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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
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.
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.
The 1920x1080 / 1366x768 resolution curse has been the worst thing to happen to laptops in a long time. That and glossy screens.
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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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.
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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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?????
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.
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.
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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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on a 1080p, 15 inches monitor you can see the fonts aliasing from a viewing distance of 76cm? superman, is that you?
Just saying: I have both a MacBook and a Retina MacBook, and while I cannot see _what_ the difference is from normal distance, I know that the Retina display is better for my eyes over many hours. It is definitely easier to read. It's like 128 KBit and 256 KBit compressed music: The 256 KBit _does_ sound better, even though many or even most people cannot consciously hear what the difference is.
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.
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%.
11.811023622 pixels per mm. There you happy now?
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?
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.
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.
IT IS NEVER ENOUGH!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
In some places it's seen as a sign of status. Madness. So many laptops that never leave the desk with specs far lower than desktops of half the price, and a need to hold onto the things for years to justify the price. Not as vast a difference as it used to be but still madness.
That's why some business environments have desktop machines everywhere and a few docked laptops for the travelling folk and others have ageing but shiny laptops for all but the IT geeks, technical folk who need some grunt to run their apps and downtrodden newbies.
The cheap and productive way IMHO is to discourage using laptops as a status pissing contest, give everyone cheap powerful desktop PCs and multiple cheap LCD screens far bigger than the laptop ones, and use what is saved to give the people that really need to travel some decent laptops updated before they get too slow. The downtrodden newbies and work experience kids then get to use the cast off laptops that in other places would be seen as a status symbol to hang onto for five years or more. Laptops are then seen as the tool they should be and not a fashion accessory.
If you read up on the 31" ASUS 4K monitor actually does this, it has two boards that each control 1/2 of the screen. It shows up in windows as 2 monitors and you combine them into one desktop. Now if only we could create arbitrary sets of "monitors" to show our video card.
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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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.
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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.
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I just got a new Dell Precision M3800, it has one of the 3200x1800 displays, two memory slots (although max of 16GB for now until reasonable laptop 16GB mDIMMs are available), and flexible battery and storage options. For a shorter life battery both an mSATA SSD and second 2.5" drive can be used (256GB SSD + 1TB spinning) if you have high storage needs. It is definitely a breath of fresh air in some regards, and room for improvement, but overall I've been very happy with it. It really is essentially a MacBook Pro but with some options.
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).
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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.
There are a lot of differenced besides resolution: the Retina is an IPS display, while other macbooks are still TN. Better contrast, higher brightness, better viewing angles, etc. Try setting the Retina display at 1440x900, match the brightness to your other macbook, and you still may prefer it.
No, it's not useless. That was my point, though I was being somewhat flip in making it. It's not giving me eyestrain. In fact it's alleviating it. The pixels aren't used to make things *smaller*, they're used to make things *sharper* while keeping them the same size. I have the same number of rows and columns in my text editor, they're just less blurry. The same number of icons on my desktop, only they're sharper and more well-defined. Kind of the difference between reading an illustrated article in a high-quality glossy magazine versus the same text and pictures in a daily newspaper.
I went from an older laptop with a 15" 1440x900 display to this one with a 15" 2880x1800 display. I didn't notice a lot of difference. Marginally clearer, I thought, but no big deal. Certainly not worth the extra money, good thing my company was paying. But then after a few weeks I went back and looked at the old machine. Good gravy, the 1440x900 display looked *awful* after getting used to four times the pixels! I hadn't made major changes to my desktop layout, my editor, my browser, or anything else. The same physical size elements, just with more pixels. It was rather surprising how it didn't make much difference going from low-res to high-res, but going back was a *huge* difference.
So yeah, more pixels is better, at least when the screen is only 18" from my face. On the other hand I keep my TV, clear across the room, at 720 instead of 1080. Why? I'm nearsighted, I can't tell the difference at that range, and running at the lower resolution lets my aging and somewhat underpowered HTPC function better. I can't say that more pixels is better in all situations for everyone, but for me anyway I'll take all the pixels you can give me in a laptop display.
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I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
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."
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-- Joe
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?
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.