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.

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.

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: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!