Slashdot Mirror
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...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
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)
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