How many pixels can be stuffed into an LCD/LED

I was just thinking of how my 15.4" 1680x1050 was so beautiful
I was looking at high rez pictures from my digi cam and they were super.
I also remember using my 15" 1024x768 lcd and didn't think much of it. I mean I could see each pixel individually in it

If the companies that make LCD and LED panels could stuff even more pixels into the screens what would be the pro's of it? Of course it would look nicer but anything else? IDK I just thought that this would be something of interest to discuss.

 

Adding more pixels would be a NEGATIVE. Everything would simply be too small and using non-native resolution is useless.

1680 x 1050 already kind of sucks. Everything is too small for a 15.4" LCD.

 

There is even 1920 x ... resolution for 15.4" LCDs. I don't know what the hell those are for... Perhaps they should be giving out some magnifying glasses with them too...

 

Actually the first laptop to support 1920x1200 was the 15.4" dell inspiron 8500.
Unfortunately I bought the i8500 with the 1680x1050 screen, but both are very nice.
I particularly find 1680x1050 to be the best viewing size for a 15" screen. 1920x1200 is a bit small for most people.

The technology can probably push higher than 1920x1200 on a 15.4" screen, but the demand is not their. Most cannot read text at resolutions higher than that on a 15.4"

K-TRON

 

I like jamming more on the screen... especially since I do a lot of web design, and having multiple tasks on the screen is commonplace..

 

As far as I'm concerned, the more the better. I think 1920x1200 is great on a 15.4". 1920x1200 is what I use on my desktop.

For me, more resolution = greater productivity. There is a direct relationship.

I think your question, erwallie, is not a question of how much you can fit on a screen, but how much is practical. Companies aren't going to develop a technology into something that isn't going to be useful.

That's your opinion and you're entitled to it.

 

Eyesight quality matters at these resolutions. I've got a 1680 x 1050 15.4" notebook that is gathering dust because it hurt my eyes, but young eyes may be very happy with it. While you can tweak Windows' display settings (bigger font and icons) a one pixel wide line can be very thin and almost invisible.

John

 

I agree with K-TRON, im sure its possible to make a higher than 1920x1200 resolution on a 15". But as stated, nobody would be able to read it... So, why would they spend the money and time to make a screen with that res, when nobody would buy it...

Personally, i have a 1440x900 on my 17". Its not bad for me. But i do wish i had gotten the 1680 x 1050 on it...
Resolution is a personal choice more than anything.

 

I know on CRT's they can go insanely high. I used to have a 27" EIZO Flexscan which could do somewhere in the 5,000 in resolution. It was an insane monitor. Its a shame a magnet destroyed it.
At that resolution, the taskbar was literally like 2mm thick

K-TRON

 

My sister still uses one. Its been dieing for a while but the screen is crazy!

 

Ive got 1920x1200 on my 15,4" and love it. It's all down to personal preference and eye sight though, some can't read thing and think it's too small. Testing now, i just woke up and when i stretch my arm holding the laptop as far as i can i can still read this forum easily...no problems here

 

I had 1920x1200 on my M1730 and it was nice to have a lot of screen space, though I am not sure I could deal with it all the time. Right now I am at 1440x900 and it seems to be the sweet spot. Sure there are times I could use more space but everything is readable.

 

Other than making the font too small, bear in mind that the higher the resolution, the slower your game will run. You can certainly lower the resolution manually but the picture may look ugly.

 

Yup, Its a lose - lose situation with higher resolution screens.

Higher resolution does NOT = Better.

High resolution laptops screens = poorer graphics performance, everything is too TINY, switching to non-native resolution to compensate makes everything look blurry.

 

well, my xperia (sony ericsson winmobphone) has 800x480 on 3". that means 1600x960 on 6", or 3200x1920 on a 12". i have a 12" notebook. it would be CRAZY

 

except if you could scale by two... then it would still be sharp. but it could have 4 times the detail where needed.

in the end, go into a shop, look at screens with different resolutions and make your choise. i could use 1920x1200 on a 15.4" with ease. others nearly can't use 1280x800 on 15.4"..

getting more pixels that you can see is a gain. more than you can see, a loss. you'll have to find the balance.

 

Personally i'd go for 1680x1050 (or even higher!) on a 15.4", i'm at 1280x800 now though and that annoyes me as i wanna have alot of desktopspace, so i'm using a 20.1" @ 1680x1050 also and i can't seem to get used to be without it either hehe.

Why shouldn't the screen resolution under the native(max) look good? On my 20.1", if i use 1280x800 there it looks good. It's just more pixels available, so why wouldn't it be possible to make it as nice as any less native screens so to say?

Just because it has more pixels?
Then why can't the screen use it like 4pixels to become 1 in another lower resolution (that is if we can get alot of more pixels fit on the screen), if someone gets what i'm saying, then it should look as nice (if not nicer) than other screens.

 

Wow, you sure to seem to carry your opinion as universal fact.

Higher resolution does = Better, if a person wants or needs it.

I personally can not stand using any res lower than 1680x1050 on a 15.4" notebook. Of course, I also have the high-end VGA necessary to back it up.

 

Right now I'm loving WUXGA+ on my 18.4in laptop. I think most people who claim that WXGA is fine and anything higher would kill their eyes have actually never used a WUXGA laptop for too long. You get used to the font size and start appreciating all the stuff you can have open at the same time.
Soon you can't live without it.

Regarding the game issue, most WUXGA laptops have high-end GPUs, which would be able to handle a higher res. For example; a 4850 can easily play CS at max settings @ 2500 by 1600 res.

 

I had an WXGA 1280x800 notebook for years, and the low resolution made it really hard to effectively work on it without an external monitor. I used WSXGA+ on 15,4", it's way better. I would also have gotten my actual notebook with a high resolution than 1920x1080 on 18.4" if it was available.

 

I agreee. 1280x800 is far to low to be a good resolution on a 15.4" even if you're not used to have alot of apps running. There should be a minimum of 1440x900 or something on a 15.4"

 

Ya totaly. All of the budget laptops with 15.4" wxga screens is pathetic.
I just set my 15.4" 1680x1050 down to 1280x800 TO BIG

 

wow. I didnt know they even had that.

But who can really make use of it? Thats why not many are made...

 

How 'big' things are on a high-dpi display (like my 15.4" 1920x1200 display) is a function of the software being used to generate the output, and *not* of the screen itself.

I agree with the other posters -- once you've used a high resolution LCD, like a 1920x1200 15.4" display -- you'll find it fairly hard to downgrade in a future laptop. The visual acuity, the clarity of the fonts, the lack of a need for interpolation in the brain between large pixels, all improves productivity and reduces eyestrain and mental stress associated with using a laptop.

The big disadvantage to the small WUXGA screens, it would seem, is the amount of energy the displays must use. The backlights must be very strong to overcome a significant amount of light attenuation caused by the smaller LCD grid used. This means lower battery life. On my Latitude D830, for instance, I get 3 hours, 20 minutes. On a plain WXGA Latitude D830, running the same stuff, I would probably get well over 4 hours running the same battery.

 

What do you mean? That software can make things smaller (like it would be a higher resolution)?
I myself have a 1280x800 on 15.4" i hate it, but i've changed the fonts (down to 7) and sizes on all windows (down to 13 and 16, in windows settings) so it would look like i have a even higher resolution than it is, but it isn't, though i can fit more like this on the screen.

But i don't think the software can do more than that, if it could, i'd be jumping with joy.

 

You can put as many pixels in a display as you want.
Normally more pixels are better, e.g. when you read a PDF you will get ultra sharp font if your display has many DPI.
The only downside is that the GUI of almost every program isn't resolution independent. That means the higher your resolution gets the smaller the icons, menus, ... get. This could easily be fixed if they stop using bitmaps and use scalable vector graphics instead and optimize their GUI to make them scalable. This is a bit tricky but well, in the future they have to do this.

One very high DPI display is the IDTech manufactured 15" QXGA (2048×1536) IPS panel. A dream. But yes, the backlight has to be stronger and with current operating systems and programs you must have good eyes to work with such a display. But maybe in a few years, with Windows 8 or maybe 9 the whole user interface gets scalable and we will have 300 DPI displays everywhere.

 

Another plus would be with games.
Like if I was running crisis on a 17" LCD @ 3840x2400 I would have a much much more beautiful picture.
I wonder if there will be a screen invented without pixels. Some kind of display that is like an eye... without pixels.

 

erwallie, an eye has a resolution, and it does kinda have "pixels" (photo receprot cells). your brain interpolates, and makes many many more things, partly still unexplained, to enhance your vision.

 

But that can cause a lot of font smoothing issues and especially web pages from being rendered correctly.

 

lol, yeah i guess so.

Can i upgrade my eye's resolution?

@ Erwallie: Yeah, but there is no GPU that can handle that. And when it will exist, it will probably cost a million bucks. and there will be a Crysis 5 Warhead 9 already.

 

More pixels means crispier image, but may show lack of details.

Also, decrease in GPU performance.

 

Firefox has not been affected by those changes in that way anyways as i haven't changed the fonts or sizes to anything smaller that can make these errors, and there is this ctrl+scroll up or down thingy to correct this easily otherwise



filefantasy, can you define that a bit more, why is that? That doesn't sound logically.

About the GPU performance loss, that shouldn't be relevant as we're speaking of a hypothesis?
But. If we where at that point that there where common with more pixels, more powerful GPU's would be along the side not losing any performance that is to talk about.

 

You probably could play crysis at that resolution with a pair of those GT295 GX2 cards at low settings. A screen without pixels probably will be a reality someday. The problems would be mostly in processing the data for such a screen as well as the material (genuine plasma?, amorphous metals?).

You can get bionic implants for your eyes already I believe. They aren't that great yet. Give it another century.

 

i really like on my 24" 1920x1200 display to zoom in on all webpages (using firefox) to fit them to the full screen width. then, text gets rendered quite big, and is awesome to read.

once the whole os gets as scalable (there are reasons why not right now), it will be great to have 4x, 16x as much pixels.

a friend of mine is professional photographer (one of those who only uses 30" displays at work ). the moment i told him how much pixels his 30" would have, if it would have the dpi of my xperia phone, he really wished we could buy such a screen

 

i think it should be pointed out that anti aliasing is something that makes the image less sharp, and is a compensation for low resolution. when it is easy enough to manufacture screens with insanely high resolution, the standard will be only slightly higher resolution than the human eye can see, and anti aliasing will be obsolete.

 

Actually, according to Nyquist's theorem with respect to discrete sampling, you'd need the screen to have an effective dpi (resolution) of at least twice that of the human eye, in order to completely avoid aliasing. (if you're an EE or DSP geek and want to talk more about the theory....PM me)

I think there is some good evidence out there that suggests that the less interpolation that the human brain and eyes must do, the less stress using a particular interface poses on its user. So high resolution screens are great, and I think Microsoft and software developers in general are somewhat behind the curve right now in delivering vector-based solutions.

 

For medical imaging, I suspect. Spots of cancer on a digital X-ray, for instance, might be easier to see on such an extravagantly high resolution display.

And cost for such a device isn't an issue..

 

well, i got remote desktop working on the xperia. and while it's awesome to work with your home server from the phone, and the resolution of 800x480 makes it at least usable, it's ... uhhh small

the windows button is some millimeters at most.. really funny but one can still read all.

i'd still love to have a bigger screen based on that dpi

 

If you want to see how many pixels you can fit into an LCD, take a look at a projector sometime. Those babies can fit 1920x1080 into an LCD less than an inch across!

 

I'd rather have as high as possible, to a certain extent. Currently my 16" has only 1366 by 768, but I'd like it to be slightly higher than 1920 by 1080.

 

right, forgot about those.. i'll take a 30" of those should have no scaling issues with all sort of resolutions then

 

Some people have Thinkpad R50p with QXGA resolution in 15" screen. Just because your eyes can't take the resolution doesn't mean that no-one else can.

 

seen those, it's great