I, unfortunately, have never had a graphics card good enough to play games at a native resolution. I have never noticed that much difference on my LCD monitors when playing games at low resolution (640x480, 800x600) with low settings than the same settings with native resolutions (1280x1024). I've always felt it looked fine.
Now, when not playing games, but rather word processing, web surfing, photo editing, etc., I find running at a non-native resolution digustingly blurry. I've always preferred ultra-high resolutions as I like having the extra workspace.
If you don't want the extra workspace and want things to be large, running a lower resolution, don't get the WSXGA+, and you probably don't want the WXGA+. WXGA will be just fine.
I've never had a 15.4" WSXGA+ screen before, and this is one of my main qualms about the 1520 I'm thinking of ordering. I want the high resolution, but I don't know if the screen is wide enough, so I did some measurements.
A while back, I had a 17" CRT monitor that was capable of running a 1600x1200, and that was my preferred resolution. It was a fine size and worked wonderfully, I could read size 10 font from several feet away no problems.
It was a 4:3 ratio on the monitor, so we can make a triangle with a hypotenuse of 16.5" (viewable) with a tangent of 3/4. The arctan of 3/4 is about 37°. The sin of 37° times 16.5" is 9.9". The cos of 37° times 16.5" is 13.2".
Thus we have a screen which I am very comfortable with, running 1600 pixels by 1200 pixels, at 13.2" by 9.9".
Now, 1680x1050 is roughly equivalent to that, only have 80 more horizontal pixels, and the 150 of the other is lost by the widescreen.
The ratio of this monitor is probably 16:10, and the arctan of 10/16 is 32°. The sin of 32° times 15.4" is 8.2". The cos of 32° times 15.4" is 13.0".
So, now we hve a monitor 13.0" by 8.2", running 1680 pixels by 1050 pixels.
1680/13.0" is 128 pixels per inch, and 1600/13.2" is 121 pixels per inch.
1050/8.2" is 128 pixels per inch, and 1200/9.9" is 121 pixels per inch.
Dividing 128 p/in by 121 p/in give me a ratio of 1.058, which is an increase of 6%.
Thus, there are 6% more pixels per inch with this laptop versus my old CRT monitor which I was very happy with the resolution. Therefore, I figured that I can indeed handle this resolution very easily, although I have been using 1280x1024 on a 4:3 17" LCD for the past few years.
If you want to, you can do calculations yourself, comparing past monitors to the new one you want to buy, especially if there are no 1680x1050 15.4" screens for you to see.
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Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
