Please Advise: 1366x768 or 1600x900 on E6520?

I'm upgrading from a Dell Inspiron 8600 with a 1280x800 15.4 display to a Latitude E6520 with 15.6 display.

I'm having a bit of a hard time deciding on which res screen to buy: 1366x768 or 1600x900. I mostly surf the internet, read tons of text, build webpages in wordpress, and use MS office for school. I would like more screen real estate but not at a major cost to text readability in native resolution - in this light the 900P display seems like a decent compromise (1080P screen would make things uncomfortably small I think and I wouldn't like it and it's not an option anyway).

I'd love to see the panel in person but the closest laptop in terms of display would be the Macbook Pro's 1690x1050. Would this provide a decent approximation of the E6520's display?

Could someone point me to some screen shots comparing both resolutions on a 15.6 display?

So, 1368x766 or 1600x900? Please advise would be grateful for your help.

 

I would favor the 1600x900 on the 16:9 15.6" unless you've got a reason not to.

GK

 

1600x900. Huge difference in screen quality (at least it is on the E6500/10).

 

I thought Dell always offered like higher nits on higher resolution screens.

 

I'm grappling with the same dilemma... I tried out a new MBP 15" last summer, and everything was much too small for me (I am basically a business user). I returned it.

Right now I use a laptop with a 1280x800 display, so that's what I'm used to - everything being big enough to see clearly.

I went to Staples to see what the resolution was on the consumer Inspirons, the 15.6" displays were all 1366x768, and the 17.3" displays were 1600x900.

In terms of brightness/clarity, the 17.3" with 1600x900 definitely looked better. But, because it's a bigger screen the size of icons & text on both screens looked the same (they were fine for me). I really need to compare two 15.6" Dell screens that each have one of the different resolutions.

I need to get over to the nearest Univ. bookstore that has a Dell store to find out what 1600x900 actually looks like on a Dell (BU carries the 6510), but just haven't gotten there yet. I hate to get the laptop and then be straining to do my everyday email, word processing and web browsing on it.

 

The higher the PPI the clearer / denser any image is on the screen. The size of that image is determined by software, interacting with the hardware. For working with text, especially, always go for the denser screen option.

 

Higher the better, as long as the brightness is similar. Good modern OS' can scale their fonts fairly well. I've had 1920x1200 on a 15.4" laptop for almost 4 years now and while, at first, the software sucked -- as new web browsers came out, and as Vista (and Win7) were updated, the font scaling facilities became better and better.

Personally I don't know why they ship the low-res screens anymore, other than, they are cheap.

 

But don't graphic images and icons that come up when web-browsing (i.e., the CNN banner graphic on the CNN homepage) become blurred when upscaling (even in Win7)? The GUI elements and text scale-up well, but in my brief experiment with DPI scale-up I found that there were always elements that looked like crap when you get outside of native resolution....

 

[email protected]" makes things approximately the same size as on [email protected]".

Things definitely won't look nearly as small as on the MBP's 1680x1050, and there are many reasons to for the 1600x900 in the E6520 over the 1366x768.
- 1600x900 lets you fit more on the screen without making stuff TOO small
- using MS Office (especially Excel) is a lot easier because you can fit more cells
- the brightness of the E6520's 900p panel is higher than on the 1366x768
- the viewing angles are better, so you won't see distorted colors when looking from the side

 

You have to remember that back in the days of the old E6500, you had to upgrade to the higher resolution to get LED backlighting. With the last generation E2, Dell made LED backlighting standard.