Why have high-res screen become so uncommon?

Man, I am glad Alienware offers 1920X1200 RGB LED panel for m17xr-2!

 

Seriously, when you are squeezing prices down to such low levels, one of the ways you do that is remove variations that don't add perceived customer value. I love 1920x1200 and find that 1920x1080 isn't too bad either. I don't like 1366x756 at all since I find it just too little vertical and not enough horizontal to take advantage of the extra width vs 1280x800. Regardless, we as consumers aren't clamoring for higher resolutions. If we demanded and were willing to pay they would come. But as other said, consumers don't know or understand the differences. Also, for many consumers, the lower resolution screens are better. Anything much less than 1024x756 on a 15" screen makes a laptop unusable for my mom.

I wish things were different but remember when they were computers simply cost more. This is the same reason why we have "bigger" 15.6" screens that aren't as nice to use as the older 15.4 in screens... which I generally find to be inferior to the older 4:3 screens.

I wish my netbook had a 11.x" 1366x766 screen vs the WSGA screen. However, I wasn't willing to pay more than $250 so I am stuck with my low res screen. If we the market really wanted it I suspect the manufactures would deliver. However, we seem to care mostly about price.

 

I think that most of you are forgetting that computers come in all grades. So where there is a market, there will always be manufactures to fill that void--even if it's only at the professional level.

As for the aforementioned commodity issue, that falls under the same umbrella: In virtually ever household there are appliances that we buy for transitional use, and those we buy for the long haul. If you want to maintain a perspective otherwise, it would only be to observe the situation from a purely marketing point of view.

For example, there's no functional reason to go out and buy a cell phone every two years. Even thought the data capability a list of functions may be increasing exponentially, the basic "phone" operation hasn't changed. Nevertheless, people have become programmed to do just that. It doesn't say much for pragmatic and practical thinking, but it's a boon for the market and all those in the cell phone industry. So as long as we have choice, who am I to question capitalism.

 

Well the issue is that I can usually find a laptop with all the specs I want EXCEPT not the resolution I want. And the reverse as well. I can find a machine with the higher resolution but not the other specs. It's frustrating.

 

Lol I use 1280*800 res (non gaming) on my 23" 1920*1080 cuz of my bad eyesight.
But I find that 1680*1050 is the minimum resolution for games to look decent.

Since my next laptop will probably be incapable of playing the games I want, i'll have the luxery of ignoring the resolution options when chosing a cheap portable for my schoolwork ^^

 

I have a Samsung RF710 with a 1600x900 17.3" screen. Would it be possible to get a 1920x1200 screen from one of these laptop repair places and replace it ? Are the screens failry interchangeable or are the connectors very specific to the brand ?

 

Different aspect ratio, that won't work. 1920*1080 would work if laptop supports it.

 

Connections and wire length/routing are very specific. I have swapped screens before but only between two Dells that were based on the same basic design as the D800. In that case it was very plug and play.

I would guess that if your laptop was offered with a higher resolution screen it would be an easy swap for a screen from a higher resolution version of your computer. If it didn't offer a higher resolution version it may be very hard unless, like the Dell D800 vs Inspiron models which were largely the same computer under the hood.

 

As Regnad. There are several on line vendors that may be able to help you find the screen you want or see if they are even available for your laptop.

Here is one of many but i cannot vouch for any; ScreenAid.com, Laptop Lcd Screen Replacement on ScreenAid.com- LCD Screen Leading Supplier

 

Netbook craze and the rest, there was a race to the bottom.
Perhaps now with the iphone retina and the rest, there will be a taste for high dpi once more...esp that now that the o/s has finally caught up and can scale the interface correctly, whereas in the past i'm sure they got a lot of support calls over xp's broken implimentation of interface scaling.

 

I think resolution and other aspects of image quality need to be considered separately. Many people have trouble reading small text so they go for lower resolutions. But my guess is that they still want (and would pay extra for) great viewing angles, contrast, and color.

 

Ummm, that seems to claim that the so-called "price fixing" ended in 2006, so if higher screen resolutions have been disappearing, it isn't because of past price fixing, since this phenomenon stopped occuring after 2006?

Should we argue that price fixing lead to increase screen resolutions and competition lead to the demise of the higher resolution screen options?

Actually, just how many TVs or computers were assembled in New York State between 1996 and 2006? Actually, if the computer and TV manufacturers were the ones effected, why haven't they gone after the screen manufacturers?

I seem to remember LCDs getting cheap and cheaper in this period, so if somebody was price fixing, they were doing a pretty awful job, weren't they?

 

You can argue that viewing angles, contrast and color concerns have lead to glossy, glare screens becoming universal in the computer market. Anti-glare screens are great outdoors, or in an office setting to minimize resolutions, but if you're primarily concerned about multimedia in darkened room, it isn't hard to see why they've become extinct in the mainstream consumer segment.

The fact that people are downgrading from native resolutions tells me that the higher resolutions are not the selling point that some would imagine.

 

The article says nothing of the sort. The lawsuit only goes up to 2006 because until that time, they were doing this in a really obvious way (quarterly meetings between top-level executives). Once they got sued (it initially happened around 2007), they got a lot more clever about hiding things.

They have. In fact, they did it even earlier. The state is doing it not because they were assembling computers, cell phones, etc. but because they purchased them at inflated prices.

No, it just means that the costs of production decreased by so much that they were able to slightly lower prices regardless (but of course by far less than if they were not colluding).

 

High resolution has a significant downside on a laptop (small text), unlike great color, contrast, and viewing angles which have no downside assuming you are ok with a glossy screen.

 

Well, there are a lot of "joint ventures" in China in the screen business. Honestly, it's hard to say what the difference is between a "joint venture" and price fixing. I don't have a clue when it comes to Japanese, Korean or Chinese laws regarding price fixing.

I just assumed that state government simply buys everything at an inflated price. Compare the "education and government" prices to the "small business" prices sometime. Government always pays more the private sector.

As far as Nokia, they've fall behind so far in the smart phone market that I don't take them seriously anymore, especially after the now infamous Android comment.

Well great then, prices to consumers were falling. I guess if the accused price fixer had been better at price fixing, prices would have been falling at all, and the saving from production efficiencies would have gone to the producers, not the consumers. Like I said, if they were price fixing, they sure were pretty bad at it.

 

Fonts scale great especially with Windows 7. It really shouldn't be that big of an issue.

 

My point was that there are no tradeoffs when you improve color, contrast, and viewing angles (unlike resolution which does have a font size tradeoff even with scaling which is not perfect). I think people who don't want small text would be willing to pay up for a high quality, medium resolution screen.

 

Thats a massive "assuming". In an office environment, glossy screens are horrible.

Also, higher resoultion does not necessarily mean small fonts. Windows 7 has fixed the font scaling issue.

 

I remember when XGA was king... about 10 years ago... lol.

 

It wasn't all that long ago. From memory, most of the old 4:3 business notebooks never switched from XGA, and the last ones didn't disappear until only a couple of years ago.

 

This is why you still find anti-glare screens on business notebooks. Of course, a lot of small businesses use consumer quality notebooks.

It's still absolutely no fun to try to adjust fonts, even in a browser like Firefox. The real issue is that much written content on the web seems to be optimized for ancient, low res 4:3 displays.

 

And despite that, practically no 4:3 screens are being produced anymore, yay for market fragmentation and lack of proper support O_O

 

Well, arguable, with so many netbooks with 1024 pixel wide screens, you might understand why there's so much content that doesn't fit higher resolution screens. It's also worth remember that a lot of that excess horizontal space is now devoted to advertising as well.

A lot of it does come down to really, really dated webdesign.

The 4:3 aspect ratio is still available in rugged notebooks, but otherwise, it's pretty much extinct.

 

I'd be prone to think it's just dated web design i.e. lack of support for older websites. Websites built in 4:3 format existed before netbooks came along back in the 16:10 days. On lots of sites which don't use variable margins(I forgot the exact terms), you see the content stuck in the middle and a background color filling in the rest of the space >.>

 

I've been doing it for years (admittedly on linux). It has not caused me any issues. Occassionaly there is is some issue, but for 98% of the time, things work fine.

For the other 2%, there is opera with unscaled fonts, or I just use another account and run firefox with unscaled fonts from that account.

 

Many 4:3 screen business models also offered higher resolutions including 1400x1050 and 1600x1200. But XGA on a 15" 4:3 screen was rather grainy. Of course the upside was you could read it from across the room Or for people like my mother, it was about the only laptop screen she could comfortably use. Currently the best we can do for her is a 21" UXGA 4:3 set to the odd ball 1152x864. The fonts lose their sharp edges as the display is now aliased but at least the fonts are easier to read. Still, it kills me to see an UXGA screen used at such a low resolution!