Resolutions haven't moved on much?

[gollop]

Is it me or have screen resolutions not really moved on much in laptops?

I bought a Dell Vostro about two years ago and it has a 1680x1050 15" display, and a dedicated Nvidia Graphics card, its been really good but.....

I want to upgrade to a widescreen 17" with full HD, blue ray etc and more graphics power so I can run more games but am staggered by how little the resolutions seem to have moved on.

I was eyeing up the MSI GX740 but the resolution is the same as my 2 year old vostro?

I don't really want to spend £1200 on a new laptop but for what I want it seems I may have to wait a year or so and carry on playing WOW on my old Vostro!

 

[sja360]

i think the bigger issue is do you want 1920x1080 on a 15" screen for the masses?
the screen size on laptops remain the same throughout time as its ment to be portable.
really i doubt you'll see better than 1920x1080 on a laptop with most laptops having 1366x768 as standard. also i imagine the cost implications to do this would add atleast £50-100 on current laptops

 

[DefiantAsh]

doesnt the alienware series have somewhere near 1920x1080?

 

[sja360]

yea i know particular manfactures of 15" screens do have 1920x1080 but i wouldnt expect packard bell or hp or acer/asus etc mainstream laptop manufactures to be uptaking that resolution.

 

[Disco Boy]

The person currently sat behind me has a 17" dell XPS with a 1920*1200 display... It's nice that it has such a high resolution, but everything is so very small! The limiting factor nowadays is the human eye rather than the ppi that is achievable, once you go beyond a certain ppi everything just looks tiny.

 

[haz_pro]

The higher the resolution the smaller icons and text ect appear on the screen, i think?

I think that may be why resolutions havent changed much on laptops.

EDIT- damn too late hah.

 

[DefiantAsh]

The person currently sat behind me has a 17" dell XPS with a 1920*1200 display... It's nice that it has such a high resolution, but everything is so very small! The limiting factor nowadays is the human eye rather than the ppi that is achievable, once you go beyond a certain ppi everything just looks tiny.

im sure you can enlarge them if you right click on the desktop or go into the control panel, as for the taskbar at the bottom, my resolution on my pc is too small for my liking so i made my task bar the smallest so it looks like a higher resolution screen

 

[Disco Boy]

Yes you can make everything bigger... But then you may as well just have bought a lower res monitor and you've wasted your money

 

[olivier renault]

Not impressed in screen quality as well, poor viewing angles, and the obsession with glossy screens to counter the poor contrasts. Technology doesn't seem to have moved on.

I have a 13'' and 1366 x 768 is a good resolution for that size. 15'' could do better than that surely.

 

[DefiantAsh]

Not impressed in screen quality as well, poor viewing angles, and the obsession with glossy screens to counter the poor contrasts. Technology doesn't seem to have moved on.

I have a 13'' and 1366 x 768 is a good resolution for that size. 15'' could do better than that surely.

well i think the 13" at 1366x768 is great, my 18.5" monitor for my pc supports max of 1366x768

 

[Makhaira]

Yes you can make everything bigger... But then you may as well just have bought a lower res monitor and you've wasted your money

Not really, even if you enlarge everything because it's too small, you get a much crisper picture because of the smaller dot pitch.

 

[vince3]

Be careful with increased resolution on screens. Some programs, notably Photoshop Elements, use built-in pixel based fonts and icons which no amount of Windows desktop and font resizing will change. Photoshop Elements is all but unusable above 1366x768 on a 15.6 screen or 1600x900 on 17.3". See my posts at http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18213349 for a full explanation.

 

[DefiantAsh]

Be careful with increased resolution on screens. Some programs, notably Photoshop Elements, use built-in pixel based fonts and icons which no amount of Windows desktop and font resizing will change. Photoshop Elements is all but unusable above 1366x768 on a 15.6 screen or 1600x900 on 17.3". See my posts at http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18213349 for a full explanation.

Elements is way outdated isnt it? with CS5 commercially available?

 

[vince3]

Elements is really the cut down 'consumer' version of the professionally oriented CS. Elements 9 has just been released for around £58 and CS5 is typically about £560.
I own PSE and have used CS3. While PSE has a steep learning curve, CS is practically vertical.

 

[DefiantAsh]

Elements is really the cut down 'consumer' version of the professionally oriented CS. Elements 9 has just been released for around £58 and CS5 is typically about £560.
I own PSE and have used CS3. While PSE has a steep learning curve, CS is practically vertical.

I find CS5 easy to work with, i used Photoshop 7.0 for almost 1 year before using Photoshop CS5 properly. Similar layouts and some more nifty techniques like pressing delete to remove a layer, rather than dragging it down to that recycling bin thing

 

[barrix]

17 Inch for MSI is not LED HD I think?
Its an older on 740.

 

[Amp34]

Not impressed in screen quality as well, poor viewing angles, and the obsession with glossy screens to counter the poor contrasts. Technology doesn't seem to have moved on.

I have a 13'' and 1366 x 768 is a good resolution for that size. 15'' could do better than that surely.

That's more about what you are willing to pay. Like most screens those on laptops can be a variety of different types. Decent screens are more expensive.

As for resolution. There is a point of (massive) diminishing returns. After a couple of hunded DPI there really isn't any chance you will be seeing pixels even if staring at it from a few inches, usual viewing distances a much lower DPI can be used*. What's the point in having a higher resolution than needed, all it's going to do is increase the price and the power consumption (GFX card will be stressed more), unless you just want to boast about the resolution.

If however you really want something to boast about have a look at Sonys X series, they sell a 13" one with a resolution of 1680x1050 as standard and 1920x1080 for extra cost. Personally I wouldn't even contemplate the 1920x1080 screen on that.

* Be interested to know what pixel density the average eye could view at around 12-24", guessing it's not far off around 130, which is just around the pixel density of most laptops. EDIT: By that I mean really see a difference to make the change worthwhile.

 

[vince3]

The eye can resolve about 0.6 minutes of arc. But this is not the whole story. Reading text involves more than just resolution - letter and word recognition and fonts are involved.
This site explains:
http://www.pc.ibm.com/ww/healthycomputing/vdc-crf.html (It seems to me that the 14 and 22 captions are the wrong way round).
The key is the phrase "character sizes should not be smaller than 14 or larger than 22 minutes of arc in height."
Using the graph on the website about 2.8mm height is needed at 75cm.

Photoshop Elements comes in as follows:
2.27mm on a 15.6" screen at 1366x768
2.15mm on a 17.3" screen at 1600x900
1.78mm on a 17.3" screen at 1920x1080

So it's on the low side for the first two and definitely problematical for the third. Allowing for age-related deterioration it's pretty small anyway.
High resolutions are fine for movies, but will need upscaling for standard text. Windows will do this for standard fonts in Make Text easier to Read. I have it set to 140% and put up with Photoshop Elements.