The Smarter Purchase?: 1280 vs 1440 Screen

having recently arrived in the laptop market, I was suddenly bombarded with having to think in an economical sense. On the one hand, there the endless continuum of technology to drool over and on the other hand theres the bank account. So how to get the bang for the buck and avoid the pitfalls?

Its probably easy to decide important hardware such as gpu, cpu or harddrive.
But I just dont see as much of a point in shelling out big bucks for purely aesthetically components like the LCD.

Thats what I used to think until i started reading a bunch of laptop reviews that trashed the 1280 screen..

So really.. Is there such a big visual distinction between the two screens? Could the 1280 actually be better in some cases? Im thinking of batter life and maybe performance? When would the 1440 or higher resol screens pay off?

Answer this and help out the poor individual whos striving to be an informed consumer.

 

battery life wont have a difference but for preformace if u mean games and stuff then yeah as games will run better on lower resolutions. which notebook are u looking at

 

One advantage of higher resolution is "real estate" more shows on the screen. This helps so much as you have to scroll less. Kind of like going from a post it to a sheet of paper. I now have 1280X800, I used to have 1450X1080 or something like that. I like the higher resolution for that reason alone, then there is also the issue of sharpness which is very nice also.

One thing that I think about for when I buy my next notebook is to get the vertical above 1080 so I can watch the best HD, 720 is cool and standard LCD will play but I want more.

 

1440 x 900 gives you a little more real estate compared with 1280 x 800. See the attached photo which compares two 14.1" displays. However, more detail means smaller pixels so, at default settings, all the text and graphics get a little smaller. You can tweak the settings but sometimes the formatting goes adrift so you want to avoid anything where the pixels are too small for your eyes (a potential problem for the older generation). Because 1440 x 900 has more pixels there will be slight additional power consumption.

Another, related, question, is whether to want an LED backlight. These enable thinner displays which use less power. At present they have a price premium and are not available in all sizes and resolutions.

John

 

im deciding on a m1530. Ive hear several people complain about dell screens though. So im a bit shaky on that one.

 

when playing 720p movies, would the 1280x800 screen be better because you would be playing the movie natively (no horizontal scaling because 720p movies are 1280x720)?

 

You can make it play in native resolution no interloping. Since they don't make 720 notebooks this is already done. So the answer is no. Now the down side is if you have a higher resolution it will appear smaller.

 

I just read this. I guess thats the reason why a 1280 resolution on a 1680 screen will look horrible. Sucks if you suddenly want to see everything in big again. But i guess the point of having a higher screen in the first place is to never have to use the scroll bar since you can probably fit half the almanac in one screen on a 1680, web surfing will be great and easy! Editing photos and videos will probably get way better with higher resolutions too.

 

Alright you opened up Pandora's Box. Fixed number of pixels, say non wide screen, 1600X1200, you can view in 800X600 with no loss is clarity. It has to do with divisibility. The less complected the fraction is the better it will display. If GPU wants to fill 2 pixels with 4 pixels of info not a problem just doubles. What if same GPU wants to fill 4 pixels in 3? can't do it, called interloping. The talk about how newer screens do it better is not true. It is a fundamental situation. When numbers can be divided evenly they will look better.

 

Not "interloping", try "interpolating"!

I'm quite happy playing DVDs on 1440 x 900 and they look OK at my normal viewing distance. Commercial DVDs come with a wide range of aspect ratios ranging from 4:3 for old TV stuff to the really wide widescreen stuff (which is wider than the 16:10 wider notebook screens) so I'm usually using the pan and scan option in PowerDVD to get a best fit.

If you are thinking of 15.4" then I would go for 1440 x 900. IMO 1280 x 800 is not making best use of the screen size.

John

 

Wow thats quite something then. since 1600x1200 seem alot more divisible, you have more resolution options to pick between in the lower resolution ranges. You can play on 1200x800 nicely in gaming if the game offers that graphic option. 1440 will probably be less suited for gaming since the graphics comparatively.

Still I wonder if 1600 resol is worth the extra 100~150. Because at least if most people in the U.S use laptops for what they're design for, mobile workstations and entertainment centers, its hard to think of uses for resolutions other than 1280 since most software programs these days are geared toward that standard.

 

I have a 2 year old AW lapy with a 1920-1200 LCD. I play several games and and watch movies the picture resolution is great.