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?"

Comments

16:10

[Anonymous Coward]

screw 1080p

Re:16:10

[CadentOrange]

Ended up with a Macbook precisely because of the aspect ratio. Now if there was a decent 4:3 laptop, I'd buy that in a heartbeat. The Chromebook pixel is nice, but too pricey for what it is.

Re:16:10

[Bill Dimm]

You would never be able to use it on an airplane -- the seat in front of you would keep you from getting it open far enough for a decent viewing angle.

Re:16:10

[Octorian]

I kept using my old HP notebook (with a 1920x1200 display) for years after I should have replaced it, precisely because all the PC laptop manufacturers seem to have colluded to deny me the option of ever buying a display with that resolution again. This year, when they finally started coming around, they seemed to think that high res was *far* more important in a dinky 13-inch screen, and dragged their feet on 15-inch offerings as long as possible. While they may now finally exist, they're quite hard to find and in limited selection.

So I basically just waited until the Haswell 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro came out, caved, and bought that. 16:10 screen and all.
(And its great, except when developers of many of the more cross-platform software projects look at this "retina" thing as something they don't really need to care about, resulting in apps the OS upscale in ways that look horrible. Just a note: "retina" support is basically resolution-independent scaling of some portions of the UI, because the full native res of the screen is actually "too" high without it.)

wouldn't it be better if the industry agreed on a

[etash]

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.

Work?

[ebonum]

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.

About bloody time

[FrostedWheat]

The 1920x1080 / 1366x768 resolution curse has been the worst thing to happen to laptops in a long time. That and glossy screens.

Re:About bloody time

[mwvdlee]

Buy a business laptop.
Most big vendors have gone back to matte screens for their business-class laptops.
The aspect ratio is still wrong, though. Unless your job is to edit widescreen movies, a widescreen display has no place on a business laptop.

A 15" 1920x1080 screen is indeed worse than a 15" 1280x1024 screen.

My aging laptop has a 1680x1050 15" non-glossy screen. This screen is the only reason I haven't bought a new laptop yet.

DPI

[Bert64]

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...

Because text size need not be defined by px number

[Derec01]

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.

Re:wouldn't it be better if the industry agreed on

[Bert64]

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

Re:Because text size need not be defined by px num

[_xeno_]

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!

Re:wouldn't it be better if the industry agreed on

[SuricouRaven]

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.

No, 1080p isn't enough

[wonkey_monkey]

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.

1366 x 768

[temcat]

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".

Re:wouldn't it be better if the industry agreed on

[Anonymous Coward]

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%.

Laptop screen rotation

[tepples]

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.

Re:Because text size need not be defined by px num

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.