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Displays GUI Graphics Windows Technology

Windows 8 and Screen Resolution: WXGA Still Most Popular 382

Posted by timothy from the how-tight-are-your-pixels? dept.
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%."
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Windows 8 and Screen Resolution: WXGA Still Most Popular More

Windows 8 and Screen Resolution: WXGA Still Most Popular

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  • 1366x768 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CyberK ( 1191465 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @12:50PM (#39461409)
    Also known as the cheap laptop screen.

    • Re:1366x768 (Score:5, Informative)

      by hjf ( 703092 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @12:54PM (#39461431) Homepage

      I was shopping around a few months ago. ALL laptops have that resolution. Because it can be marketed as "HD". Either that, ir "FULL HD" 1920x1080.

      So it's not "cheap". It's just what it is.

      And it's not any better in the "affordable" desktop monitor realm either. I'm still sticking to a 17" 1280x1024 because i think it's stupid to get a 23"-27" with "only" 1920x1080.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dave420 ( 699308 )
        You must be really bad at buying computers. I have an old Dell from 2007 with a 15" 1920x1200 screen.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by hjf ( 703092 )

          That's the point, Einstein.

          It's *now* that's hard to find high rez screens. In the past it's been much easier.

      • Agreed. I find 1080 tall confining when I work on documents. There is, after all, more to life than watching movies.

        My current old-style tube is 1600 by 1200, is taller than most screens and has better colors. When it dies I'll have to look at 1920X1200 (16:10) monitors, which are rare and expensive.

        • Re:1366x768 (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Electricity Likes Me ( 1098643 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @03:51PM (#39462453)

          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.

    • Indeed. It really is an unfortunate trend. Going to 1366x768 is cheaper for manufacturers, and it seems most people don't care. 16:9 is a convenient way of selling less screen area for the same diagonal size than 16:10. Sure, people will argue about how widescreen this and widescreen that, but virtually all websites and documents scroll vertically. The only thing 16:9 is good for is watching HD videos without having black bars along the top and bottom.

      • Re:1366x768 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by icebraining ( 1313345 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @01:03PM (#39461477) Homepage

        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 disagree: widescreen is great for having two Emacs windows side-by-side

          FTFY ;-)

          Seriously, though, in addition to old school text editing (which I use every day), many of the modern applications I regularly use (IDE, GIS, CAD/CAM) make efficient use of wide screens. I typically work with three wide screens on two computers and love it.

      • >>>The only thing 16:9 is good for is watching HD videos

        Which is probably what the majority of computer users are doing... watching youtube or hulu or other video sites. Very few are doing actual work with vertical documents like we do every day.

        I don't have a wide 16:9 screen but if I did, it would HAVE to be at least 1024 vertical (same as my old 12:9 CRT). The currently-popular res is too cramped (though it beats the 320 or 640x200 of my early computer days).

        • What is interesting is that 320x200 has actually the same aspect ratio than 1280x800. Well, to be honest, I think it was designed to be used in the 4:3 format with non-square pixels. However it's nice to run games in DosBOX with sharp quad-pixeled graphics.

          • Sure, if you like your games to look squashed. DOS games running at 320x200 were indeed designed with non-square pixels in mind. Playing fullscreen in DOSbox without aspect correction turned on looks awful.

      • Another cramped resolution. Why wouldn't people use the higher 1280x1024 on their screens?

        • Because 1280x1024 is a 17 or 19 inch 4:3 display, still pretty common on top of beige corporateboxen of the world; but not exactly setting the world on fire at retail or in consumer focused offerings. 1280x800 is almost certainly a cheap 'HD' widescreen in one of the smaller sizes(somewhere between 17 and 20) or a similarly nasty and similarly marketed as "HD" laptop panel.

          In most cases, those extra vertical pixels don't physically exist. The combination of cost-cutting and the marketing convergence of b
        • It may be because of default font size, lack of desire to change resolutions, or maybe, here's a thought, THEIR MONITOR DOESN'T SUPPORT THAT REZ !

          I apologize for my outburst, but a lot of people got monitors with their computers (straight from oem, no consumer choice involved) that doesn't have that vertical resolution as it only goes to 768, though it often has 1360 or 1366 horizontal resolution. And as to those of you with money to burn and can just get one of those huge and gorgeous monitors we all drool

      • The only thing 16:9 is good for is watching HD videos...

        I read a lot of documents. A lot of documents. The wider the screen the better, so long as I get to rotate it 90 degrees.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Widescreen is great for doing all sorts of things - the key is that you have to use multiple windows. I've never understood the habit of having full screen apps.

        On the odd occasion that I actually want lots of vertical space, I've got a (widescreen) Samsung monitor that rotates. Stick it beside a regular widescreen and you have the best of both worlds.

        Where widescreen doesn't make sense is on devices designed for a single window: tablets and phones.

    • Re:1366x768 (Score:5, Informative)

      by x0d ( 2506794 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @01:06PM (#39461501)
      That is correct. Older higher-end Thinkpads had like 1600x1200 or 1440x1050 even on smaller screens, like 14" and that was back in 2002-2003, so, by now everyone should have caught up as parts became cheaper(they did, right?). But it's 2012, and the standards haven't been raised by much. Maybe the arrival of the new iPad will improve things...

      • Re:1366x768 (Score:5, Informative)

        by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @01:29PM (#39461631) Journal
        Speaking of how things were better in the old days, shed a tear for the IBM T220:

        3840×2400 pixels on a 22.2 inch widescreen. Discontinued c.2005

        • Re:1366x768 (Score:5, Informative)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @01:43PM (#39461721) Journal
          I used one, and while they looked great I won't be shedding too many tears. For one thing, it used two single-link DVI connectors, so it looked like a multi-monitor configuration to the computer, meaning you needed something like Xinerama to make it work properly, and often things like OpenGL applications would decide that full screen meant half of the monitor. It also cost over $10K, putting it well out of the price range of most people.
          • Oh, it was a hell of a weirdo, and would have done a great deal better with more recent display connection standards. The price, also, was undeniably an issue.

            It's just sad that, unlike many of the other technologies that were a bit hacky and/or excessively expensive in the 2000-2005 range, the T220 just sort of died rather than improving. That specific product had the issues you get when you push a little too hard against the envelope. It's just frustrating that 6+ years since its introduction didn't re
            • The yields for he high resolution displays never got high enough for them to be worthwhile. My Nokia 770 had the same DPI, but on a 4" screen. TFTs have the same issues as other solid-state devices: defects happen in random places and so the bigger they get the higher the probability of a defect meaning you can't sell it. If you're making a big panel and one a sixteenth the size, then a single defect means a complete loss for the big panel or a 15/16 yield for the smaller ones (or a 3/4 yield if you're r

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Panasonic do a 4k resolution 20" monitor [trustedreviews.com]. My hope is that as 4k TVs start to appear we will get 4k consumer monitors too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jimicus ( 737525 )

        > by now everyone should have caught up as parts became cheaper(they did, right?)

        They did indeed. Driven by small widescreen LCD televisions, the cost of 1366x768 screens plummeted.

        Now, the PC industry is heavily driven by cost. Basically every commodity PC manufacturer is in a race to the bottom to see who can build a computer the cheapest. It's been this way for some years now - there's a reason a cheap laptop feels like it's constructed out of cheese.

        Which means that if the 1366x768 16:9 television pa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Arguably, it's the human eyes that are the limit, and we're hitting it. As quite a few people pointed out, if you don't specifically look for differences, most people will not see the difference beyond current resolutions used. It's a sweet spot between what people find acceptable in terms of quality and acceptable in terms of price.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @02:26PM (#39461991)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Tacvek ( 948259 )

        You are quite right that Windows 8 is two entirely different UIs mashed together.

        The idea is simple: Microsoft wants tablet computers. Existing tablets that use the regular he regular windows UI have been tried but nevr caugh on. Tablets that use touch-specialized UIs have caught on.

        Microsoft wants to be different from Apple. So instead of having a Windows tablet be a scaled up Windows Phone OS device (Like an iPad is a scaled up iOS device) Microsoft decided to make it a scaled down version of their Deskto

      • I'd like to make a minor apology to the Ubuntu guys, yes your new UI sucks but compared to Win 8 its a God damned masterpiece. I thought for sure nothing could top the suck of Unity but now I have to give the Ubuntu devs credit, at least Unity is consistent and discoverable

        And, if you still don't like it, easily replaceable: sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

        Win 8 is just a fucking mess. It TWO different UIs jarringly jammed together with no rhyme or reason

        Something like the "At Ease" and "Finder" UIs of classic Mac OS?

        Who the fuck thought have a touch designed UI as the MAIN UI on a NON TOUCH desktop or laptop was a smart idea?

        Apple, in roughly 1993 [wikipedia.org]. But seriously, the Metro style start screen just replaces the start menu, and you're back to the desktop once you start a desktop application or close the start screen. My impression is that the biggest change compared to Windows 7, unless you install a bunch of Metro style applications from the Windows Store, is that the start men

    • my 32" lcd tv (3 or 4 yrs old now) is that resolution.

      my htpc is a lightweight atom and it prefers having LESS pixels to push around. I am quite fine with 32" and this resolution for an average size room distance viewing.

      the more data you push thru, the harder it is on ALL your system parts; network, video, ram, drives.

      1366x768 is just fine! it really is. even for a laptop, its fine.

      I guess I dont' see the complaints since smoother playback is a higher prio for me than absolute pixels.

  • 1366x768 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CockMonster ( 886033 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @12:52PM (#39461417)
    I hate this resolution. I seems to me that screen resolutions have gone backwards, it's nigh on impossible to do any development with this shitty resolution. My old 5 year old Dell laptop supports 1600x1200 compared to my more modern Acer laptop despite the Acer having a far more powerful graphics card. It's not even a native HD resolution so your graphics card has to scale the 720p image up to display it on fullscreen... which totally defeats the purpose of 720p as the scaling hardware is probably crap. It seems to me that laptop manufacturers are shooting themselves in the foot with this crap.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RyuuzakiTetsuya ( 195424 )

      DPI probably has something to do with it.

      Having arbitrarily high screen resolutions at small to medium(13 to 15 inch) range is a goddamned nightmare on the eyes.

      And yes there's probably HDTV to blame too, as HDTV has been a big push behind LCD panel production making 1366x768 screens cheap as hell too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tenco ( 773732 )

        Having arbitrarily high screen resolutions at small to medium(13 to 15 inch) range is a goddamned nightmare on the eyes.

        I don't understand. Why is a high DPI value a "goddamned nightmare on the eyes"?

        • Re:1366x768 (Score:5, Informative)

          by jo_ham ( 604554 ) <joham999@gmail.cTIGERom minus cat> on Saturday March 24, 2012 @01:44PM (#39461733)

          Because Windows and OS X have spotty support for high dpi modes right now (both slated to improve enormously in next release), so while your images, video, scaled up vector fonts etc all look fantastic, the UI elements tend to be tiny. You can scale the UI, but this sometimes breaks some apps.

          • No not so much (Score:5, Informative)

            by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @02:22PM (#39461965)

            Windows has flawless high DPI support since Vista. It scales everything properly vector based to any level you like. You can try it on a system if you want, crank up the scaling and watch it go.

            All MS apps do it as well. IE, Notepad, the calculator, all the things that come with windows properly listen to the size requests for them OS. Even thing like images, IE will upscale images properly. They don't gain resolution, of course, but they are the right size and the resampling algorithm is quite good.

            The problem is apps. Some flat out don't listen, Steam is one of those, it just won't scale at all. Some want to do their own thing. FF is one of those, it can scale, but won't listen to Windows for scaling. However there worst is some scale some things. They'll scale their text (because they use the Windows text renderer) but not the boxes the text is in (because they use their own pixel based controls).

            So that's the issue. Developers have to start following the spec. If they use the provided Windows controls, it is no problem they scale themselves. If they make their own also no problem, they just have to write in the scaling logic. Problem is they don't, they are lazy about it.

        • Because of small fonts. At least that's how it was with XP system fonts. And when you increased it's size, everything looks butt-ugly.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Mr Z ( 6791 )

        Sure, current OSes and applications don't support high DPI very well, but that's not a good reason to shun high DPI. Higher DPI is actually easier on the eyes. It's the reason a printed page is much more readable than a PDF scaled to the exact same size onscreen.

        Rumor has it the next MacBooks will have high-DPI screens. I hope this is the case and it inspires a few others in the PC world to follow. Once developers start getting high DPI monitors in greater quantities, they'll be more inspired to fix the

  • Stop 16:9 displays! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @12:53PM (#39461427)

    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:Stop 16:9 displays! (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 24, 2012 @12:54PM (#39461433)

      Stop running your desktop in 4:1 then...

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 )

      "I can't stand having . . . 6 inches of vertical height"

      That's what she said. Thanks, I'll be here all week. Tip your waitstaff.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Pedantic: 6" / 9 * 16 = about 1' not 2.

      My way around this at work was to rotate the displays -90 degrees (into portrait instead of landscape, so to speak). It's not idiotproof, but I've got both windows and linux supporting this (a bit of trouble getting the welcome screen to rotate) and I get 4 screens of real estate in a large square. For sourcecode or long docs, stretching things to huge vertical rectangles makes all the hassles worthwhile.

    • I can't stand having a two foot wide desktop with 6 inches of vertical height.

      Your married to the classic CRT ratio, and you are of course overstating the actual ratio of new displays. You would do well to get used to letterbox ratios for a few reasons; 1) LCD tvs come in letterboxed ratios. The old 4:3 CRT/TV ratio is not coming back. 2) LCD TV'S have one or more HDMI ports, and netbooks have them as well. The best deal for a larger display is an LCD TV w/HDMI. I "dock" my netbook by simply plugging it in its hdmi port to my Vizio 24" LCD, something I picked up at Walmart for under

    • Re:Stop 16:9 displays! (Score:4, Funny)

      by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @02:49PM (#39462099) Journal

      Wait until 2.39:1 becomes standard. Eventually we'll be carrying around laptops that look like ironing boards. Won't that be convenient.

  • I'm surprised so many people have widescreen (Score:3)

    by cpu6502 ( 1960974 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @01:00PM (#39461461)

    I'm still using a CRT with standard aspect ratio, and two spare CRTs/LCDs in the basement. I won't be going widescreen for awhile.

    But an up-and-down resolution of only 768 would feel cramped to me. I'm used to 1024 pixels of room, so I can comfortably read documents and books (which are oriented vertically).

    • To me, 1024 is definitively not enough for a full A4 page, and if I have to scroll, a little more or less doesn't make much difference, in my opinion.

      I have 800 vertical pixels, and I usually zoom the text to fit half the page. Having 1024 wouldn't give me anything.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )

      Indeed. I can get $2 CRT monitors at my local Goodwill that will do 1600x1200 easy, and usually higher.

    • I'm surprised anyone is still using 4:3 CRTs. Seriously. Why?????

      • Re:I'm surprised so many people have widescreen (Score:5, Interesting)

        by cpu6502 ( 1960974 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @01:56PM (#39461805)

        Because they didn't break. Throwing-away a still working piece of equipment is what is filling-up landfills and damaging the environment. In addition to the 4:3 CRT and LCD screens, I also still use a TV set from the 70s, a second set from the 90s, a Pentium 4 computer, a Pentium 3 laptop, a Dolby 5.1 surround stereo, and 1987 and 97 cars..... rather than toss them in the trash, I just keep using them until they die. THEN I will upgrade.

        • Re:I'm surprised so many people have widescreen (Score:4, Insightful)

          by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @03:05PM (#39462201) Journal

          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.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re:I'm surprised so many people have widescreen (Score:5, Informative)

            by cpu6502 ( 1960974 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @04:01PM (#39462501)

            Yeah I've thought about that, but I measured my CRT at only 50 watts. Ditto the P4 (I turned-on the laptop low power mode a few years ago). 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. (Same principle applies to why I use US-manufactured incandescent bulbs not CFLs imported from non-environment-friendly China.)

            Forgot to mention my phone which many of my coworkers call "ancient". I bought it in 2006 so I guess that is pretty old, but it still makes phone calls and accepts text messages, so why toss it in the trash? No reason I can think of.

            • Re:I'm surprised so many people have widescreen (Score:5, Insightful)

              by bertok ( 226922 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @07:04PM (#39463335)

              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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      That's one funny thing. If I could get an affordable CRT monitor that is about 24" diagonally and can do 4:3 or 16:10 or even 16:9 at at least 1024 vertical pixels or better, I'd buy three and never look back at any of the LCD monitors ever again.

      Sure, CRT will use more power and may eventually get issues with convergence, but I will finally be able to get a monitor that can display colours properly. It's been years since I've seen a computer monitor with proper colours, even IPS is shit in comparison to CR

  • 1366x768 ? Who uses that ? Even my mother in law has a better screen.

    I've been using 1920x1200 and/or 1920x1080 for the last 8 years and lately trying to get something better than that. But there's nothing without a huge price jump (think x3 for the closest resolution and most screens are actually x10). When are we going to get an improvement in screen resolution ?!? And fuck the iPad3.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jimicus ( 737525 )

      > When are we going to get an improvement in screen resolution ?!? And fuck the iPad3.

      Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say "About 12-18 months after Apple releases a laptop with drastically improved screen resolution".

  • I miss WUXGA. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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'

  • Once again proving they are idiots (Score:4, Insightful)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @01:19PM (#39461581) Homepage

    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)

      by Moridineas ( 213502 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @01:24PM (#39461611) Journal

      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.

    • You can't convert all images to SVG. Try zooming a PDF which has images, and see how the images get blurry while the text remains sharp.

      • Re:You're the idiot (Score:5, Insightful)

        by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @02:59PM (#39462167) Homepage

        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?

    • Microsoft had another option which they have completely ignored. SVG is a standard graphics format which is vector based.

      and a quote from the actual article...:

      Windows 8, the platform natively supports vector graphics. Any images exported as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) or XAML art will scale without getting blurry.

      No, the real idiots here are you and the wazzocks who rated you 'informative'...

  • This is why it would be great if we could have 5-20k+ screens. Scaling and blurring wouldn't be an issue anymore (hardware or in software manually), and we won't have to rely on tricks such as subpixel anti-aliasing (or even *any* anti-aliasing, so that scaling is faster, and where there are less artifacts if you work in graphics). Reading text would as clear as reading a book. And we would take one step closer to true resolution independence where all icons, gadgets and widgets would resize accordingly.
  • Especially amongst the professional crowd, there's clearly a demand for displays with more vertical pixels. If someone just created laptops with 1920x1200 and 1280x1024, matte coating, hell, put a IPS panel there (they are cheap enough to make). It would sell like hot pretzels in Oktoberfest.

  • Early on, the Windows team explored an inch-based scaling system, but found out that bitmaps would look blurry when scaled to unpredictable sizes.

    Really?! Who would have thought that.

    But do I understand correctly that Windows 8 (Metro) will pretty much abolish higher resolutions? Higher resolution, but still the same amount of screen estate.

  • I don't know why my W510 has this resolution. My old DELL Latitude D810 with WUXGA display has 1920x1200 resolution [google.com], but that laptop is now impossible to use, it's so old and underpowered and it overheats immediately and responsiveness is near 0. But I want that screen on my new laptop, WTF is wrong with this picture that since 2005 the screen resolutions have gone down as opposed to going up?

  • Does this mean that I have to go update all my webpages that proudly declare:

    BEST VIEWED AT 640 X 480 [google.com] ??

  • Netbooks? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xlsior ( 524145 ) on Saturday March 24, 2012 @02:23PM (#39461969)
    The graph on that page shows that in 1024x600 only "desktop apps" will be supported, not Metro, which will require a minimum of 1024x768. ....Which means that a large percentage of currentNetbooks won't be compatible with Win8/Metro.

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