Windows 8 and Screen Resolution: WXGA Still Most Popular 382
jones_supa writes "The Building Windows 8 blog comes up with a detailed post explaining the improved support of Windows 8 regarding different screen sizes, resolutions and pixel densities. Early on, the Windows team explored an inch-based scaling system, but found out that bitmaps would look blurry when scaled to unpredictable sizes. They ended up choosing three predefined scale percentages: 100%/140%/180%. The article goes on pondering the best solutions to make each app look good on different screens. Also shown: the distribution of resolutions being used today with Windows 7, 1366x768 having a huge lead at 42%."
1366x768 (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop 16:9 displays! (Score:5, Insightful)
Please stop it with these 16:9 ratio displays. I can't stand having a two foot wide desktop with 6 inches of vertical height.
Re:1366x768 (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree: widescreen is great for having two VIM windows side-by-side, or having only one VIM and a document, etc.
Most websites have to be scrolled anyway, more vertical space doesn't make much of a difference, but tiling windows horizontally is damn handy.
I miss WUXGA. (Score:2, Insightful)
Before 1080p LCD's were commonplace, 1920x1200 screens were common. Now they're hard to find, and expensive and I really miss them. It's the perfect resolution for a desktop, allowing full HD playback with subtitles on the black bars, plus it's tall enough to have two pages of text fit nicely.
Once 1920x1080 LCDs started being mass produced and used in both monitors and TVs, the superior WUXGA screens became much harder to find.
I don't really get the whole 1366x768 screen. I'd rather have 1280x800, as it's to 720p as WUXGA is to 1080p.
16:10 all the way. Stupid TV industry has pushed computer monitors to use 16:9.
Once again proving they are idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft had another option which they have completely ignored. SVG is a standard graphics format which is vector based. The code to support it has already been written over and over again. MSIE already supports the format from MSIE 8 and above. SVG does not have to mean the rendering is slow in the least and can easily mean bitmaps are rendered from SVG sources before displaying and only has to be updated if the screen resolution changes.
Of course, they could also have used WMF but... yeah... just no.
They could have selected any resolution after basing icons and other graphical bits on SVG and it would ALWAYS look as sharp as it needs to look.
Re:Once again proving they are idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
Making all art resources into vector graphics is not nearly as easy as you seem to think it is. Absolutely nobody believes that rendering SVG or other vector formats is the hard part--the problem is converting content to vector formats!
Bitmaps are not going anywhere for a long time.
Re:1366x768 (Score:1, Insightful)
You might be surprised to find that it's now hard to find those 1920x1200 monitors in any size. Starting a couple of years ago the standard higher-end resolution became 1920 x 1080. Go into a computer store. You'll find 40 monitors at with that resolution and 1-2 with 1920x1200, and those ones might not have features you want like integrated speakers or webcam or usb hub built in or whatever.
I had your attitude before and then I had to buy computers for my office and I was pissed off that my options had gotten worse than before not better.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1366x768 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You're the idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about bitmap "images." It's about user interface elements. Few applications use images for icons unless, of course, we are talking about thumbnails which, interestingly enough, are scaled down images which works well enough without requiring every image come in multiple sizes.
I know too well what the limitations of both vector and bitmapped graphics are. But for user interface design, nothing beats vector graphics when keeping things future-proof. As Microsoft sets about saying "okay, here is the finite list of things Windows 8 supports" they are closing the door on flexibility, versatility and the future. They are, in effect, casting their vote in favor of backward compatibility over forward compatibility. And when you are planning to be relevant into the near future, it makes sense to care more about backware compatibility. But when you are planning to be relevant into the distant future... well... isn't it obvious to see how far Microsoft's vision extends?
Re:I'm surprised so many people have widescreen (Score:4, Insightful)
Bravo!
I bought a high end tube TV in 1985, kept it until it couldn't be fixed anymore, finally replacing it in 2004. The computer on which I am writing this was first purchased around the turn of the century, replacing the guts over the years as they died. I tend to buy lease return vehicles (which tend to be low mileage and no "new car" premium on the sticker) and keep them for 15 - 20 years.
A new version of my phone just came out this year. It has dual cores and a lot of other neat stuff. So I'm going to run right out and KEEP THE PHONE I HAVE, because, you know, it still works. When it stops working and can't be fixed, I'll look at what's available then.
This rabid consumerism is shameful. It's not just electronic waste on the back end; the process of creating the devices is dirty also. As consumers we're expected to spend a significant portion of our discretionary income on the next incremental improvement on our entertainment devices, while a few companies, and a few people in each of those, get fabulously rich. So when 4K comes out, I fully expect a massive re-purchasing of TVs and monitors, along with a measureable spike in electronic waste. What a con game.
Re:1366x768 (Score:5, Insightful)
More to life yes, but I suspect in marketing to the general consumer "1080" is now a secret codeword. Hollywood in reference to HDTV and Blu-Ray throws the term "1080p" around as the thing you want. Hell, it "feels" nice when I think about it. So for the average consumer it certainly sounds good.
It's just you, and other posters are right: for general purpose computing, it's not really so good because in working with documents, web-pages etc. everything we do is much more orientated towards "tall" resolutions (i.e. we work with portrait documents, not landscape).
One of my brothers runs 3 monitors and he has 1 24" screen configured specifically in a portrait configuration for this very reason.
Re:1366x768 (Score:4, Insightful)
You are right, but I'd say Facebook is as much to blame. Stick with me here. 1366x768 is the most common resolution, and presumably Facebook knows that because get they stats from HTTP request headers. So why do they design their site not to make better use of the available horizontal space?
Cheap widescreen laptops would suck less if websites realised that most people use widescreen displays these days. In fact it is hard to buy a non-widescreen display. I know, long lines of text are not as easy to read, but newspapers and magazines figured out how to get around that 200 years ago.
Re:I'm surprised so many people have widescreen (Score:5, Insightful)
The manufacturing energy & strip-mining of new materials & toxic chemicals plus shipping from the other side of the planet would far-exceed anything I would save by switching to LCD or a new iCore CPU.
That's probably not true.
I've heard this kind of thing said a number of time before, for example about electric cars, the theory being that it somehow costs more energy to manufacture a battery pack than it will ever save compared to an ICE engine.
However, a simple economic analysis shows this to be false in many cases. Energy is largely fungible, that is, it doesn't really matter if you're using electricity or oil, it's all pretty much just watt-hours at some fairly equal cost. There's variances of course -- electricity is cheaper near a hydroelectric dam, oil is cheaper in some countries, and both is cheaper to buy in bulk.
Manufacturers pay for energy the same as everyone else, and they're not just going to ignore that cost out of the goodness of their hearts, it's going to be baked right into the cost of manufacture. So, looking at the cost of a good gives you an idea of the maximum amount of energy it could have taken to produce. You don't need to know anything about the specifics of its manufacturing process, just the cost.
You can get a 23" Dell LED backlit LCD monitor [dell.com] for USD 170 delivered. Now, at most half of that is the manufacturing cost, because Dell has to pay taxes, make a profit, and this is the RRP that resellers can also make a profit on. Hence, lets say $85 manufacturing cost, including all design, materials, factory and equipment depreciation, etc... Of that, at most $40 would be energy costs, directly or indirectly, the other half would be paying for "man hours" in one way or another. These are rough numbers, but bear with me.
Now, taking that estimated $40 worth of energy, we can figure that at a typical cost of $0.15 per kWh, it cost 280 kWh of energy to make that monitor. Now, an energy efficiency review [teachmefinance.com] shows that that model uses 16.65W of power when on, so that means that after 9,930 hours [wolframalpha.com] of operation, it will have made back its own manufacturing energy cost in savings compared to your current 50W CRT. At 8 hours per day, that's just over 3 years, and you've had your CRT for 6 years.
Admittedly, this won't make it cost effective for you to personally purchase this monitor based on energy saving alone, that would take well over a decade of usage. However, it shows that it isn't wasteful environmentally to buy a new monitor, and you do get a new monitor that would look much better than your old CRT. Better colour gamut, no flicker, always perfectly sharp, no distortion, etc...
Your example of CFLs is even more clear, in which case you would be personally saving money [environmen...mistry.com] quite quickly by switching away from incandescent bulbs. That's been true for pretty much all models of CFLs for years now, and LED lights promise to improve on those savings even further.