Displays, DPI, and Widescreen

Looking at the new lineup coming from Asus, I am frustrated by the low resolution for many of their offerings. Display resolution is one of my most stringent requirements for purchasing a laptop. I use my machines for software development, graphics processing, and other tasks, but ever for document editing or browsing the web, I want to see more on my screen.

Part of the problem we are seeing with resolutions right now stems from the move to 16x9 widescreens, though.

Windows is designed with a target physical DPI of 96.
My 24" 16x10 desktop monitor running at resolution of 1920x1200 has a physical DPI of 94. It looks very natural and readable at it's native resolution without enabling high DPI in windows.

My current laptop with a 15.4" 16x10 panel running at 1680x1050 resolution winds up having physical DPI of 129, which looks great but requires me to be closer to the monitor or bump the DPI setting in windows. It looks great in Win7 with the DPI bumped up to 110% or so, but not all programs honor the DPI setting.

The current trend is towards 16x9 instead of 16x10. It seems like almost all of the new Asus lineup will be at this aspect ratio.

A 17.3" 16x9 laptop running at 1600x900 ends up with a physical DPI of 106, which puts it somewhere in between. 1920x1080 would put it at 127 DPI, which seems to be around the sweet spot for my comfort. 17.3 sounds like it should be massive on a laptop, but all the additional size is in the width. A 17.3" 16x9 screen is 2 inches wider than my 15.4" 16x10, but only maybe a quarter inch taller. A 16" 16x9 is actually shorter.

The 16x9 screens look great, and are fine for watching movies, but they come at the cost of vertical resolution.

How many of you care about DPI as well as resolution in your laptop purchases? Is the move to 16x9 displays a good thing?

 

I don't mind the lower resolution since my eyes aren't that good. So I couldn't really care about higher resolution.

 

As I said in the other thread on the topic, I'm not a fan of 16:9, because most panels seem to be coming in just having 10% less vertical resolution compared to thier 16:10 counterparts. If they had added horizontal res instead of taking away vertical, I might have been ok.... but then of course, they could have used the same production lines to make TV screens. Bleh. I just want my 10% back...

But yeah, I have seen this same downward trend in res in Sagers in some models. For instance, the NP2092 used to have 1680X1050 panels, but the "update" for the line has 1366X768. I concider that a significant downgrade.

Anyway, as to DPI, I'm less concerned with DPI than DPDA, if you will (dots per degree arc). What I mean by that is that from whatever is the standard/comfortable usage distance for a given display distance, the pixel density for every degree of arc within the viewing cone of your eyes is of a certain level. I'm not sure what that level is... but I like it high.

 

Which would mean that as the display gets farther away, the physical size of a degree of arc on the display would grow bigger. DPDA is going to be a function of the physical DPI of the display and the distance of the viewer. Both equate to the smoothness and detail which can be displayed. Given that my viewing distance with a laptop computer is going to be fairly consitent, physical DPI becomes a viable way to measure this. The problem with increasing those numbers is that if you display the image with the same amount of actual detail (render it using the same number of pixels) then the size of the resulting image decreases, and the ability of the viewer to percieve the details decreases. The flip side is that you can view more information on your screen.

I like to be able to see a lot of information on the screen (high resolution), however if the resolution goes too high on current systems, it becomes difficult for my eyes to make out the details without getting closer to the screen, or in other words it creates "eye strain". Obviously there is a "sweet spot" that is going to be different for everyone.

Essentially, I want my physical DPI to result in a DPDA which allows me to view the maximum amount of information on the screen that I can comfortably view.

On a related note, as the dpi and resolution of displays goes up, software is going to have to adjust to take advantage. What good is having a 10,000 vertical pixel resolution if you end up with 12 px characters that have to be measured in nanometers? This means that Windows (and other operating systems) will have to move away from current pixel based rendering to some other device independent unit in order to control what we see across a broad range of hardware. Interestingly, this is one of the core notions of Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation.

 

I completely agree with you. I just haven't had the problem of a display that is too high resolution for me to use comfortably at normal usage distance yet. I'm sure it can happen (for instance, WQXGA on a 14" lappy might be a bit much, heh), but for the time being, not a problem.

 

I haven't yet either, but I am seeing 15.4 laptops coming now with 1920x1200 resolution and I think that might be a little too high for my taste. (I haven't actually handled one to see, Best Buy doesn't stock high res versions of anything!) That's why I'm putting together some research on physical DPI's (which would be 147 by the way, and is the highest value I've come across so far).

 

Death to 16:9

 

From a brief google search, it looks like the generally accepted value for the smallest viewing arc that the human eye can resolve is 1/60th of a degree for someone with 20/20 vision. It should be pretty easy to figure out an optimal resolution at any given distance based upon that (I would think that the DPDA should be higher than 1px/1min so that the pixels don't appear as distinct dots to your eyes). (Btw, 1 min = 1/60th of a degree.)