Rise of the Super-High-Res Notebook Display 333
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?"
wouldn't it be better if the industry agreed on a (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah I know depending on the viewing distance, a 200PPI display could be the same as a 300PPI device viewed from a shorter distance.
About bloody time (Score:5, Interesting)
The 1920x1080 / 1366x768 resolution curse has been the worst thing to happen to laptops in a long time. That and glossy screens.
Laptops? (Score:2, Interesting)
Finally take care of the goddamn desktop market where the lion's share of commercial work is being done!!!
Re:wouldn't it be better if the industry agreed on (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:16:10 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:About bloody time (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ergonomic distance to screen (Score:2, Interesting)
Easy to verify: Display this [imgur.com] at 1:1.
If you can see a step in the line, you don't have high enough resolution yet.
Re:16:10 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:DPI (Score:4, Interesting)
That's what the Mac did (does). It queries the monitor you connect to determine its physical size (the Apple-branded monitors report their size), then based on the screen resolution you select it auto-scales everything so a 72 point font is always an inch high. It's the right way to do this. People shouldn't be selecting 125% screen resolution as their preferred text size because that's not a constant. You may prefer 100% on one screen while you prefer 150% on another.
Which has me totally baffled why Apple abandoned this approach with iOS. As much as I dislike Apple's current practices, this is one problem they solved the right way. Then they tossed it out the window with iOS and went with fixed resolution for everything. With the iPhone you program for 480x320 or 960x640 (the iPhone 5's 1136x640 is just a slice of extra pixels added to one end which is ignored with legacy apps). With the iPad you program for 1024x768 or 2048x1536. This worked great when your only choices were a 3.5" or 9.7" screen. But it's causing problems now that they've got the iPad mini (same resolution as the full iPad, but now everything on the screen is smaller) and are thinking of enlarging the iPhone screen even more.
Re:Ergonomic distance to screen (Score:4, Interesting)
20/20 vision is defined as the ability to resolve a line pair 1 arc-minute apart. The actual limit of human acuity is about 0.4 arc-minutes (that's the spacing between your cones at your fovea), but due to optical defects in the cornea and lens it's rare to get an individual who approaches that (20/10 or 20/8 vision). If you work out the math (I need to get going so I can't show you the calcs), at a handheld viewing distance this works out to about 300 dpi as the upper limit for 20/20 vision.