16.4" screen - 900p or 1080p?

For those of you who have a Sony Vaio FW series or a similar 16-16.4" laptop with 1080p, do you find it makes everything too small and the text unreadable?

I can't decide between the 1600x900 screen and the 1920x1080 screen.

Anyone with any experience in this department, what are your thoughts?

Thanks.

 

1080p is too high of a resolution for 16.4" LCD. Yes everything is far too small and a pain to read and you will get eye strain. I would recommend the 1600x900. You will thank me later.

 

well, you can change the settings/increase font size for windows/your web browser....

i would say it depends on the price... high resolution is sometimes better...

 

Thanks, but it's 16:9, and according to your siggy, that makes me a fool

 

I have FW190 with 16.4", 1600x900. The font is just about the smallest that I can feel comfortable for long time reading. At 1920x800, the font size is definitely too small. Heck, I even found the font size of AW 18.4" at 1920x1080 a bit too small.

You can increase the DPI to compensate the font size but enlarging the DPI would make less text available that you can cramp in one screen. So, in a sense increasing the DPI defeats the purpose of having a screen with large resolution. Besides, DPI scaling is not 100% perfect. It is an improvement over XP but still not perfect.

You can change the resolution too but everybody knows that LCD screen looks best at its native resolution. Lowering that would make the text looks ugly.

One thing you need to keep in mind is if you have 1600x900, you are most likely get an ECO screen, instead of a HiColor screen that you would get with 1920x800. HiColor has richer color and brighter. ECO color is pale in comparison. It's full brightness is just 50% of HiColor full brightness. And it is a bit more reflective.

But I am lucky that I get a HiColor screen at 1600x900. I have the older model, FW190. It was the last time that Sony offer HiColor screen at 1600x900. Subsequent models come with ECO screen at 1600x900 or HiColor screen at 1920x800. At least that is the case for US models.

 

16.4" 16:9 screen is actually has the same physical width as 17" 16:10 screen but reduced in height. So, it is comparable with 17" screen with 1920x1200 resolution reduced in its height to become 16.4" screen with 1920x1080 resolution.

I've been using 17" screen with 1920x1200 in my Dell Studio 17 for these 8 months and it feels great. I don't use it too often for watching movies, mostly for work and daily internet activities. I don't feel pain or eye strain, even with Windows default font size or view zoom 100% settings in IE. So... Don't worry about getting 16.4" with 1920x1080 resolution.

But this might not applied if it's a 16" (or 15.6") screen, cause it will be smaller.

 

Text size is largely by personal opinion, so the best course of action is to go to a store and check out similiar laptops and screens.

Outside of text size considerations, the Vaio FW's 1600x900 screen only has one backlight, and is not very evenly-lit. If you look at the review on this site, you can see a lot of the "tunnel effect."

The 1920x1080 screen, however, is lit by two lamps, I believe, and looks a lot nicer.

 

I'd take the 1920x1080. mainly because it's the same res as my hd-beamer (and the same width as my 24" screen), and the full-hd standard instead of no standard at all.

And because I have no problem reading it.

 

I agree to go check it out for yourself.

The 1600*900 can be gotten with both single and double lamp. I do recommend the double lamp screen, contrast is a lot better.

I would go for 1080p, even though the letters are too small for me. I'd increase the DPI and use No Squint in Firefox.

 

Not with the US version. The last model that offers 1600x900 Double Lamp screen was FW1xx. I was one of the last person who grabbed it at SonyStyle.

 

Lower res on a screen like that, heck my sony (15.4 in) uses 1280x800 and its the best size for that machine Dont need too struggle to read or anything.

 

Here's some of my thoughts on this (repost from a Sony VAIO F thread):

The maximum theoretical human eye resolution is 72 arc seconds for a nicely illuminated target. Vaio 16.4" Premium Display pixel pitch P = 0.189 mm. Comfortable viewing distance ranges, say, from L = 600 (which is very close) to 800 mm depending on your tase/size. From this distance the pixel subtends an agle of A = arctan(L / P) * 206265 (this way A is expressed in arc seconds as well). Given the L range above we obtain A = 78 - 49 arc seconds. I hope these numbers speak for themselves

Now let's compare this to my old laptop (13.3" SZ with 1280x800 resolution) that had 0.2238 mm pixel pitch: A = 92 - 58. And finally let's see what the AW shows with its 0.2122 mm pixel pitch: A = 88 - 55. So which one is better for a normal eye?

The same goes to DPI: 134 for 16.4" F screen, 113.5 for 13.3" SZ and 120 for 18.4" AW. What I have to do with my F screen is use Windows 125% (medium) magnification that results in 107 DPI which is, surprise, close to the 13.3" screen DPI that I find somewhat optimal. If sony would have announced a 18.4" laptop with core i7, I'd already returned my F (once again, it's the fastest and best color producing notebook I've seen in my life, but, d@mn, I feel my eyes aching after some hours of working at 100% magnification - that's not right!)


So as for me, I do find 1080p too small on a 16.4". 1080p is for 18.4" and above, imho.