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?"

16:10

[Anonymous Coward]

screw 1080p

Pretty cool, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Underdeveloped

[Vlijmen Fileer]

Can I ask what country you live in? I have the feeling it must be rather underdeveloped.
Where I live and work, laptops for everybody has been the standard for years already. Finding a desktop PC is a curiosity that makes you halt in your track.
Cheers

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:Laptops?

[dbIII]

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.

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

[AmiMoJo]

Windows 8 does in fact read the display DPI and use it, and can even support different DPIs on different screens.

FWIW every time I have tried Linux out on a high DPI display it has ignored the settings as well. Getting it look right on a Chomebook Pixel or other high DPI laptop used to be a bit of a pain until Linus fixed it. My point is that it's not just Windows, everyone ignored the monitor's DPI until recently.

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.)

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.