees of Dell, HP, or Asus are reading this, print this out, walk up to your boss, and show him: You've saved maybe 50 cents per laptop by re-using the same keyboard part across every model, but I am willing to pay a $500 price premium to any company that is willing to sell me a laptop that has a standard sized keyboard. I type 50 pages of text or code per week. IT IS WORTH IT TO ME.
To my knowledge, no such thing exists. Nobody is willing to take my money. Maybe I'm a unique and special flower, and too small a market to bother with, but I suspect that maybe, just maybe, there might be a few people out there who, you know... type things... with their laptop keyboards.
Once some dumbass starts the race to the bottom, and every company in a market is doing the same thing, it can be hard to break of the endless cycle of shaving features or quality to under-bid the other guy. It takes vision to come up with a "revolutionary" product -- which is often blindingly obvious -- to shift the market. An example is Apple: they demonstrated that mobile phones don't need to shave cents off by using teeny-tiny screens. Customers are perfectly willing to pay $1000 for a phone that isn't made to the lowest possible spec, and they're now giving that money to Apple instead of Nokia. Remember Nokia? They're the company that used to be the biggest phone manufacturer in the world.
PC Monitors are in the same boat. When Windows 7 was announced, I got all excited about "deep colour", improved high DPI support, etc... I looked into monitors and whatnot too see if I could get a significant upgrade. Turns out that there are something like 4 or 5 models total that support 30-bit colour, none that support 36-bit, and most only at 1920x1080 or below. You can have high-resolution and deep colour, but not in combination with 120Hz or 3D. Don't even bother looking, because Displayport cables can't transmit that much data, and the only HDMI displays that go that high are all TVs.
I started wondering when I got my Nokia 770 in 2006 with its 225dpi screen. A few months later, I used a 23" IBM monitor with the same resolution... which cost $10K. And then the reason became quite obvious. Modern displays are solid state parts. Just like ICs, they have a defect rate per area, which translates to dead or stuck pixels. As the feature size increases, the chance of defects increases. The bigger the display, the more chance that a defect will result in some dead or stuck pixels. If you make a single 27" panel, one defect will make it unsellable. If you make the same area of TFT but make it into smaller panels, then a defect will just make one unsellable[1].
There's also the secondary issue that unless you scale the DPI by a factor of 2 users are likely to see aliasing effects in bitmap rendering, and so perceive the display as being worse, which is why we don't see many intermediate sizes.
[1] Or, at least, harder to sell. There are lots of applications, such as control panels for industrial equipment, where a dead pixel or two is unimportant, and companies making these are quite happy to pay a bit less for slightly lower quality small panels. Selling defective 27" displays is much harder.
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