1920x1080 resolution: is it too big of a resolution?

I'm thinking about either getting the Dell XPS 15 with 1080p or the Dell XPS 14 with 1366x768. I really like the idea of having a high resolution, but now I'm starting to get the idea that it might be too big of a resolution and that text will be really tiny and hard to read. Is this true? Does anyone here have experience with a 15-inch 1920x1080 screen? Do you have to constantly zoom things in or adjust font sizes?

 

Under Win7 you can scale everything if you feel it's too small.

 

While it is better than say XP, I still see glitches in some programs and dialogs when not using the native, non-scaled one.

 

I don't really want to have to, though, that's why I'm asking if it's common for people to think it's too small.

 

go to a local store and find out with the same resolution to judge yourself.

 

I'll have to second chimpanzee's suggestion. The problem is that this is a very subjective opinion; almost everyone is different. It's almost like asking if a red or black notebook is better...

 

Do you think I'd be able to see one in a store? Usually the laptops in the stores have the default lower res screens. I'll look, though. Basically I have to make a decision by next week and I don't know what to do.

 

Really depends on the store. If you can find a more specialized electronics store, you might have a better chance. Also, what you might want to consider doing is in addition to looking at whatever notebooks they have on display, go look at their desktop monitors. See if they have a 15" widescreen monitor that has 1920x1080 resolution. That should give you the same effect.

 

I think there is never "too big" of a resolution. Assuming you set proper DPI scale in W7.
It will scale UI elements to normal size, but higher DPI will still be here - very noticeable when looking at, say, photos or watching high-res videos.
Text will be also a lot sharper, benefitial for long-term reading.

Also as a rule of thumb nowadays lower-res LCD panels also have inferior quality almost in every other respect (gamut, brightness, contrast). Since panel makers usually consider "lower-res" to be same to "lower-end".

 

I personally found WUXGA (1920x1200) to be just a little bit too high res on a 17" notebook. I would say for 15.4" 1680x1050 is a good resolution (that is until *proper* desktop scaling comes into play).

Having said that, it's still pretty awesome to have the resolution available - I'd recommend having a play with one.

 

If you order the 1980x1020 panel and don't like max resolution, just lower the resolution. I wish I at least ordered 1440x900 for my Vostro, but back then it was my college laptop and I didn't need uber fancy resolution but trust me down the line it is worth it.

 

dude 1080p is too small....i miss my old laptop with 1600x1200 loosing the vertical pixels blows. You read so much less. The best res is 1920x1200. Unfortantely they stopped selling those awesome screens.

 

To me 1920x1080 is almost the minimum I would accept on a mid/high end laptop.

 

Here is a comparison.

1366 x 768 : You need to scroll down more for web surfing.




1920 x 1080 : The text is smaller, but not much.

 

It depends on the laptop really. I've seen 1600x900 on what I believe is an 11.6" Sony. It looked awful, and all the text was tiny.

With higher resolutions you can fit more text/windows in the same sized LCD thus be more productive. After having my Dell 21.5" 1920x1080 monitor for so long I can't understand anything under that resolution.

 

To the OP, you need to ask yourself what are you going to do with your new laptop? ..and as suggested, go to a B&M store to view one.

Most of the people I see promoting high rez are young with a full set of eye balls, no glasses. Subjective is a very good term as mentioned.

How much text editing will you do? Most text will scale fantastic..it's all the bit mapped stuff that looks like, well, a very old game.

Is BD in native rez a must have? Do you game? High screen rez will kill FPS depending on GPU horsepower. Games don't look as good when scaled back, native is always best, or play with black boarders.

Having room for multiple windows is nice but I find that best on large high rez external monitors, ymmv.

Now, that I'm wearing reading glasses, MY choices are obvious

 

Yes, there are readability issues with higher resolution screens. Personally, I'd advise you to go with the XPS 14, not just because of the lower res screen, or the lower price, but because a 14-inch notebook is much more portable.

If you really need a higher res display, but an external monitor for home or office use.

 

Yes of course, tiny netbook sized screens excluded

From 14" and up, I wouldn't even begin to consider a laptop with a 1366x768 resolution.

 

If a 14" laptop is one of your options, go for WXGA+ 1440x900. To me, this is a "just right" combination.

Yes, texts on a 15" 1920x1080 display can be too small. On my Dell Studio 1558, Chrome remembers my per-site magnification factor and nicely scales up the pages for me, and OpenOffice Writer also persists my scaling settings. Thanks to the higher resolution, font renditions look smooth and sharp, really beautiful. For my graphics/photo/video applications, the FHD resolution is a must.

 

If only Dell gave another option, but alas, that's it for their 14-inch laptop. Same goes for HP.

 

But when I lower the resolution on my MacBook, everything looks fuzzy. Would the same thing happen on the Dell XPS 15? I wish I could see one in person, but I doubt I'd be able to on account of the fact that it just came out a month ago...

I don't game, so I don't need to worry about that. I'm 14 years old with good eyesight, so I don't think it would be a real problem, but I don't like the look of things being super tiny. I don't want to have to zoom each webpage customly. I want everything to work without having to make individual adjustments like that. I also do do a lot of work with text.

If the 14-inch laptop were available with 1440x900 or something, that would be great, but it just isn't.

And what kind of store do you recommend I go to? I really don't know anything other than big stores like Best Buy and Fry's, which always carry computers with the default low res screens.

 

Not everyone plays bleeding edge games. If you play a few year old games its easy to max out res and settings

 

You don't lower the resolution of the device, you scale up the fonts. Say from 96dpi to 110dpi. That way, you can still have the pixels for your photoshop but the text in Excel would be the same size as a lower resolution monitor.

However, this in some way negate the 'you can see more'(thus more productive) argument.

 

Fry's isn't bad, you might want to try asking if they have any gaming notebooks around that you can take a look at, those will often have better screens. Also, don't forget my desktop monitor tip; Fry's is likely to have a 15" or so desktop monitor around that's capable of 1920x1080. You may also want to try looking for one of those small local shops that sells, upgrades, or repairs PCs (this would be a phonebook(!) search, most likely).

 

I guess to me it seems like if I have to scale everything up, I might as well just get the 14-inch. I don't do any super high-end graphics work or gaming, so it's not like I require 1080p. It just sounds so much better than 1366x768.

The only real way I can choose is if I see 1080p in person. I'm just trying to prepare for not being able to see it in person in case I can't for some reason.

I'll definitely try, thanks.

 

Yeah I hear you, I was searching extensively for a 14" with a decent GPU + higher resolution screen, but currently theres just no (new) such laptop, since HP pulled the Radiance screen option from the Envy 14.

 

My work laptop is a 15" with 1680x1050 and my personal laptop is a 16" with 1920x1080 and to me, theres no problem with things being too small what so ever. Of course, the best thing is to see it for yourself, but if thats not possible, I really wouldn't worry about it.

 

There's always the Sony Vaio Z, if you can stomach the prices.

 

Just out of curiosity, what kind of glitches? What programs and dialogs do the glitches appear on?

 

Well some HP 14" EliteBooks come with a 1600x900 screen but the price is pretty steep....

Newegg.com - HP EliteBook 8440w (WZ315UT#ABA) Notebook Intel Core i7 640M(2.80GHz) 14" 4GB Memory DDR3 1333 500GB HDD 7200rpm DVD Super Multi NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M

 

Dell Latitude E6410: 14.1" WXGA+ Anti-Glare LED Display (1440x900).

Manufacturer-refurbished E6400 can be found at EB.

 

I have been working on a 17" 1920x1200 for a long time. Here is my take.
A higher res screen offers more clairty. Smaller fonts can be read just as well as bigger fonts on a crappier screen. I do a lot of text based work, so the extra clarity is really nice.
I however sometimes scale up fonts insider certain applications if I feel like it. But the usual titlebar on windows etc, I dont neeed or want big fonts. I want them to be small and not take up space.

I have worked a bit on 15.4 1920x1200, and the font size was fine for me.

PS: Also check out the HP DV6t --- its a lower res screen but I gather it offers great value, and the lid/body is metal covered too.

 

Thanks for the info, DexterM. And I saw the HP dv6t in person (in several stores actually) and I didn't like it, sorry. 1366x768 is too small for a 15-inch in my opinion, I found the screen grainy, and the touchpad jumpy.

 

Have you thought about 17 or 18" 1920x1080 laptops? Eg HP DV8 or envy 17?

Another option might be to get an external monitor for the xps 14..

 

Nah, I can't have anything that big. I need one that can fit in my backpack and be portable. That's why I like 14 & 15 inch.

 

How about a used Envy-14 with the Radiance screen then?

 

You may want to read this: http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...top-1080p-screen-text-too-small-browsers.html

 

To me it's too low of a resolution. I still have to zoom out on my 15.4" 1920x1200 screen to get things to display the way I want them.

It's something you're better off confirming for yourself.

 

Nah, I want the Dell, I'm just not sure if I want the 1366x768 14-inch Dell or the 1920x1080 15-inch Dell.

Hmm. I know I have to see it in person, I'm just not sure how easy that will be because I've never seen one yet. Next week I'll go looking, for sure. I live in Silicon Valley, for crying out loud, there has to be a place where I can see a 15-inch screen with 1080p!

 

This is your original question. Somehow, this thread has been dragged to 4 pages!

There are plenty of computer stores in Silicon Valley! The Stanford Bookstore, in particular, has great selections.

I would get the Dell XPS 14 with 1366x768 resolution.

 

Microcenter in Santa Clara too has lots to see...

 

Only if your eyesight is failing. You have to be the judge.

As they've stopped selling black and white TV sets. There's nothing sacred about reduced resolutions.

That's because it IS better. On the other hand, if you're like the Slowskys, you may prefer backwards technology?

 

I think a lot of people really miss the point.

You can scale text, controls and almost everything to be not of "ultra-tiny" size by setting proper DPI scale in Windows 7. Windows 7 allows you to completely customize DPI setting to any zoom you like. This makes point "I dont want to stare at tiny text" completely moot. You dont need to lower resolution, just use native highest res possible with proper DPI set.

However the resolution/ (DPI) is still here, even when text is not made visually smaller. If you compare text with same 5mm-sized letters on two screens, you will see that one on higher-res screen is a lot sharper. Try to watch photos and movies on low-res screen and very high res screen. Photo will not be physically smaller on high res - but you will notice so much extra detail, the image on low res screen will appear blurry in comparison.
Really, saying that "I dont want high res screen, some apps have compat problems with high res" is a little like saying "I dont want this new fast CPU model, some old apps have compatibility problems with it".

 

This assumes that what you're looking at _can_ scale appropriately. Something that's exactly, say, 1366 pixels by 768 pixels, will end up being slightly blurry when upscaled to 1920x1080, simply because elements that were previously represented by a single pixel now have to be represented by 1 and a half pixels... and since you can't have half a pixel, the edge blurs. Now, if your photo was (originally) at a (or the) higher resolution, then yes, as the viewed resolution approaches the recorded resolution, you'll get more extra detail. Really, the issue there is the question of what source you have.

This is, by the way, a big part of the reason why people complain about running games in non-native resolutions. That whole "half-pixel" thing ends up blurring the image.

 

I'm starting to get confused now

 

Generally at upscale this big it will be very slightly blurry. Given you use good upscaler. Also this depends on content, and I would say with 90% of photos and videos you won't see any bad effects from upscaling - just because res is big, and no pixel-size sharp details. Mainly upscaling artefacts are visible on synthetic raster images.
It all down to weighting pluses of always having that DPI there to use against minuses of sometimes encountering something that does not play so great with it.
Also more you upscale => less detail you lose. Thats why higher res => better, that's why iPhone 4 screen was upscaled so much that you essentially see no bad effects.
I agree that in some apps upscaling is simply badly implemented. For example, that's why I use Chrome as browser, it's raster upscaler is amazing, so good that you barely see the difference with native res (compare this with IE, even IE9, which is so bad it's shocking).
Games are matter of preference. Personally I love the fact that I could run less GPU-intensive games at amazing FullHD+ res. And with more GPU-intensive games upscaling to FullHD+ is not that bad, it's almost undistingushable from antialiasing.

 

Why I said, see one for yourself. You simply cannot 'see' via others eyes.

 

How does higher DPI result in bigger text?
DPI is dots per inch...more dots per inch = bigger text?

 

Who said higher DPI result in bigger text?
Text and similar vector-based rendering uses DPI of the screen to compute text size in pixels, therefore visual text size should remain constant (but more in pixels on higher-res screen). As long as DPI size set in OS correctly. Older OS did not support high DPI scaling well, it mostly solved in W7.

 

font size is expressed as 'point' which is a fixed scale, 1/72 inch. So if it is a 72 point font, it is 1 inch. If you set the screen to 96 dpi, that is 96 screen pixels, if it is 120 dpi, it would be 120 screen pixels. And obviously, 120 screen pixels would take up a larger area than 96 screen pixels.

That is also the reason why I said for certain programs, changing from standard 96 dpi would result in shifting, especially if the screen is designed with fixed pixel alignment.

And for those wonder why changing the dpi may not affect say a web page, this link can give you some info. Basically, there is more than one way to specify web page font size, standard 'points' as in the printing industry or 'pixel'.

http://developers.evrsoft.com/articles/pixel_vs_point_size_fonts.shtml