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Dell Offering 1600x1200 Laptops 128

Posted by CmdrTaco from the pixels-to-size-of-dust dept.
Fervent writes "Dell has started offering laptops today with the new UXGA screens. These higher-res LCD screens proport better, clearer graphics at no extra power cost. Details on the new laptops are available at CNet." They don't say how big the actual screen is, but ya gotta be scared... I can see 1280x1024 on a 15" screen, but 1600x1200 is pretty scary... I find a lot of things to small at that res on a 21" monitor. Then again, just pump up the font size and everything is crisper... of course those icons on web pages sure don't get any more legible.
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Dell Offering 1600x1200 Laptops

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  • hi res != tiny letters (Score:4)

    by tychoS ( 200282 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @04:54AM (#834075)

    Will people please keep in mind that the size of fonts on screen is in no way proportional to the size of the individual dots on the screen.

    Smaller dots means that an individual character of a certain size will be drawn using more pixels, leading to a sharper and more well defined representation of the character.

    If you cannot understand this, then just memorize this little example.
    In the old days (more than 5 years ago) laser printers printed at 300 dots per inch (dpi), now a cheap one prints at 600 dpi and good ones at 1200 dpi.
    Text printed on a 600 dpi printer isn't half the size of text printed on a 300 dpi printer ;-)

    BTW. 1600x1200 on a monitor with 18" viewable area gives around 120 dpi. 1024x768 on a monitor with 14" viewable area gives around 75 dpi.

  • How many defects will they typically ship with? Many "acceptable" LCDs (acceptable to the manufacturer, not necessarily the customer) have one or two pixels that are always on or always off. How many bad pixels will consumers of this screen have to live with?
  • Ok, I don't know if this would work or not, but most people's complaints about this seem to be that this resolution is too small to be usable. Well, how about using a fresnel lens like this [rickleephoto.com]? I guess that it might interfere a little with image quality, but you do still gain desktop space. Of course, you'd have to come up with some support mechanism other than a styrofoam box, but I'm sure that enterprising geeks could come up with something.

    What do you guys think?
  • Forgive my ignorance, but surely if the screen has bad pixels when you buy it then it is faulty, and you can legitimately ask for the laptop to be replaced?

    Surely you cannot. The Fine Print explicitly gives the number of bad pixels that the manufacter defines as "acceptable"; less than that and you do not have a warranty issue because it isn't "faulty" by definition. I've seen fine print that allowed FIFTY dead or always-on pixels. Your only real choice is to make sure your vendor has a "no questions asked" refund policy, get your money back, and try some other store and/or manufacturer.

  • Browsers shouldn't be that much of a problem (Score:3)

    by R@Bastard ( 91524 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @04:58AM (#834079)
    Modern browsers (heh) are supposed to actually retrieve the logical ppi (pixels per inch) from the OS, and render type that way.

    Generally, it's either 96 or 72, and I'm sure that if it were 200 ppi it would work just fine.

    Of course, those designers who insist on rendering every little thing as a bitmap are screwing this pooch... bitmaps don't scale or have a "size" per-se, outside of their pixel dimensions.

    Some others have mentioned that Opera's renderer can zoom on the fly... which solves both problems.

    For anyone who's interested in this stuff, there's an excellent (in-progress) related article here:
    http://style.metrius .com/font_size_intervals/altintervals.html [metrius.com]
    -----------------
  • because we're all wise enough to know you're too ignorant to appreciate it. sonny.

    Agist fucks.

    The childish demand that the elderly subsidize a younger person's lifestyle is marked +4 insightful (funny, maybe, but insightful? Give me a break.) while the above humorous reposte is marked down as a troll?

    As a young person (who would love to have some georgious older woman set him up in style) I would say this agist shit reflects very, very poorly on the slashdot crowd (the moderators in particular, not the original post or the reposte, both of which I found rather funny).

    Perhaps humor is simply too difficult a subject for this forum?

  • Interesting. Thanks for the clarifications.

    ~Cederic
  • An open-source program called fiasco (you can find it on freshmeat) reduced a picture (2.1M as a bmp, 800k or so png, 500k jpeg) to a 5k file. Very good quality (as good as the jpeg), and LOTS smaller. It can also do movies (without sound, someone want to do that and say bye to mpeg?) but even a 30 second movie was 2MB (if you put an mp3 with it, about 2.5MB for half a minute!!)
  • Personally I'd prefer teachers/professors actually teaching instead of going from textbooks all the time, but I guess that's not quite as profitable. On the plus side, eBooks would be many times easier to copy than paper books, so I could end up saving money after all.
  • Well, I'd prefer to get that resolution on a 15 millimeter display. Hanging right in front of my eyeball.
  • of course those icons on web pages sure don't get any more legible

    I completely can't understand this point of view. Every single icon I know of is too freakin huge. I run 1600x1200 at work, and 17--x13-- at home just so I can get the icons, titlebars, and other widgets small enough to allow my content windows to reclaim some of the desktop.

    and I never hear anyone else support this point of view... are you all going blind from too much you know what, particularly you UI designers? What is with the huge freakin icons!

    Does it make me happy to have the larger resolution displays become standard? NO! When they become standard, all of the wankers will simply adapt, and start issuing ever larger spoodge.gifs to fill up the new screens.

  • It runs linux better than it runs windows, and it has a screeen which is bigger than most monitors can display...

    Shame I still need to reboot into windows to watch DVD's legally.

    Any Slashdotters out there know how I can hack my Torisan 6x dvd drive to go Multi region?
  • Assuming that Dell implements the same sort of technology that they have been with their Inspiron 7500 series with this new screen the actual resolution that you run the screen at is almost irrelevant. Why? Simply put, the video card scales the display image appropriately to fill the entire screen. This means that rather than 800x600 only using 480000 pixels to display itself, it will actually use the full 1920000 provided by the display. I've used this feature a few times in presentations and it works just fine for those of us who can't see a Origin2000 from 3 feet away.
  • Yes, annotation and highlighting, and bookmarking without using tonnes of paperclips or "Post-it Index" tabs.

    e-Books will be great, especially at >150dpi on a device around 6.5" by 5" (1024x768). Colour isn't important though, greyscale is fine for books. For textbooks though, I can see the advantage of colour.

    But there is still nothing like the feel of a proper book...

  • I agree 100%. I just finished up at a school that has the world's worst monitors. (I swear that they had to be used 14" monitors.) While the glare really bothered me, the resolution was what really bothered me. I occasionally got yelled at for messing with the "advanced settings" that only the brilliant computer teachers could touch (the same teachers who wanted to give everyone write access to everything, but prohibit deleting them...) But the maximum resolution on a 14" monitor is still way too small.

    In short, the default 640x480 is simply _impossible_ to use. I used to run 1600x1200 on my 19" monitor, but it looked pretty bad, so I "let" it slip down one level. I really want to get one of the $2,000 Sony 21" monitors that supports _enormous_ resolutions. (2K something by 19xx something).

    And don't don't get me started on the Internet connection. Essentially, all 50+ computers went through a dedicated 56K connection... (It was "true" 56K, though). I tried to talk the computer teacher into buying at least one T1 line. (It might have been in the OC-x ranges... )

    ...............
    SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name

  • The beautiful thing is, X/Linux is messy anyhow, and very much being developed/kluged into something more like a modern rendering system. There aren't that many consumer GUI apps out there for it yet, which means the form is still malleable.

    Set things up so the popular Linux GUI environments can scale to vastly larger resolutions, and you get the following delightful result:

    • screens continue to expand and expand so users can have DSWs and one-up each other in boardrooms
    • MacOSX/vector/no problem!
    • Linux/some hack or other/here we are at 16000x12000, fun fun
    • Windows: ow ow ow!
    If this REALLY gets going, Windows' legacy of holding 90% or so of the app mindshare will cause lots of major hurting :) you _know_ most of those software companies wouldn't be able to adapt to the new environment, and the more of them croak, the less reason there is to go Windows. The end result might be Windows looking (space-wise) like the old 9" screen black and white desktop Macs- 'why would anybody want more room?' (yah right). That would be very amusing to watch- though what you'd see would be Windows kluging itself to adapt, and then the majority of the software base out there failing to clear the bar, causing ever more unreliability and inconsistency in the Windows platform...
  • I can't wait until my display device has comparable resolution to my hardcopy device.

    Actually, this exists already (sorry, no link). Read in some graphics magazine that the military uses a special grayscale display that has 600DPI and is as sharp as a printed page. Costs an obscene amount of money of course.
  • I've gotten lost in the acronym soup here.
    Which sets of letters actually correspond to which resolutions? 1600x1200, 1280x1024, 1920x????, 1153x900, 1024x768, etc. Thanks!

  • The solution is not nearly as simple as setting your font size large(r) as many posts have suggested... It's quite complicated, as many, many late nights coding the "fix" these past months have proven to me.
    And... 1600x1280 (or larger) DOES look like *#$%& on a 15" display (as far as fonts/icons are concerned) and I've got 20/20 vision; As a developer I LOVE more resolution real estate.

    I work for Portrait Displays, Inc., Pleasanton, California. Our company is known in the industry for our Portrait/Pivot display utilities(rotating displays).
    I'm a software engineer, working on a new product which "fixes" this problem with hi-res/hi-density displays.
    We are currently working with several large computer and display manufacturers (unable to name them here, but they are the leaders in the industry), testing our product in preparation for shipping later this year.
    We (and the display industry as a whole) expect these new hi-density (133-200ppi, pixels-per-inch) displays to become prevelant over the next couple of years.
    I personally expect to remain quite busy, working late hours, getting the product to market;
    But rest assured - We've got the software solution!
    And - 133-200ppi looks FANTASTIC!
    The product is not currently listed on our company web-page, as we're still testing and negotiating contracts for distribution.
    Visit: www.portrait.com (soon) for details & pricing.
  • that I'm using right now...

    It does 1400x1050 which seems just about perfect for most of my work.

    Sadly, I have yet to figure out how to make Linux able to use it, and thus am stuck with Windows on it for the near future.

    Its the first time in a linux install that I've ever got sound working before video.

    I feel bad though, now I don't have the biggest laptop screen on the block anymore



    Tim Gaastra
  • you can run 800x600 on a 1600x1200 monitor, and it will still look better than on a 800x600 monitor. I use 800x600 quite a bit on the internet for viewing pages where the pictures are microscopic. Viewing size does not equal native resolution. Of course it will still look best at 1600x1200 with a larger font setting.
  • A woman who loves a man even though he is poor has probably found a man who will love a woman even though she is homely.
  • One of the advantages of riding a bike to work everyday is that your ass and legs look better. Young or old, you'll always find chicks (and dudes) to dig that aspect. :-)

    (...given a moderate commuting length and a spirited attitude toward the ride, of course.)
  • Which doesn't help if your font renderer doesn't keep track of the true screen resolution and instead makes you manually adjust the erronously-named control "Font Size". (And then forgets to tell the dialog manager, so half of your apps end up drawing controls outside of the non-resizable window.)

    The point is, regardless of what kind of font you use, a sample of 12pt type should look the same at 120dpi as it does at 75dpi. So needing to manually adjust "font size" is stupid. Changing icon, toolbar, and widget size may be necessary, however. (And people laughed when they saw 128px icons in MacOSX)

    (incidentally, I run at 1280x1024 on a 17" CRT, 110dpi)
  • Actually the browsers don't do squat, they just shove off the font rendering to the OS, which is supposed to (but doesn't always) know what the dpi is. Browsers, however, are ignorant of this. To demonstrate, create a jpeg at 300dpi and toss it at a browser. The browser displays it as if it were a 72dpi image. Shoot, even Photoshop 5 for Windows doesn't seem to understand that my screen is not 72dpi. But open it in an intelligent graphics app with an intelligent OS (such as GraphicConverter on MacOS) and it will display it at actual size.

    ... and have you ever tried printing a web page?
  • Please, don't talk about bare numbers with tech support calls to prove a point. Talk about percentage of tech support calls for that products, related to percentage of sales of that product.

    If you get 2 tech support calls per week for the 5000 model, out of (pulling a number out of the air) 100 (20 per day?), then you have a rate of 2%. In numbers shipped (not dollars) how does this 2% compare to the sales of model 5000 laptops? Based on numbers sold, does the model 5000 still compare well? Does it compare well for it's audience? (Percentage of machines sold to that class of user, whether power user, generic business user, or whatever.)

    Do you only do laptops, or do you do tech support for all Dell PC products? This will also affect how valid your data point is.

    If you don't have this information, that's okay, but presenting a bare number and pretending it has significance without knowing context and how it relates to sales figures... well, that's how bad statistics are made. :)
  • I don't think that standard JPEG files have resolution; they just have pixels. There are those bastards out there, like a TIFF with JPEG compression, but that's a goofy thing.

    You're right, though. Browsers just read pixels. Of course, because no image formats that are web-centric have built-in resolution yet (not even PNG!) it doesn't matter.

    You can specify an embedded flash in "em" units, or inches, or whatever. It works! Hopefully, SVG will work the same way. It should.

    I suppose that you could also specify that an image was 1 inch by 2 inches, via style/DOM, but I'm not sure it would look very good. Bitmap scaling code in browsers sucks. It works well when printing from a browser, though... I've done that, it works.

    SO, I guess what I'm trying to say is that the infrustructure for resolution independent display is in there, it's just not hooked up to the right places to make images work.
    ------------------------
  • Even though Mac OS X is based on resolution independent technology (a modified version of Display PostScript), the UI is still laid out in terms of pixels, and the numbers of pixels are hardcoded in the style guide.

    This was a big mistake. Now that very cool things are starting to happen with X, I believe that we will end up creaming Apple.
  • For years I've been using ctwm because of this. Any window manager with virtual screens would do.
    I bind f10,f11,f12 to switch to screen 1, 2, 3 quickly. You can have a screen dedicated to programming, one to netscape window(s), one to games for example.

    Pity there is no real equivalent for NT though (only some inconvenient things that try to approach it).
  • I'm not entirely sure that's the case - get hold of a RISC PC and change the resolution. Now look at the button bar at the bottom.

    Good idea, but I'm not sure it's done on RISC OS...

    (course I may be wrong)

  • Re:Dead pixels (Score:3)

    by alee ( 64786 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @03:15AM (#834105)
    In 1995, the tolerance on my Toshiba laptop was at least 12 dead pixels (800x600). In 1999, on my IBM laptop, it was 8 dead pixels (1024x768) although in some cases, 3-4 if they were stuck in a color. Clusters of bad pixels (2 next to each other) make a stronger case. Most SGI 1600SW's I see for sale have at least 1 bad. A perfect screen still rare, despite all the improvements out there.

    Most manufacturers will NOT accept the screen back under warranty as a matter of course. I have tried with IBM when a laptop showed with 1 bad. They said tough. I begged. I screamed. 1 bad pixel is "well within the manufacturer tolerance".

    Unless you buy your laptop retail, and inspect it before you leave, you generally have 2 options -- return it to the manufacturer and then buy a new one (too much of a hassle), or try and make more pixels go out and make it look like a defect (harder than it sounds).

    Manufacturers do make exceptions. However, in my experience, unless you make a really good case, you can forget about getting any satisfaction if you claim 1-2 pixels are stuck off.
  • "Not to poo-poo progress, but does anyone see a need for super-high res 15inch laptop monitors? "

    800x600 should be enough for anybody, then?

    :)
  • > What happens when we get 4000x3000 displays?

    Hopefully this will never happen. Why? Because the aspect ratio is 5h1t3. Once you've worked on a widescreen monitor it's a bloody nightmare going back to 4x3, it's like going from a 21" 1280x1024 back to a 14" at 800x600, but worse.

    Give me 1960x1280 or give me death ;)

    Mike.

  • Re:The market is lopsided. (Score:4)

    by kevin lyda ( 4803 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @03:22AM (#834108) Homepage
    because we're all wise enough to know you're too ignorant to appreciate it. sonny.
  • This idea was inspired by the old Acorn BBC Micro computers, the idea being that there were about 6 graphics modes all with varying resolutions and amount of colours, but to the programmer there was only one resolution of 1280*1024 (if memory serves correctly, which it doesn't tend to).

    An idea way in front of its time.

  • Good news (Score:2)

    by Tet ( 2721 )
    This solves one of my main objections [slashdot.org] to traditional laptops -- that they don't have a suitable graphics chip to drive an external monitor at a decent resolution (read 1600x1200). I still don't feel a 15" laptop is sufficiently portable to be worth the effort, but it's a good sign for the future.
  • That OS be Acorn's RiscOS. Anyone remember mode 22, for the visually impaired?
  • About a month ago I set up a few new Inspirons (Dell model) with this screen on them, and it was just freakish. My default, they were at top-res, and moving the mouse was like running through a football field. Especially considering the monster-screens on those things. (I'm used to very old laptops. These ones were 15".)

    Funny though, that even after a minute of photo-quality screen use, everything seemed crunched together when I set it for 800x600.
  • You can get the IE power toys thing from the IE download site that lets you do this. I agree, It's pretty handy sometimes....
    ---

  • DPI setting on X (Score:5)

    by DGolden ( 17848 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @08:55AM (#834114) Homepage Journal
    If you're having problems with legibility with your X server, you may well have the DPI set wrongly. It defaults to 75dpi if you don't set it, which is often wrong for modern, high-res screens. (eg. my 15 inch 1280x1024 display is about 120DPI)

    See the tip on linux.com [linux.com]about it.

    Make sure to read the comment by Andreas Plesch on the tip as well, as a better method for setting the DPI is given than the original suggestion.

  • I work for Dell and have seen a pre-production (Score:3)

    by Zara2 ( 160595 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:15AM (#834115)
    These things are sweet man. Yes the resolution does go that high and text is still readable if you have good eyesight. These systems use the ATI mobil rage chipset with either 8 or 16MB of video RAM. The chipset includes anti-aliasing technology. This means that you Can run it at 800x600 or whatever you want and it will still look good. Also there is no more problem with viewing DVD videos on both an external monitor and the lcd. (ATI rages with 4MB video ram would get a black picture on external monitor). Other than the processor, lcd and video card these are exactly like the original Inspiron 5000's. Now for what everyone wants to know. How often do they break (i do tech support for Dell.) Well the 5000e is a bit too new for me to make a solid judgement on it but I almost never get a call for the 5000's. Maybe one or 2 a week. Very good reliability. No stress fracture issues that I know of. Well made machines. As a side note I am not in sales. I am in tech support. I'm about as unbiased of a person out there who has actually seen one of these systems already ;)
  • My mistake, the screen was one step below that, and almost unusably sharp. Ye gods! The new ones are crazy!
  • Take it from someone who drives a mighty schnazzy vehicle -- the kinds of chicks who swarm you aren't the kinds of chicks you want to date. They're turning you into a symbol of *money*, and that's what they're looking for.

    And, for you women out there, when my girlfriend drives it, she says it's the skeeziest of guys who give her the most attention ...

    People make the assumption that if you drive a fast convertible, you're just itching to give money and cocaine and diamonds in exchange for sex. Or maybe that's just here in Los Angeles.
    -
    bukra fil mish mish
    -
    Monitor the Web, or Track your site!

  • Gah, I can't believe I missed that. MUST. RUN. OUT. AT. LUNCH. Buy 30 Gig harddrive...

    No sleep till SuSE!



    Tim Gaastra
  • Actually color accuracy leaves something to
    be desired on the 1400x1050 lcd.
  • The A20p I used had zero dead pixels.
  • XFree86 4.0.1 handles it fine. Just ask google for A20P and linux and you should be able to find an xf86config file for it.
  • The 15.4 inch displays are 1280x1024, only the 15" displays are 1400x1050. Very recently the 1400x1050 became available in 14" as well.
  • The 15.4" is 1280x1024, the 15.0 inch is 1400x1050. There is no 1500x1040.
  • Back in the mid-80s, people talked about the "3M" machines: 1 Million instructions per second, 1 Million bytes of memory, and 1 Million pixels on the screen. Well, in the first two, we are nearly 1000 times up from a Million, but even 1600x1200 is only about up by a factor of 2. What we need are more pixels over a much bigger field of view. SWAG-ing it, I'd say resolution of 1 arc minute over a field of view about 100 degrees in each direction - this is 36 M pixels. When we are there, then displays will nearly fill the user's visual field, which will make the experience of computing quite different than now (compare pictures of the Grand Canyon to actually being there). So when are we getting the super displays. Not for a long while yet, I guess.
  • In theory, I think MacOS X is actual resolution independent. That is to say, the Windows and widgets are all that way. However, any application that uses scalar graphics (which is just about all of them) will throw those advantages out the window.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • This makes no sense. In order to get the new screen, you need to get a 16mb video card, but the Dvd only works with 8mb. What to do? Anyone know the answer? e-mail me ethabr@hotmail.com -Ethan
  • A pox upon your house for teasing me like that...I went to freshmeat and looked up "fiasco"...the only thing that came up was "L4-compatible real-time microkernel capable of running Linux in usermode"...does anybody have a better pointer?
  • I agree with you
  • It's not really fair to compare the image quality you get on a monitor with that on a tft screen.

    TFT screens are a lot clearer and dont suffer the same way that monitorimages do from blurriness.

    What however would be really good would be a monitor mode which reported itself as 800x600 but whenever windows was called upon to render text it could use the extra resolution for excellent clarity.

    That way you could have icons and graphics all at a decent size but with lovely crisp text. And programs like Coreldraw could be made aware of the resolution difference... just a thought tho.
  • Did I mention I afree?
  • I use 1600X1200 on the desktop at work. This will allow a way to do presentations that look the same on the laptop as I see them on desktop. I hate having to go over it again just to see what has changed when I get down to 800X600. WOOHOO .

    Now, when are they in stock?
  • Give me the modney!
  • why that can only mean one thing...

    at last i can view my pr0n in absolute crispness!

  • The market is lopsided. (Score:4)

    by grahamsz ( 150076 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @01:51AM (#834134) Homepage Journal
    By the time i'll actually be old enough to afford a 1600x1200 screen my eyesight will have faded enought that i'll run it at 800x600 anyway.

    Just like how i'll be deaf by the time I can afford a decent hifi, and by the time i've saved up enough cash for a nice tvr sports car i'll be way past the age i need to be to pick up chicks in it.

    Why cant higher quality stuff be sold cheaper than the low quality stuff so all the old people who dont know better subsidise me having a quality lifestyle.
  • what's a Troll?
  • Not to poo-poo progress, but does anyone see a need for super-high res 15inch laptop monitors?
    I've really been impressed by the Dell laptops though. I work at a design firm that does a lot of CAD stuff, and one of my co-workers used one to finish up a highly detailed Pro/Engineer model on a plane ride. That's pretty impressive, considering the video demands, as well as the fact that that kind of work is pretty painful on anything less than a 21"
  • I've noticed various weird display problems on Windows and Linux systems when the display resolution is smaller or larger than the system the application was developed on. Plus, some of the operating system provided graphics and fonts do not scale well.

    Are there any fixes for this problem? What happens when we get 4000x3000 displays?

  • Textbooks and UXGA screens (Score:3)

    by Chasuk ( 62477 ) <chasuk@gmail.com> on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @01:59AM (#834139)
    This should make for some really clear e-books. MS's ClearType and MS Reader (which, if you haven't tried it, really does blow the socks off of Adobe Acrobat in terms of readability and ease of use) now should display better than ever. I've course, I'm not going to spend the horrific prices that Dell is probably asking just to be able to enjoyably read Gutenberg e-texts, but I might buy one of these babies when TEXTBOOKS are commonly available in an e-book format. Imagine toting one slim laptop around, versus a back-braking collection of textbooks?

    Does anyone know whether textbooks are available in e-book form?

  • Actual size is 15-inch (Score:4)

    by mtsirkin ( 218685 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @01:53AM (#834140)
    How do you mean "they don't say what the actual size is"? Quote: Dell will offer UXGA on one of two Inspiron 5000e models introduced today. Consumers can choose from 15-inch UXGA and 14.1- or 15-inch SXGA+, SXGA or standard XGA displays.
  • Hooray! I am lucky enough to use the 1400x1050 display on a Dell Inspron 7500, and it is very good. Its main problem is vertical viewing angle, no matter what it is not possible to see a block of the same colour as the same colour all the way down the screen. I hope they fixed it.

    One good side effect of having such tiny pixels is that dead pixels are far less noticeable than they are on lower resolution displays.

    I know what I want for Christmas :D
  • Unless Dell are really serious about their Linux commitment [linux-mag.com], then this is one hell of a big screen just for executives sitting on jets to play minesweeper.
    - Derwen

  • I use 1600x1200 both at home and at work, and I'd just really like a 18,1" tabletop TFT capable of 1600x1200 !!

    -
    Under revision.

  • Resolution is good.

    If you're working with low-res characters in dot-matrix calculator-vision, then they need to be big to be able to see them. If they're on a higher resolution screen, then they get better shapes, anti-aliasing etc. which makes them more readable. Although there's no simple "all 9 pixel high characters are readable" rule, it's certainly the case that smaller characters at better resolutions are more readable than larger characters, if their resolution is worse.

    How small can you comfortably read on a screen ? On high-res paper ?

  • What browsers should be doing (if the host GUI isn't... remember RISC OS?) is provide a "zoom" button.

    You know, so you can actually read those web sites designed for 800x600 on larger screens, the browser would be aware of its window size and have a button that says "Scale as if res was 800x600"

    Then it resizes your fonts and the images accordingly. That would be a very cool feature, IMHO.

    [please don't bother to reply saying 'shut up and go code it yourself' - I know...]

  • I tend to do a similar thing at home - a couple of days ago I realised I had a spare gfx card and monitor so I installed XF86 4.0.1

    I never want to go back to just one monitor again - I run my main screen at 1600x1200 (19") and a 15" next to it at 800x600 (though that might change) - it's so useful being able to keep stuff open all the time without it cluttering up your desktop.

  • Re:Resolution Independent GUI (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The fix to this problem is to use a display system that does not dictate the pixel density. This is of course why NeXT built their GUI around Display Postscript, and why MacOS X updated that to use PDF with OpenGL. Future Macs will be well positioned to take advantage of such screen technology.

    Microsoft of course have tried to do this kind of thing within Windows, but in my experience if you change the display scaling Microsoft's own software, including the OS itself, will fail to display properly. Buttons fall of the bottom of windows, and whole rows of sheet tabs in panels often dissapear if you've got your font display at 125%+.
  • To keep this in perpective, keep in mind that print media (those of decent quality, that is) typically run in the 1200-2200 dpi range (on the original film from the imagesetter, at least).
    Therefore, I strongly endorse the notion that we are now to the point where increases in screen resolution can be used to improve the quality of text display, rather than just making the old crufty 7x5 dot patterns illegibly small.
    Remember, 9pt type should be 1/8" between baselines, NOT 9 pixels. (Obapologies for the American ruler and the implicit MICROS~1 bashing ;-)
  • How about a 22" 1600x1024 TFT? The Apple Cinema Display fits the bill (even if the bill won't fit the credit card... boo).

    Seriously though, I'm surprised they are sticking to the 4:3 aspect ratio here, I think 16:10 (like apple) would be equally if not more consumer acceptable, and require less pixels

  • Re:But it'll be TFT (Score:3)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @03:40AM (#834150) Homepage Journal
    What however would be really good would be a monitor mode which reported itself as 800x600 but whenever windows was called upon to render text it could use the extra resolution for excellent clarity.

    You mention Windows, so I'll add that Win16 and Win32 have always drawn their GUI elements as a multiple of ::GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXBORDER) (and SM_CYBORDER). However, none of the drivers I've ever seen have ever taken them up on it... all drivers define those metrics as one pixel.

    It's probably a self-defining problem: since most app writers are lazy or don't know this, they write THEIR apps to measure in pixels and not border-multiples or logical points. Any driver manufacturer that experimented with adjusting these metrics probably found 30% compliance and 70% noncompliance with all the apps out there.

    Thus, you can see why device drivers would find it hard to decide what gets drawn bigger, and what doesn't.

    I would imagine the same sort of "uneven compliance with standard methods" would appear in X, Motif, Qt, etc., but I would also imagine that mentioning this will invite lots of followups that say such things wouldn't happen to their beloved platforms.

  • I *really* can't stand anything less than 1024x768 on my computer because I run with so many things open.

    With that said, look at the LCD screens. A lot of them are *very* high resolution, and *very* clear. (I'd give my first born cat for one.)

    However, on my LCD screen I run 1024x768 and it's clear as day at 15" (14.7" viewable. ;p) Now, on my 17" monitor (15.6" viewable?!) 1024x768 looks like absolute crap. (I need a new monitor, bad.)

    Answer: resolution on a 15" laptop screen depends on screen quality more so than size. ;)

    -- Talonius
  • Hold down the CTRL key and scroll your way to bigger fonts.
  • No offense, but the logistics of that are just silly. Monitors don't handle anything except the display of pixels. Video cards do things like "rendering" and even then, it's often a function of software. It sounds to me that you'd be happier with a 1600x1200 monitor under a resolution-independant OS, where graphics are all vectors and can scale "crisply" to any res.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • I am using a Sony Vaio C1XD at 1024x480(768 virtual) on a 8.9" TFT.

    1. you sit closer to a laptop screen

    2. there is no flicker

    3. in the right conditions backlit LCD is brighter than CRT

    I was scared at first, but is very readable with no apparent eye strain.
  • Unfortunately, the IE zooming only affects the text size. You can access this in the menu. View..Text Size

  • Certainly the Inspiron 7500 that I have does, and I run Linux on a daily basis (and I'm using it right now).

    The ethernet card took a while (30 mins) to get working, but everything else works fine. And that includes the suspend to disk, which really surprised me. The only thing lacking is the DVD player ;-)

  • Re:icons on web pages (Score:3)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:55AM (#834157) Homepage Journal
    Opera lets you zoom in and out, a feature which once used, is soarly missed.
    Isn't it about time more browsers had this?

    That's not really a solution. OK, you can zoom in and examine a graphic in detail. (Does that icon really look like an eagle with an erection? Is that a mole?) But what about a page -- or application -- that requires a specific number of pixels to display? If you zoom out to get, say, a superwide HTML table in view, everything's too small to read. Zoom in and you can't possibly follow the thread of text.

    Here's an example: when I upgraded to Win2K, I forgot to make sure a driver for my video card was available. So, using the generic VGA driver (640x480 only) I go to support.dell.com, enter my service tag, and am taken straight to the download page. But there's no download button on the download page! Being a nonvisual person, it takes me a while to figure out that all the page content is exactly 750 pixels wide, and if I already had the driver I was trying to download, I would see the download icons neatly aligned on the right.

    Problems of graphic size and layout are symptomatic of two larger problems:

    1. Too many developers, page designers, and others, do all their measuring in pixels. It's not as if they have to. Popular graphic formats are not resolution-specific. Platform APIs provide plenty of resolution-responsive features. (HTML provides primitive but functional resolution-independent layout. Java and Qt have intelligent layout managers. I gather GTK has something similar. Even Windows defines a pseudo-unit in terms of system font size -- crude, but better than nothing.) But designers persist in relying solely on point-and-grunt techniques that should be reserved for end users.

    2. There are no simple, reliable conventions for communicating browser and user capabilities. The same Dell web page I was just complaining about contains the following Javascript code:
      bNS4 = (document.layers);
      bIE4 = (document.all);
      bV4 = (bNS4 || bIE4);
      bMac = (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac") != -1);
      bMenu = (bNS4 || (bIE4 && !bMac));
      Most fancy web pages have something similar -- usually much more complicated. And this is just to identify a few browser-specific capabilities. There's no way to identify a high-bandwidth connection. (So newspaper sites either assume one or make you click through to see photographs.) There's no way to communicate the user's capabilities and limitations to the server. A web page should automatically adjust to high or low bandwidth, high or low resolution, display size, users that can't read graphics-only pages, users with advanced 3d pointing devices, users who can't or won't use pointing devices... There are few mechanisms to support these things, and Web software, both server and client, doesn't even properly use the ones that do exist.
  • saved up enough cash for a nice tvr sports car i'll be way past the age i need to be to pick up chicks

    I hope for your sake that this won't be true. What may be true is that you would be too scared to drive the car the way it's designed to be driven.

    Old fucks like myself are supposed to be buying sports cars, but here I am still riding my damn bike into work every day. This is not a good way to pick up chicks.

  • We have a Dell laptop with 1400x1050 on 15.4 inch and I really like it. The linux installation was a little bit difficult, you have to set a special video mode at boot time (vga=791), otherwise the display will be black as soon as you start X11. Their support pages had the required pointers to the internet to find out about it.
  • Oh, that sounds great! I'm running to the store RIGHT NOW to buy my own copy! Oh my goodness I'm in Rhapsody! *g*
  • Yes, this is due to Windows and X Windows sucking ass. AFAIK, both do graphical measurements in pixels, which is all but useless. OpenStep, Berlin, Mac OS X's GUI (which is more or less OpenStep I guess) and probably many others do measurements in real world units (e.g. millimetres, points, inches), which makes things a lot more logical.

  • Re:Which is UXGA vs SXGA+ vs SuperMegaXPlusUltra? (Score:3)

    by Kevin Burtch ( 13372 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @10:44AM (#834170)
    Well... originally the meanings were as follows:
    (digital RGB)
    CGA = 320x200x4 colors
    EGA = 640x400x8 and lower
    (analog RGB)
    VGA = 640x480x16 colors
    SVGA = anything better (even 640x480x256!)

    Later, it was altered:
    VGA = 640x480x* (any color depth)
    SVGA = 800x600
    XGA = 1024x768i (interlaced - IBM's original XGA)
    EXGA = 1280x1024

    The Unix modes 1152x864 and 1152x900 never got
    those silly acronyms, since the Unix world is
    typically more precise.

    The SXGA, SXGA+, and UXGA labels are just
    marketing B.S., moreso than the originals... at
    least they were named after the video cards that
    supplied those resolutions. (you just _knew_ if
    a monitor was advertized as VGA it could _not_
    display 800x600!)

    FYI: Dell's versions are:
    XGA = 1024x768
    SXGA = 1280x1024
    SXGA+ = 1400x1050 (wierd!)
    UXGA = 1600x1200

    A great place for history and info is the Winn L.
    Rosch Hardware Bible (I think that's the right
    spelling)

    Later,
    Kevin
  • Why we need a device-independent graphics system.

    Pumping up the font size isn't going to work for everything. Is there an open Display Postscript? If not someone should get on it real quick.

    On the other hand, no, on the SAME hand, I can't wait until my display device has comparable resolution to my hardcopy device.

  • Re:Resolution Independent GUI (Score:3)

    by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:23AM (#834174)
    I've noticed various weird display problems on Windows and Linux systems when the display resolution is smaller or larger than the system the application was developed on. Plus, some of the operating system provided graphics and fonts do not scale well. Are there any fixes for this problem? What happens when we get 4000x3000 displays?

    Yes, of course there are fixes. First, it's possible to do a decent job of scaling *anything*, even bitmap fonts and pictures, if you take a halfway decent approach to the problem. Hint: do you know what a sinc filter is? If not, you better find out fast, or you have no business writing a bitmap stretcher.

    Second, a lot of the formats that are now becoming popular are inherently resolution-indenpendent, for example, any lossy image compression format - jpg (DCT), fractal encoding ;-), wavelets, whatever. Outline fonts too.

    We need to carry this kind of resolution-independent design all the way through the entire system - from Web design to automatic screen geometry to font rendering. A huge task, but it's underway.

    Probably the biggest obstacle is entrenched page/screen designs that were for some incomprensible reason, done with the assumption that screen resolution would never change. For a good example of this, just go to Yahoo. Notice how it's increasingly taking on the appearance of a postage stamp in the middle of your screen. (Note: screen resolution doesn't just *increase* over time, it decreases too. If you don't believe me, check out IBM's Linux-on-a-wristwatch.)

    Even in the face of thoughtlessness on the part of web designers, we can patch up the resulting stupidity with scaling techniques. Check out Andy Hertzfeld's Eazel [eazel.com] project and you will see that somebody out there is actually thinking about this.
    --

  • RISC OS used to have (or still has, I haven't checked it recently) something like this:

    To applications, a standard (very large) resolution is presented. Eg, as an application writer you can simply assume the desktop is 1048576x768000. Then, the GUI 'translates' this to the actual screen resolution when the windows are drawn.

    This is an oversimplification, but you get the general idea. It works great to make applications run on all sorts of desktops - the app writer doesn't need to worry about it, (s)he knows that on higher resolutions, it will just look sharper but the size will be the same.

  • Re:Dead pixels (Score:3)

    by Tribbles ( 218927 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @04:14AM (#834178) Homepage
    On my display, I have one pixel with stuck red. Under normal use, I don't really notice it. If I'm watching a film, or something, then it can be irritating. However, with smaller pixel densities, you would notice dead pixels less and less as their physical size decreases.

  • Dead pixels (Score:3)

    by alee ( 64786 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:36AM (#834179)
    Unless they significantly improve the production process, there are going to be a lot of TFT panels sold with "stuck" pixels -- ie. stuck bright red, bright green, bright blue, or dead.

    Every manufacturer sets tolerances for how many dead pixels are acceptable. What percentage would be acceptable to you? 1% of 1600x1200 pixels is a lot different than 1% of 1024x768.

    The cost of manufacture must be very high no matter what. A bad TFT screen cannot be fixed -- it has to be tossed in the trash. I am thankful that my Thinkpad's 1024x768 screen has no dead pixels, but I am dreading the thought of my next laptop purchase. In my opinion, 1 bad pixel is one too many. It's a shame that none of the manufacturers feel the same way.

  • Hrmmm (Score:2)

    by Xrkun ( 160736 )
    Hey now my new Dell will look like my Nescape on Linux!! Whoo Hoo

  • Re:Textbooks and UXGA screens (Score:4)

    by Mignon ( 34109 ) <satan@programmer.net> on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @04:32AM (#834183)
    Imagine toting one slim laptop around, versus a back-braking collection of textbooks?

    Imagine dropping a textbook on the floor. You pick it up, find your page, and continue reading. Now imagine dropping your laptop...

  • The Importance of Resolution (Score:4)

    by jayhawk88 ( 160512 ) <jayhawk88@gmail.com> on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @04:42AM (#834185)
    Screen size and resolution, and really laptops in general, are like Frames-Per-Second, # Polygons, and such to business-types. They can't impress each other with their Voodoo 9000's and Razer mice, so they trick out laptops.

    Business Guy 1: So then accounts puts out this spreadsheet of quarterly projected earnings, and they don't even bother to break it down into multiple sheets! I'm scrolling all over the place looking at it!
    Business Guy 2: Really? Cause on my new laptop with 1600x1200 resolution, I was able to view the whole thing on one page.
    Guy1: Well, that's great, but I bet it took forever to load with that 1 Meg video card your laptop has in it. Mine, on the other hand, has a full 4 Meg of video memory, plus 256 Meg of RAM. I can load the Powerpoint Org Chart presentation in no time!
    Guy2: Too bad you've got that 2 Gig hard drive in there. Mine, on the other hand, has a full 10 Gig, not counting the extra 6 Gig drive I can put in my expansion bay.

    I'm only half kidding here; I've actually seen scenes similar to this. It's actually pretty funny to watch two 40+ mid-level managers have a pissing contest to see who the CEO likes best.
  • Wait...you can have sex without giving them money, cocaine, and diamonds? Shit...I've been doing it wrong.

    -B
  • .. a look at this website, made by one of my coworkers. I found it very helpful:
    Check it out [linpro.no]

  • Surely you just answered your own question. For a lot of work, 1024x768 (or worse, 800x600) just restricts and holds back the user. Having the ability to display more on screen allows more tools to be visible, and more of the work being done to be visible. Examples are CAD, WYSIWYG DTP, object modelling, business process design/documentation, etc. That's just the graphical things.

    When I am coding I want to be able to see 100 chars width of code, a code/project browser (for quicker navigation between files) and ideally some documentation on the language/APIs/etc on-screen at the same time.

    When I am generally playing around (at home) I want to see my mud window, my IRC window, my web browser, my email and usually a command line at the same time on screen.

    So yeah, 1600x1200 is a nice thing, and I approve.

    ~Cederic

  • icons on web pages (Score:3)

    by codemonkey_uk ( 105775 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @02:54AM (#834202) Homepage
    of course those icons on web pages sure don't get any more legible.
    Opera [operasoftware.com] lets you zoom in and out, a feature which once used, is soarly missed.

    Isn't it about time more browsers had this? Are there any plans for Mozilla [mozilla.org] to include this functionality?

    With difference between the top end and bottom end of display technology, and the tendancy of (less skilled?) web designers to create "best viewed in NxN" sites, html viewing software neads to be deisgned to cope with these differences.

    Thad

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