Latitude WUXGA (1920x1200) screen ??

The Latitude comes in these flavours:
1920 x 1200 pixels (WUXGA) (500:1 contrast)
1680 x 1050 pixels (WSXGA+) (300:1)
1280 x 800 pixels (WXGA) (300:1)

I'm considering getting the WUXGA LCD but when I connect my external 20" LCD, I would have to lower the resolution of the internal LCD to ~WXGA+. Will this look OK or is the result crappy?

The reason I say this is because the WUXGA has a very high DPI and my external LCD has a normal DPI. With WinXP (and I"m guessing that Vista is the same), I can't specify different DPI setttings for external vs. internal panel (at the same time), so it would be ackward to have a high DPI internal LCD and a normal DPI external LCD.

 

You should be able to set the 'Screen resolution' on the notebook and the external monitor separately, unless you're just mirroring the same desktop on two screens. Once they're both plugged in and turned on, there should be dual-screen options on the 'Display Properties' settings. There should be a box with two smaller boxes, of different sizes. You click on the little boxes (representing your monitors) to set the resolution.

If not, click on the 'Advanced' button and see if there's more settings provided by the video chipset manufacturer, or make a 'System Restore' checkpoint and upgrade the video card driver.

As for how bad your display will look, that all depends on the resolution of your external monitor. It's not the contrast that matters, it's matching the aspect ratio that matters most. The next big thing is how well the underlying display system manages scaling to a lower resolution, both in your external monitor and in the computer its self. Some chipsets will drive at various arbitrary resolutions and do scaling internally themselves, if you let them. So you could still be 1920x1200, but the external monitor panned or got a scaled-down version of the image.

For a worst-case scenaria, I have a 1920x1200 monitor that I use a VGA connection from an XBOX 360 on. The XBOX 360 doesn't support that resolution, and doesn't do squat for scaling up to it. I found that certain resolutions worked better than others, and picked the highest one that didn't suck. 720P worked, as did one of the higher odd-looking 'Computer' resolutions they provided.

 

Yes, I can set the resolutions independently - it's the DPI setting that has to be the same for both monitors. This makes it difficult if the two panels have very different DPI's.

Turning down the resolution of the internal LCD is a solution to this, but I've heard people comment that using non-native resolution sometimes look really bad, depending on the panel.

 

OK. Let me ask a more specific question about the WUXGA panel.

Can anyone tell me what modes it supports? I'm hoping it supports WXGA+ (1440×900).

Thanks.

 

Another thing to consider while you ante up big bucks for the notebook would be spending $500 or so on a better external WUXGA monitor, too... Sure, it's just throwing money at the problem, but it's an option.

There's always somebody who wants cast-offs.

 

My external monitor is 20". A 20" LCD with a DPI similar to the internal LCD we are talking about would have an enormous resolution. I doubt the notebook could drive a monitor like that if such a thing even existed.

 

My five year old SyncMaster 240T LCD monitor is 24" and 1920x1200 (WUXGA) and I can tell you with absolute certainty that when you give it a 1920x1200 image to display, it displays right no matter what the source 'DPI' was, because 'DPI' means absolutely nothing. There is no video setting for DPI that means anything. Most LCD monitors nowadays have square pixels, and a similar dot pitch.

It doesn't matter that a notebook's default built-in hardware made the signal, or a high-end 3D card made the signal. It displays right so long as the original aspect ratio and the expected shape of the pixels is about the same. The size and shape and resolution and DPI of the built-in notebook LCD are all irrelevant to an external monitor unless you're mirroring what the notebook is displaying. Windows will treat the other monitor as a separate device, and configure drawing primitives accordingly.

DPI is only a number, and only comes into play with some desktop publishing stuff. You set DPI higher on a 1920x1200 image, it still has 1920x1200 resolution, but when you print it, it gets smaller. When you set a lower DPI, when you print it, it gets bigger. Most software displaying images on a monitor will go by the physical resolution of 1920x1200 and ignore the DPI.

Windows has a 'DPI' setting to monkey with font and window sizes. That will do nothing about how the monitor displays things, only in how fonts and windows are drawn by Windows.

 

Yes, I agree that DPI is just a number. I don't care about accuracy - I just want text that is big enough to read. But if I get it big enough to read on my internal high DPI display, then it is going to be much too big on my external normal DPI display.

Regarding DPI not having much affect. It is my understanding that Vista does much more with the DPI setting then WinXP does. I don't know the degree to which existing applications will get this new functionality.

 

If the text will be sharp enough to read small on the small display two feet in front of your face, will it be too big on the big display three or four or five feet away?

Nobody can answer that but you, after tinkering with the settings and getting comfortable with it.

Naturally on the big monitor I have the text pretty minimally sized. On a smaller monitor, I'll have to wait and see how sharp it is. The 17" Vostro notebook I ordered last week should be here today, assuming the driver doesn't tap his brakes at the gate and sneak away without trying the phone.

I generally don't mind reading tiny text if it saves me panning around with the mouse/mouse pad to find it. A 17" monitor is 70% the size of a 24" monitor, and the only thing that keeps my text as big as it is on the 24" monitor is collapsing smaller fonts into 'greek' (i.e. all the holes in b, p, e, etc. become solid).

If Vista does anything differently, hopefully it scales the windows and controls in their dialogs and menus and such with the fonts more intelligently. Usually if you set up 'big' fonts, a wide variety of applications melt down unless there's extra code to 'fix' the problems. I honestly don't expect it to be any better. There are just too many ways to write Windows applications with buggy layouts for an OS level tweak to fix anything. Move the symptoms off of Microsoft branded applications? You bet they will. But fix other problems? No way. They most likely just broke lots of non-MS applications that don't have their own custom layout and window management worse so everybody has to put out 'Vista' patches.

 

Just got it, and it does support the 'hdtv' format settings, at least the NVidia 8600 card does.

 

Yes, that is a good point, and that's kind'of what I do now. I currently have an Inspiron 6000 with a 1680x1024 screen, so when I'm using it with my external screen I keep the external a little further away then the notebook.

Who knows, maybe it's good for my eyes.