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Rise of the Super-High-Res Notebook Display
MojoKid writes "Mobile device displays continue to evolve and along with the advancements in technology, resolution continues to scale higher, from Apple's Retina Display line to high resolution IPS and OLED display in various Android and Windows phone products. Notebooks are now also starting to follow the trend, driving very high resolution panels approaching 4K UltraHD even in 13-inch ultrabook form factors. Lenovo's Yoga 2 Pro, for example, is a three pound, .61-inch thick 13.3-inch ultrabook that sports a full QHD+ IPS display with a 3200X1800 native resolution. Samsung's ATIV 9 Plus also boast the same 3200X1800 13-inch panel, while other recent releases from ASUS and Toshiba are packing 2560X1440 displays as well. There's no question, machines like Lenovo's Yoga 2 Pro are really nice and offer a ton of screen real estate for the money but just how useful is a 3 or 4K display in a 13 to 15-inch design? Things can get pretty tight at these high resolutions and you'll end up turning screen magnification up in many cases so fonts are clear and things are legible. Granted, you can fit a lot more on your desktop but it raises the question, isn't 1080p enough?"
screw 1080p
No! It's not. Nor was 720p or 480p or whatever.
universal DPI (like for example 300PPI - god i fucking hate inches, metric ftw) and build every display with that standard density?
Yeah I know depending on the viewing distance, a 200PPI display could be the same as a 300PPI device viewed from a shorter distance.
It's pretty cool. Shoulda done that long ago. Just like tablets are pretty neat, and were, in hindsight, a long time coming.
The thing is, though, that indiscriminate use means everybody else needs to upgrade, too. And that is really not done, for it means that just a small leading edge having fun with their latest, newest gadgets, are inadvertently pushing a lot of costs to upgrade on everyone else.
How this works? Look at any random website that's recently had an overhaul, or is just plain new-ish. Hipsteriffic developers such as abound in the website world have the latest stuff and assume everyone else has, too, or you're not "in". Yet their audience is invariably much greater. Millions greater. But look at the designs they come up with. Optimised to be visible under fat fingerprints on the screen, and sized to be readily legible on screens with DPI ratings well over what's still widely deployed everywhere.
It means that, say, a 1024x768 screen is a right pain to use regardless of size, even though at this writing that size is still ubiquitous, and in poorer places, will remain so for a while to come. A little consideration for the rest of the world, outside of your comfy job and your comfy corporate commuter bus, would be nice, dear digital hipsters.
> it raises the question, isn't 1080p enough?
Indeed not, advertorials start at $2500 plus handling charge.
Happy Xmas to those who have good eyesight :), the high res displays are here and as a person who can still see the dots at 30inches plus on a 1080 screen 15in design, I can definitely say it is not enough!
Buy some newer glasses!!
Ideally you want pixels so small that you can't discern two lines separated by one pixel from a normal viewing distance, and then you use unhinted antialiasing to get the density of thin lines right. Paint stuff as big as it needs to be - that doesn't have anything to do with display resolution.
Perhaps the only reason you have a laptop is to watch YouTube. Some people do actual work on a laptop.
If you use Word, Excel, Eclipse, etc. you don't get enough lines top to bottom. Even at 1080p. For many applications such as web browsing you have tons of unused white space on the left and/or right with 1080p, but you are constantly scrolling up and down.
The more horizontal lines of resolution, the better. In an IDE with lots of tool bars and debug windows, etc. I have the up down space of a 1984 Mac for my code. It sucks.
It would be simpler/future proof/more complex if displays had a standard why to communicate their real world size, dpi, etc. sad it didn't happen 20 years ago.
Try to think of the like paper, A5, A4, A3, and so on. Real-estate is determined by the size of the display, not the resolution (anymore).
Perhaps it does raise the question, but it doesn't raise it particularly far because the answer is 'No, everybody has different requirements.'
The 1920x1080 / 1366x768 resolution curse has been the worst thing to happen to laptops in a long time. That and glossy screens.
Finally take care of the goddamn desktop market where the lion's share of commercial work is being done!!!
A higher resolution should not translate to more things on screen, it should translate to greater levels of detail, assuming the UI is designed properly...
Font sizes for instance are measures in points, where 72 points equals an inch. As such, a 72 point font should always be an inch high when displayed on screen, irrespective of how many pixels are required to render it.
Or to put it another way, when you watch a standard def movie on an hdtv you don't get a small box in the top corner and a big empty black space around it, the movie fills up the whole screen as best it can and you just have less detail than if it was an hd feed.
The extra level of detail may make it viable for smaller font sizes to still be readable...
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What a peasant. I don't know what you do on a laptop, but 1080p is a terrible resolution.
If nothing else, there's not nearly enough vertical resolution -- but in general 1080p is a very low resolution for any computer to have.
The summary makes the same ridiculous assumption I see repeatedly, which is that a desire for higher resolutions means that I want the text to remain tied to a number of pixels. Of course I don't want the text to get arbitrarily smaller; I just want it to get sharper. And I definitely notice. Every time I take a look at my boss's MacBook Pro I feel my eyes relax a bit compared to the jagged fonts on my Air.
The real problem is that the OSes are terrible at rescaling to take advantage of the increased ppi. OSX is unfortunately bitmap based and many parts look pretty terrible if you turn the HiDef monitor option on. Windows is actually a little better with arbitrary % scaling, but many third party programs will still look awful.
With a higher resolution you can read finer print and so you zoom out. This is great for Visio network diagrams where I have a facility with 500 some racks and I need to see as much as possible. The only other way for me to do the same was to use a plotter. If I could get my work to buy a ~48" 4k display that would be ideal. That'd be like looking at a plot. Yeah, the screen would be huge but it's no different for me than looking at a plot pinned to the wall. At home I have a 27" 2560x1440 and for my Ms it's invaluable for my network modeling, writing a paper about said modeling, and having other stuff going. I used to have dual 1080's but this is better. If I had the money I'd get this guy: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824260146 Sounds absurd to have so much screen but you really use it if you need it. For most people though, YouTubers, FB Warriors, and the like 1080p is good enough.
They do...
The DDC & EDID standards which are used to read monitor capabilities also supports reading the physical size. The problem is that windows ignores this information, and therefore some monitors don't bother to supply this information, or supply it incorrectly.
http://scanline.ca/dpi/
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-October/157671.html
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1920 x 1280 is about the resolution I want. It has enough res to watch movies in high definition, gives text just enough crispness, and has an aspect ratio of 3:2, yet doesn't requires a new set of icons all over the place.
OSX is unfortunately bitmap based and many parts look pretty terrible if you turn the HiDef monitor option on. Windows is actually a little better with arbitrary % scaling, but many third party programs will still look awful.
Which is hilarious, because the OS X UI was originally based on Display PostScript, which evolved into Quartz2D, where one of the stated design goals is "resolution-independent rendering."
Which, of course, it does not really do. I remember seeing a non-"retina" app running on a retina MacBook, apparently they "solve" this case by bilinearly scaling the app up. Genius!
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
One day everyone's complaining notebook screens aren't keeping up with hi res of modern tablets and smartphones.
Now you're bitching that 4K is too much for an utrabook.
Which is it, damnit?????
Android got this one right, I have to say. It looks just awesome on a 2560x1600 tablet. But of course there are always apps (and web sites) that have only low resolution icon or bitmaps - those really stand out, and not in a good way.
Sounds a lot like the ACPI situation. Windows ignores half the configuration values, so a lot of mainboards (especially laptops, as they tend to have more heavily customised power management) either have them full of zeros or specifying incorrect/suboptimal values. As the manufacturers are only concerned with running Windows they don't bother to even test properly on any other OS.
I've been trying to figure out ACPI on my flip-top laptablet for a week. It's nice hardware, really, aside from the ACPI quirks under linux. Things like the 'screen rotate' button returning one ACPI event when the lid is up, but either another event or none at all when the lid is folded into tablet. Which is very annoying, as I want to use that button for right-click functionality. The volume control operates in a similar manner: It can produce different ACPI events depending, as best I can tell, on some sort of astrological alignment.
Meh....
Putting in huge 4k screens on asmatic GPUs might suite for Visio. It really starts tyo grind on CAD or Gaming and within that context, just watch the funny reviews on the Mac book stuff where the guy tries to run some VMs and then runs out of Vid ram.
Some seriously flawed stuff being shipped in this context..
Every time I take a look at my boss's MacBook Pro I feel my eyes relax a bit compared to the jagged fonts on my Air.
It depends on your eyesight. Mine is not so good, I don't really see the difference between a Retina display and a regular one. And I am happy with the low price I paid for my MacBook Air :-)
First, in mid-2000's there was ThinkPad T42 with 2048×1536 option (not saying about rather common 1600×1200 resolution). Then, 4:3 was screwed and 1920×1200 became the new standard. And then, there were NO FUCKING NOTEBOOK WITH VERTICAL RESOLUTION GREATER THAN 1080 PIXELS FOR TWO FUCKING GENERATIONS (Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, namely; except Apple MacBooks, of course). So, if you want your real estate, you stuck with your aging Nehalem-based (or core-based) laptop and can't buy any new laptop without DECREASING your working resolution. And even now, with all those shiny new screens, they are all 16:9 (and there are some 21:9 weirdness which i'm afraid would be the new standard), which do not add any usability and do not increase productivity. And there weren't any problems with custom DPI for, like, 7 years, thanks EDID. Okay, not in X.
Granted, you can fit a lot more on your desktop but it raises the question, isn't 1080p enough?
10 internet points to you for not using "begs the question."
As for an answer, no, IMO, it's not enough (it's also not quite the right question to ask, because what really matters is pixels per degree). "Enough" will be when anti-aliasing/cleartype no longer have any visible effect.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Screw super high res. Just give me laptops with resolution better than 1366 x 768 at 13" at least without the need to pay through the nose for this alleged "luxury".
For prolonged use, you need to have a comfortable distance from your eyes to the screen. That is, in general, at least 60cm (2 feet). Anything closer than that will make the focusing muscles in your eyes tired. The amount of detail we humans can comfortably dissolve at that distance stops at somewhere around 200dpi and the difference between 110dpi and 200dpi isn't much any more.
Given these hard biological facts, going anywhere over 110dpi for screens you look on longer than a few seconds at the time is mostly luxury and posing. Sure, you can put more information on a screen with more pixels, but you can't really use it effectively, since you will have to leer over to look at the screen more closely and your eyes and brain will have to work a lot harder to get that information processed if you don't. This does not apply to short term screens like your phone or tablet, but for laptops and desktops, just get a screen that has great colour rendition and enough resolution to look pretty at a comfortable distance.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
No. No it wouldn't. It'd standardise the appearance of components sure, but at the expense of standardised resolutions. That makes it much harder for programs to deal with, especially full-screen ones (like games) and graphics card drivers are geared towards specific resolutions.
Yeah, 1080p is plenty.
It's like the moon, we've been to the moon, we don't need to go any further right? The moon is enough. Don't need any more than the moon.
300 DPI, no matter what size the page.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The real problem is that the OSes are terrible at rescaling to take advantage of the increased ppi. OSX is unfortunately bitmap based and many parts look pretty terrible if you turn the HiDef monitor option on. Windows is actually a little better with arbitrary % scaling, but many third party programs will still look awful.
What parts of the OS look bad? And what parts of apps that have been written in the last two years? "Bitmap based" doesn't matter if the bitmap is a 1,024 x 1,024 pixel icon.
The problem I see with that Lenovo is it doesn't have a powerful enough GPU to take advantage of that resolution. Anything that is 3D accelerated is going to have to run at a lower resolution to get decent framerates and that's going to introduce hideous scaling artifacts.
the poster is a moron, and the among the shuffling deadweight slowthinkers who hold back progress.
Can we please get those every ay laptops into something higher than 1366x768 before we start dishing out these 4k screens?
Games are written using OpenGL (or Direct3D), which doesn't expose the notion of a screen pixel as a programmer abstraction at all, beyond creating the original context. OpenGL programmers only need to care about the aspect ration once the initial configuration is done. Everything else is done in terms of a floating point coordinate space.
The same is true of any vaguely modern GUI toolkit. Pixels are simply not exposed as a programmer abstraction. In 2D, it matters slightly more, because you often people often stick images on, but if the OS does relatively competent scaling then it doesn't matter too much. It only matters when you do something stupid, like putting text in an image, because then people notice that the text is more blurry than the rest of it.
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I have a large TV/monitor for 16:9 content, I actually want to do work on my laptop. Give me at least 16:10 please (4:3 would be so much better, but I don't want to be difficult) and I don't care for super-ultra-high rez - I REALLY can't see the difference from where I'm sitting...
Oh, and I don't want a fucking mirror for a display, I don't work in a dark dungeon.
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For the lulz.
Indesign CS6 doesn't even interpolate and it looks horrible. It feels like you're editing on a Gameboy Color.
Properly coded apps look amazing on high PPI screens.
isn't 1080p enough?
Depends on what you're using it for. I started out in the computer world programming home PCs with tiny resolutions, then coding in assembler for EGA then VGA, sometimes for 20 hours solid. That's what there was so that's what you used and your eyes got used to it. And now we're looking forward to 4K screens.
But as others are pointing out, the resolution you need depends to a large degree on what you're using it for. Not many people, as a percentage of the population, are creating 4K video. Most people simply need something that's comfortable to read.
As an amateur photographer I need a screen whose resolution is within a certain range. I need plenty of res to work with 14MB NEF files (photos of, say, 4000x3000) without having to squint. On the other hand, it's of no use to me if I zoom in to 1:1 and the image gets visibly smaller. A good fit would be something around 1920x1080 on a 22" monitor, which is what I currently have. I would imagine that a draughtsman would prefer something on the order of twice that in each dimension, or more.
I wouldn't be working on a laptop by choice but if I were, I'd still want around 1920x1080 on a 17" screen.
Garry Knight
>Every time I take a look at my boss's MacBook Pro I feel my eyes relax a bit compared to the jagged fonts on my Air.
Wrong, that's penis envy.
... is considered to be rough at around 150dpi, ok at around 300dpi, good at around 600dpi, and anything at 1200dpi or higher is considered very fine print and is usually reserved for art prints, etc.
Of course, print dots and pixels aren't exactly the same, but comparison is hard - mostly because print dots are not as clearly part of a grid system as pixels are. Comparing print dots and subpixels would make more sense, but is even harder.
So assuming that pixels and print dots are equivalent 3200X1800 on a 13" 16:9 screen would mean the screen has something like a sqrt(3200*3200 + 1800*1800)/13 = 282ppi resolution (simplified maths).
So we're just about moving from "rough" into "ok" territory, by some 30+ year old standards. To me, that's not "good enough", but YMMV.
OSX is unfortunately bitmap based
What is that supposed to mean? A lot of artwork comes in bitmap format. But there are also quite a few PDFs and the OS doesn't really care either way.
The graphics system is point based. Where a standard display features one pixel per point and a high dpi display has two (by two) pixels per point.
Apple tried to make the UI scale arbitrarily, (the feature was available for development purposes for years) but it didn't really work all that great, because there are too many cases where you get off-by-one errors that look quite bad. They eventually decided that it wasn't worth the effort and instead opted simply for displays with a 'high enough' resolution (i.e 'retina' displays) and integer scale factors.
I have been looking for a 13 inch ultrabook for a while now and I had been thinking exactly the same.
I already have a 15 inch laptop with 1920x1080. There is no way I would need or want a higher resolution on this screen size; it fits perfectly. The same on 13 inch would be nice as it gives a bit more room to play with how much content you get on the screen versus the size of the content.
But 3200x18800 on 13 inch is overkill. In addition, I would be paying lots of EUR extra for something that does not "do" anything for me. And I would say does not do anything for anybody.
In my eyes this is a marketing trick, just like the whining about how many petapixels your camera or phone cam has and how many 1000 times it can zoom in.
What parts of the OS look bad? And what parts of apps that have been written in the last two years? "Bitmap based" doesn't matter if the bitmap is a 1,024 x 1,024 pixel icon.
Well, er yes it does mater if it is bitmap based because only integer multiples of resolutions will look good (which is why that's what Apple did in iOS). If you want to do a 1.33 times scaling, then a bitmap will be horribly interpolated.
My favorite laptop screen in 15 years of laptop computing was my Dell C840 UXGA (1600x1200) panel. Until now, I've never seen a laptop screen I would rather work on.
Actually Windows does use that information (At least 7 and forward) - and it uses it to set the system DPI level. One of my old laptops sets the DPI to 125% on its own at installation; another sets itself at 150%.
This is perfect news for the Oculus Rift which I'm super interested in as the next leap in gaming.
But they need the most amount of pixels in the smallest amount of space so this arms race is perfect news!
Regards,
Can I ask what country you live in? I have the feeling it must be rather underdeveloped.
Where I live and work, laptops for everybody has been the standard for years already. Finding a desktop PC is a curiosity that makes you halt in your track.
Cheers
this is one of the reasons FOSS has been good for all. Can you imagine how awful technology would be if manufacturers did not have to respond to technically savvy consumers? On the topic of display, my desktop is 4480x1600, if I had 9600x3200 I would not complain, but it would have to be MUCH lower power. The LCD/LED hybrids of today are a vast improvement on the past, but an OLED in 9600x3200 would be awesome...!
To those that don't like 16:9, the reason it persists is because 4:3 content can have a "tool window" beside it. I was shown this by an SGI rep years ago when they started selling them to the industry. I feel it is probably a bonus that movies come with that format....
Have you ever watched a badly pan-and-scanned movie? Aspect ratio matters for a lot more than one-time OpenGL configuration!
Untill you actually start a real game. Many games have menus or HUDs that have fixed sizes and these will not scale with higher resolutions. And there are so many games implemented this way that writing a list would be impossible.
11.811023622 pixels per mm. There you happy now?
Take THAT Apple. Your retina displays are so 2012..
1080 lines of horizontal resolution is not enough and we were stuck there for the longest time now.
The one thing I do wish for though is once ultra high res becomes a thing, is to split wide screens in half and have the OS tree it as two monitors in portrait mode side by side. 13" screen, circa 11.2" horizontal at 300 dpi equals around 3,300 pixels. 7 inches = 2100 dpi. 1650 x 2100 res for each split? Sounds golden. Good enought to browse in one and code in the other.
Pixels are simply not exposed as a programmer abstraction
Texels are. And if your graphics API has any sort of support for rendering to a texture, you want to size that texture appropriately for the end result.
It only matters when you do something stupid, like putting text in an image, because then people notice that the text is more blurry than the rest of it.
And that's incredibly common, such as for a sign on a wall in a video game, or for visual effects applied to text which effects the operating system doesn't support. You don't want to load (or render to) high-resolution textures when running in low resolution because that'll cause texture memory thrashing on the low-end GPUs that would be running in low resolution in the first place. A game running at running at 800x480 (EDTV) and the same game running at 3840x2160 (4K) will need differently sized textures.
Let's assume for a moment that there's no concept of a "pixel", and all coordinates are expressed in fractions of the screen width and height. So if I'm drawing a line of text as textured quads whose height is 0.05% of the screen, how many texels tall should the texture be so that it's sharp at 0.05% without overusing precious video memory on a low-end PC?
So now we should go back to 4:3 so our 16:9 content can have a 'tool window' below it? sounds like an infinite loop we've got ourselves in, huh?
At that point, you can use over-the-counter reading glasses with magnification.
I recently bought a new laptop to replace my old Windows laptop. I ended up getting Macbook precisely because of the extraordinary quality of the retina screen.
I do allot of reading, writing and some coding on my laptop, and the change has been extremely pleasing. For the same price, I could have gotten a marginally more powerful machine with more memory and disk space and touch screen, but all things considered, the high-def "retina" screen *completely* trumped that for me. High-def screens is one of those things I think you need to experience yourself. My girlfriend has a lower resolution screen, and I find it hard not to get annoyed at pixels when I use it, and everything seems blurred. I find reading much easier on the eyes on the new machine than others. To me that means its not just a luxury thing - it really makes a difference.
So, I for one welcome our new high resolution overlords with open arms. The very argument "X should be enough for everyone, no need to progress" was invalidated a long time ago anyway. Screen tech is obviously evolving in synergistic ways between laptops, phones and tablets, and as long as they can make them better, please do.
Rise of the Super-High-Res Notebook Display
Some people do actual work on a laptop.
protip: rotate it. 9:16 is great for coding
Not a lot of laptops support physically rotating the internal screen, and an external screen isn't so useful when you're trying to get work done while riding transit.
Bingo. Maybe for watching movies having 1080p or 720p would be "good enough", maybe for monowindows desktop environments (android or win8) it won't hurt a lot, but for having a lot of windows open that must have readable text more resolution (specially vertical) matters there. 1980x1024 is "good enough", but having more won't hurt.
For many applications such as web browsing you have tons of unused white space on the left and/or right with 1080p
Then resize your window to half the screen width. You don't have to maximize everything on a 16:9 screen; you can treat it as two 8:9 screens.
In an IDE with lots of tool bars and debug windows, etc. I have the up down space of a 1984 Mac for my code.
An original Mac, fat Mac, Mac Plus, Mac SE, Mac Classic, or Mac Classic II had close to EGA height: 512x342 pixels. Subtract the menu bar, title bar, and horizontal scroll bar, and one had 280 vertical pixels left for about 23 lines of code with the Monaco 9 font. Unless you're on a 7" netbook, your laptop has far more vertical space than that. Split it down the middle and put your toolbars and debug windows on one side.
if you're doing anything other than playing games or watching movies.
I write a lot. I find it inconvenient having to hide my toolbars just so I can see my layouts. What I've ended up doing is rotating an external monitor 90 degrees *just so I can see the layout and keep my toolbar on the main screen*. I didn't have to do this on my 4:3 Latitude with its 1600x1200 resolution, toolbars sat there comfortably to the right of the main pane and neither got in the way of the other. I miss that.
The joke of the whole business is the standard resolution on budgets laptops being the same as for QHD televisions. We know where the design priority was there. I might be on a budget laptop, that was a buying decision based on the need for a dual core processor and active scaling graphics memory, but it would be nice (and I know it is possible, I've done it with 4:3 panels) to have made available, replacement panels with higher resolutions. If Apple can do it (as they have been for years), fucking Toshiba can do it.
Failing that, just let me get a few grand together and I'm forking out on a tricked-to-shit iCinema.
Footnote: I don't like ribbon interfaces, they're nothing more than a half-arsed attempt to justify sucky screen resolutions and even suckier aspect ratios. If I find myself in a situation where I only have the one (fixed, low resolution 16:9) screen, I'd rather have floating toolbars a la The Gimp which I can toss to the back or park on the side until I need them. Yes, I have a netbook, and no I don't like the screen. 1024x600 is no good for most websites which need another 200 vertical at least, it does as a stuff-into-pocket streaming video monitor when I'm out shooting conferences and the like, but as a productivity machine? Forget that idea. It just doesn't work for me. 1366x768 is the bare minimum *I* would expect on a screen that size, scaling to my Toshiba (15.6" vs. 10.1") I DEMAND 1920x1080 MINIMUM!
(yep, I suffer from terminal resolution envy).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Unless your job is to edit widescreen movies, a widescreen display has no place on a business laptop.
What's so bad about being able to view two pages side by side? There was a time when 1152x870 was a "two-page" display.
I've got one guy on a 7 year old Dell laptop with WinXP because the newer laptops have worse screens. The step backwards to 1080 is annoying.
So why does Win7 refuse to output at 1440*900 when that is the native resolution of the display?
I don't suppose he pointed out the obvious flaw in the decision to go 16:9 or 16:10 in the print industry stems from the fact that print media runs on a page aspect ratio of 2:3 which just happens to be the EXACT same ratio of a 35mm film frame in portrait mode. You're talking a LOT of whitespace on a horizontally-arranged panel. For those who like to keep everything on one screen, having a toolbar take up what, 1/5 of the total real estate down the side of the panel isn't so bad, in fact it is fucking perfect when you can view the entire page on the same screen. Why add another 30% to the horizontal resolution, if not to add again to the toolbar? It hasn't happened, in fact the only discernible reason for going 16:9 or 16:10 is to pander to the decision made in moving media to use that aspect ratio in HD content.
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IT IS NEVER ENOUGH!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Except 99% of the application on OS X do their drawing in vector space, there are almost no applications that draw in a bitmap.
In fact do you know how hard it is to make a bit-map application on OS X, because it is not supported. What you have to do is make an image, that is the size of the window and display the image filling the window. Then you can modify the image and force redraws of the image on the window.
Only applications that originally come from windows, or from linux are bit map applications that do exactly that. What is happening is that the bit map image they create is to low of a resolution to display in the window, OS X will automatically scale the image to fit the window.
It still cracks me up there is an entire product category called "Ultrabooks" otherwise known as "macbook air knockoffs".
Because of entertainment sources, laptops and desktop monitors are all wide-screen 16x9... ...but that resolution ONLY works for entertainment video. Reading requires vertical height and narrow width (books are the shape they are for a reason), so the more horizontal space that is given at the loss of vertical, the less comfortable reading and writing (and *coding*) are because one can't fit enough vertical lines on the page to be able to speed-scan for context, and at other times someone doesn't bother to limit their readable space width (or it is a plain text file) and so the horizontal line goes well beyond the comfortable 10-12 word limit.
In short, it just doesn't work when the medium is text. (Say what you will about the coming illiterate age at this point...)
1080 is actually very uncomfortable for those of us who were coding in 1440x1280 4x3's prior to the HDMI standard locking us all down to 1080. I personally keep an external monitor rotated 90degrees in order to have a decent working space, separate from my "entertainment" and browsing space.
Who else had a long vertical orientation to the monitor, knowing it was a better way to work? Xerox PARC.
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-- Joe
I was just wondering how using PPI was interfering with his daily life.
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Windows 8 does in fact read the display DPI and use it, and can even support different DPIs on different screens.
FWIW every time I have tried Linux out on a high DPI display it has ignored the settings as well. Getting it look right on a Chomebook Pixel or other high DPI laptop used to be a bit of a pain until Linus fixed it. My point is that it's not just Windows, everyone ignored the monitor's DPI until recently.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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It's clear that companies like Samsung are just in a specs game to convince people they need these things when they in fact don't.
Apple, to be fair, aren't pushers in the same way. They tell you straight up that Retina class ~326 pip is all your eye really needs. We know from gamers that 60 fps or max 80 is really all you need, 326 ppi is all you need, yet we have these pitiful discrepancies in the industry where there are CGI movies that sport a mere 24 FPS in HD, or the horrid 3D, whilst at the same time in hardware, offering (looking at you Samsung, LG etc. ) 400+ pip which is completely necessary.
I did a quick Google search, but couldn't find any data about the resolution of the human eye for emissive sources. It's generally accepted that 300 dpi is the max or optimum for display photographs, but these are reflective media. Staring at text on what is essentially a light bulb is a whole 'nother animal. Any thoughts/data?
No, it would be better if software developers wrote software that draws in such a way that it takes up the same amount of area on the screen regardless of DPI.
I develop with a MacBook Pro Retina, 15 inch. My biggest concern 90% of the time isn't necessarily with the laptop display itself but with the capabilities of the video card. I routinely connect a 27 inch Thunderbolt display for desktop use and would like to add a second. It seems that the better the laptop display, the bigger external monitor I can connect when at the office. With this reasoning, I am depending on manufacturers to keep upping the ante to make my laptop more functional for normal use. For times when I need it portable, I can change the settings to whatever is comfortable.
1980x1024 is "good enough", but having more won't hurt.
You do know that the 1080p in 1080p is referring to the vertical resolution, right? That 1080p is 1920x1080.
Isn't 640k enough?
Which, of course, it does not really do.
I attended a class at WWDC on this, in '98, and "the next release" was going to support resolution-independent Cocoa "fully". That would have been 10.3 at the time IIRC.
Yeah, more than fifteen years ago. At some point you need to conclude that they don't really care about doing it right.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
No.
1080p is fine for watching movies - but that is not the only thing that I use my laptop for.
I need a mobile workstation, and when I dropped $3k on a laptop last year, finding a major brand with a resolution better/taller than 1920x1080 would have been the deciding factor.
It looks like some of the major manufacturers have figured it out, finally.
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
640x480 should be enough for anyone...
As I sit here typing this on my 15" 2880x1800 MacBook I can honestly say that more is better, baby. It's a shame that Windows really blows chunks scaling its display. I just set up Win7 in a BootCamp partition and it looks like Bill Gates did everything in his power to say, "Make this look like ass on Apple hardware." A lot of Mac apps initially looked like that when the Retina displays first came out, so I imagine Windows apps are going to stay at this same half-assed level until hi-dpi displays are commonly available.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Review sites almost uniformly ignore the lack of memory expansion (4GB is enough for anyone right?), replacement ( RAM goes bad outside of warranty - hah! )
Difficulty in replacing the battery, upgrading harddisk without breaking warranty conditions.
I want all of that , and I don't see why I should compromise to get a high resolution screen.
What severely frustrates me is that they put these beautiful screens in ultrabooks, but they continue to insist on putting a paltry amount of RAM inside. This is nearly 2014 not 2009!!! I was moments from buying a Yoga Pro 2 the day they were released online, but the 4 Gig of RAM soldered on to the motherboard thereby ruining any chance of upgrading stayed my finger. I was also not keen on a lower end U processor that didn't support VT-d as I do a lot of virtualization. I'd eagerly pay major $$$ if I could get a lightweight, hi-res (> 1080), i7-4558U haswell proc (inludes 5100 Iris), with the max supported 16GB of RAM, but alas none of the manufacturers (even apple) are offering the right combination of top of the line ultrabook hardware.
I think you've got your years wrong. I too remember talk of OS X going completely resolution independent but OS X hadn't even been released in 1998.
I remember seeing some examples of what UI scaling in OS X looked like back in the 10.5 (I think) days looked like when enabled (which it obviously wasn't in the actual release version of OS X). It was looking pretty good, a few minor glitches here and there but definitely promising. Sadly they abandoned this approach in favor of the bitmap-based solution they've got now (though it works surprisingly well, if you had told me in the mid 90s that by 2013 we'd be up- and down-scaling desktop-size bitmaps in realtime with no visible UI lag I would've thought you were full of shit).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
One of the reasons we didn't support the iPad 1 in my last two games was that Apple put an iPhone 4 GPU in it to drive 4X as many pixels as it was driving on the iPhone, and this fill rate strain made the iPad 1 super hard to get a decent frame rate on.
If you're doing anything media-rich, particularly if it involves any kind of screen-space post processing (like deferred rendering, glow, depth of field, or one of many others), then you're really going to feel the cost of that extra resolution in both frame rate and battery life.
As with most things, balance in design is what you want.
We're not getting any younger and cramming more pixels into a smaller screen is useless unless we all wear magnifying glasses.
We've already reached the point of diminishing returns.
I personally will not buy another Macintosh laptop since they no longer make the 17" at 1920 x 1200. Cramming more pixels into a smaller 15" laptop screen is a painful and unpleasant viewing and interaction experience.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I got a macbook pro w/ retina because it had the best resolution at the time. At the time I was looking for a new laptop for work, I sifted through tons of laptops with 1024x768 resolutions. It felt like i was looking at technical specs from the 90s or early 2000s. I'm glad laptop displays are stepping into contemporary times.
Who else had a long vertical orientation to the monitor, knowing it was a better way to work? Xerox PARC.
Ok, if it was so awesome and so useful, why did it not catch on? Oh yeah, because only a small segment of computer users saw it that way. Coders have been bitching about this for decades. They bitched when they only had 480 lines and now they're bitching over 1080 lines. And then they covet 200 extra pixels? WTF?!?! If you are so hard up for vertical real estate that you covet a monitor with 200 extra vertical pixels you have some serious reality problems, as in you ain't living in it. If you have a desktop, stack monitors vertically if you need to scroll like a fiend all the time. Me, I use the "Find" command. Lovely invention to speed up scrolling through long documents on a computer screen. I just don't understand, as a fellow developer, the constant din over vertical scrolling. If it's that much of a problem for you, maybe go do something else for a living. It's really not that difficult to work around. Hell, if necessary, write a piece of code that splits the window across the screen horizontally so you see more of the document at once on a wide screen. That way you get twice or more the amount of text on a screen at one time. Again, bitch less, fix more if it's that important to you.
Wow, that's gotta suck. (Having poor eyesight, I mean).
They did it right in 10.0, which came out in March 2001. There were minor tweaks to it in 10.1 (late 2001) and 10.2 (mid-2002). I'm not sure how you think you were looking at a 10.3 beta in 1998, since 10.3 wasn't released until early 2003.
What I do know is that Display PDF has been fully capable of what you describe since public release (March 2001) and stopped getting major app-altering changes to the API about a year later. Hell, iOS uses the same rendering technology, and it's very obviously resolution independent. I also know that Carbon still allows old-school pixel sizing and that Carbon is still in use by developers that don't want to join the new millennium.
If you want to kill off crappy apps that aren't resolution independent, kill off Carbon. In order to do that, you need to kill off the retards that made Cocoa a developer-hostile Obj-C-only mess, then fix Cocoa so it works with languages that don't suck. (Technically, it works with old-style C, but good luck getting that to work right.)
I fixed it. I said I fixed it for myself: I have one monitor in vertical orientation. I also shrunk my font size down to 7 point. Seems to work, I can generally get most of a file on the screen at once.
why did it not catch on? Because the display was horrendously expensive since it was so mostly unique, compared to CRT components for 4x3 screens that were extremely cheap and off-the-shelf. It had nothing to do with coder preference at the time and EVERYTHING to do with how much a corporation was willing to spend on its coders. As such, few outside of Xerox even got to try it. Nobody knew what they were missing, because everybody knew it, "wasn't that difficult to work around".
Still, maybe someday it might be nice to have better options and better designs out there instead of stuff that "isn't that difficult to work around." Coding and building the right thing (or a more flexible thing but with better default settings) should be inherent in interface design, but it still isn't, because coders like you seem to be just fine with stuff that "isn't that difficult to work around."
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
(oh, and in addition to fixing it, I have a thunderbolt monitor for my mac laptop at work, and an imac with a larger screen ratio, too...and i've yet to meet a mac developer who wants to go back to a mere 1080 after finally getting a screen with serious real estate like that.)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
all that said, the idea of very small pixels on a laptop-sized screen doesn't necessarily make things more readable. For a tablet where you can use vertical orientation to read, it might be better, but on a laptop that is fixed horizontal orientation, I can't see it being that much use for text, and while it may render a blue-ray more accurately, your eyes won't know the difference at that size.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Because of entertainment sources, laptops and desktop monitors are all wide-screen 16x9... ...but that resolution ONLY works for entertainment video. Reading requires vertical height and narrow width...In short, it just doesn't work when the medium is text.
Speak for yourself. As a coder, I find the widescreen switch finally made laptops usable for doing. A 4:3 aspect ratio made things impossible for me.
Sure, when I was sitting in a desktop, 4:3's were nice. That's because I always worked with a two-monitor configuration, though. Ever wonder why two-monitor configurations are so popular with coders? You get to code in one screen, have a browser on another screen for reference / browsing / running apps while simultaneously making changes. Then when we had to do work on a laptop, it became minimize / maximize / alt-tab hell.
With widescreen monitors, I get to have my code window taking half the screen, so it's horizontally narrow and doesn't violate the "comfortable 10-12 word limit" you mention. On the other half the screen I can have my browser or whatever else open. It's most of the benefits of a two-monitor in a mobile device. Screw movies, I never watch them on a laptop anyway, I have a TV for that. Widescreen made coding on a laptop not be a pain in the ass. The only complaint was the generally low resolution, but it looks like we're finally breaking out of that.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Pro Tools incorporated some nice high-DPI support in version 11.
perhaps true...but then I wasn't coding on a laptop in the 4x3 era. :)
and even so, I still live in alt-tab hell because a laptop screen, no matter that it is 1440x900, can't get me my code, my web browser large enough to see the space I'm fixing, and the firebug console to figure out what the bleep is wrong with it, all at the same time.
gimme that thunderbolt...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
All the 640k jokes aside, I think in this case, its overkill. Once you reach the limit of the average person to notice a difference, its just a waste of money that could go into another part of the product instead.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The more vertical resolution the better, when it comes to writing code. I stayed with a pair of 1600x1200 CRTs until earlier this year, because HD resolutions caused vertical resolution to stagnate. I was finally able to upgrade (for a decent price) my CRT to a 2560x1440 panel which is nice, but roll on higher resolutions!
SURELY NOT!!!!!
TEN years ago.... YES 10! I had a pair of Hitachi 21" CRT monitors that sat on my work desk. People were amazed that I could run them at 2048x1536 @75 hz on a 20" viewable screen.
Why the fuck do people act like high res screens are a "new" thing?!?!
Oh how far we have fallen.
Was 640k enough?
For actual work I like 16:10, preferably at a resolution of 1920 x 1200 or greater and on a 24" display. I find 1080p is really annoying for work, and I haven't updated my monitor for YEARS as a result. I do a lot of "CAD stuff". My personal preferences always seem to be in the minority. Why can't I just be normal?
Interesting topic, but I think (one of) the most important point(s) is being overlooked.
Intel Iris Pro 5200 has sufficient performance capability to drive a pair of 1920x1200 (typical 24") high resolution monitors, with digital output, whilst remaining passively cooled. That's a remarkable level of performance for the wattage... Yes, this would make a terrific chipset for mobile use, but don't ignore broader applications.
Today, unless you want to run high-performance games on your PC, you could get a (5200-based) ultra-small-form-factor unit - say a derivative of the current HabeyUSA BIS-6922, or the "Intense" from fit-pc, and you'd have a fan-less (silent) desktop machine with up to 16Gb RAM, as much as 1Tb of on-board storage (latest gen SSDs), good quality sound output and cracking performance...
No, it won't play all games; it will bog down with video encoding; but for anything short of high-demand, CPU-intensive activities, it's perfect. Match it up with some low-power OLED displays and you've got a sweet little solution probably capable of handling 80%+ of most user's day-to-day requirements. And the gamers? Throw in a dual-screen, dual-DVI (or HDMI/DVI) KVM switch and you've got a perfect way to enjoy silent, low-energy computing when you're not saving the universe.
Not to mention that you can easily build headless machines, controllable via VNC, to handle update caching (ip Fire), home multimedia server, the works.
The more state you can have available in front of you, that can be offloaded out of your head and onto the screen, the more efficiently you can work. Yes, there is an upper limit to this, but in my experience, especially with digital content creation, there's still room. Most of us do multiple monitors at home, but especially with laptops, having that real-estate available on the go is a huge boon. If you design UIs, do graphic design, make games, 3D graphics, edit videos... all of the pro software have seriously large toolboxes, and that means a lot of buttons. The more tools and views into your work you can have available, especially at the pro level, the more efficient you can be. I work in Blender for fun and even with keyboard shortcuts, I typically need to have 5-12 views open at once to have access to all the parts I need. Toggling the view configuration only goes so far because of the out-of-sight problem. So: I crave more pixel real-estate.
4k is pointless. The human eye just cannot resolve that resolution at that screen size without magnification.
However, what it does mean is that the possibility for getting a mass produced 4k tablet or phone is higher.
Which means the Occulus rift could get a 4k panel for it's VR display. Since it's heavily magnified, this would defintly be an improvement.
So I'm all for 4k displays for everyone, as that means I can get a higher res Occulus.
We're in the 21'st century, where are affordable, energy-efficient consumer displays with real black and good representation of blue? In the same vein: where are affordable, energy-efficient consumer lightbulbs with continuous sun-like spectra? Not those eco-greeny-whadda-whadda thingys forced down our throats.
Nope. At these resolutions you are supposed to forget about pixels. Just draw that damn 2.3 pixel wide line at x=472.15 if you feel so. No need to quantize, just apply moderate AA.
You've given way too much spurious precision!
I doubt if the value is even accurate to 4 significant figures: in which case your value of "11.811023622" would be "11.81". Though I think for practical purposes, "11.8 pixels per mm" is a better way of representing it to the general public. Remember most people use metric, the USA is one of the last countries to cling to the archaic Imperial system - even England has changed to using metric!
Using integers would make more sense, so if they made the screen 12 pixels per mm, it would make little difference to the size of the device, but make the ratio of pixels to mm a lot more convenient and understandable!
Note I was born and raised in Great Britain, so I was brought up using the Imperial system of measurements, I find metric measurements to be far more useful for doing calculations. What is 2 3/4" + 6 5/16"? What is the ratio of 6 pounds 3 ounces to 10 stone 7 pounds? You say a truck is 15 tons, is that short or long tons???
for visual effects applied to text which effects the operating system doesn't support [...] how many texels tall should the texture be
Depends on font, but let's say 30. Store it as an SDF
SDF according to this video appears to be a mild blur on the alpha channel combined with a shader that applies a threshold to the interpolated alpha. It works fine for monochrome fonts, but for fonts with an outline or highlight or similar effect applied, the effect itself will get blurred when the camera zooms close enough.
I think you've got your years wrong. I too remember talk of OS X going completely resolution independent but OS X hadn't even been released in 1998.
Ah, you're right - just looking at my notes we were running Rhapsody DR2 at the time. So it must've been the OSX final release when the display independent rendering was going to be done...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
When these tweens driving this "new revolution/resolution" start losing their eyesight, retina display will be the work of the devil.
Of course, 4k will be outmoded by then, and if it's anything like the past 20 years, laptops will probably be relegated to the likes of 300 baud modems are today.
*sniff* I miss my eyesight :-)
Because its still garbage, because it has a garbage gfx chip( If the chip is intel its garbage. ), no usb-3, and no option for a 2TB HD, its memory is so 2011 with a max of 8 gig. So in reality its not very ultra.
Well, why do you think that all the Apple "Retina" displays are exactly twice the resolution of the screens they replaced? I got the impression that Apple wasn't really interested in high resolution displays, but they ran into a problem where they wanted to increase the resolution of the iPhone, and anything other than doubling it looked like shit with their terrible scaling.
As a Lenovo Y2P owner, I have to just say that 3200x1800 is plain great. First, to the detractors of 16:9 aspect ratio, I really like this aspect. Running Blender, I can keep the side panels open and still have a reasonable working area. Same goes for Unity 3D. Web browsing is good, but 16:9 really shines when you side-by-side 2 browser windows.
As for the resolution, having text this sharp is a noticeable, if minor, convenience. I actually find that displaying 20MP photos is astonishingly clear. I thought it would be the other way around, originally. I thought the text readability would be the huge win and the photos/video win would be minor. In either case, more pixels are better than fewer.
And for those complaining about the Windows desktop at really high DPI: I just set the scaling to 200% and it works just great. Some apps kind of suck at scaling, though. I wish those Windows devs would get off their asses and fix it. But they are all probably busy writing Android or iOS apps right now.
Overall, the resolution is great, and the aspect ratio is just fine. Even in tablet mode - having a long page is just fine be me.
If there's one thing I would warn about in general about high res laptop displays, it's that the GPU can easily be underpowered for this. The Y2P's HD Graphics 4400 does an OK job, but the HD 5000 would have been way better. That's my one gripe about the Y2P.
No but 12ppmm does. Unless you honestly believe that PPI has no rounding included...
Realistically, to watch lawyers on TV, the old B/W 480i tube was 'enough', to watch the zits get ready to pop on the local weather bimbo, well resolution is never high enough. Even going from old broadcast NSC (effectively 480i) to 1080p even the weather bimbo has changed her makeup to show that youthful complexion she has never had before.
And the 4K TV (4x the resolution of 1080p) is on the horizon and it too is 'not enough'.
Higher resolution on my monitors has allowed me to USE smaller fonts, to the point that people looking over my shoulder think it is unreasonable (then again, they didn't need to be looking over my shoulder ).
I am guessing there is a maximum usable resolution for a fully immersive display, but we aren't there yet. Large scale simulators do pretty well, but hey are limited on the size and number of displays to make full wraparound 'worlds' still hard to generate at this point. Higher resolution (and required higher CPU and bandwidth needs) can always find a place. The content to take full advantage of that kind of resolution and bandwidth isn't there yet. My fuzzy crystal ball sees a light weight fully immersive heads up display that can be worn in both HUD, 'see through' and as 'full attention' (non-translucent) mode for movies, simulations, etc, and enough 'cheap' bandwidth and to make it work for the common person will be the next big thing. It will start out expensive, and get cheaper. HUD display like google glasses still have court cases and precedence to set for 'distracted driving' and such (we just need GOOD apps that show good use of the displays that can save lives, traffic tie-ups, accidents, etc - possibly in conjunction with automated driving systems, not just allowing facebook updating and tweeting when we should be concentrating on the job of driving).
For practical home use, at this point, I love my 32" 720p, and would like a 60" 4K display, but it isn't happening on my wages.
Once there is no perceived difference between a display and looking out a window opening the same size, then we will be close to 'enough' resolution. Only because we can not detect differences between real and virtual displays at that point.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Or, 1.1811023622 centipixels per micrometer.
That's why I want 16:10 back, but I guess 5:4 would be OK too.