T440s: S/W Development Screen Resolution Options (1920x1080 Vs 1600x900 Vs 1366x768)

Hello everyone,

Just looking for some guidance on my soon to purchase T440s.

Initially I wanted to go with the FHD/1920x1080 screen and was patiently waiting for one to show up in the outlet. Today, I went to a computer store and looked at a couple of 13.3" laptops (Asus/Toshiba) with FHD resolution screens. Low and behold, at normal scaling the fonts appeared so tiny to me that I thought I'd get a headache if I continued staring at the screen for long.

I work in software development and intend to use the machine mainly for software development (reading and typing text for long hours will be the major activity).

My question to you is whether I should go with 1600x900 screen or the one with 1366x768 screen? I currently have a 14" work laptop which looks about right at 1366x768, but I find the need for a bit more vertical screen estate. Since 1920x1080 seemed to give me a headache, the next best option appeared to be 1600x900.

Any ideas and suggestions? Should I stick to 1366x768? Or go with 1600x900?

Would someone with an HD+ display be kind enough to post a screen shot with notepad open and some text in it in Consolas 10pt for Fixedsys font? The best will be if someone is able to post a screen shot of source code in T440s at HD+ native resolution (not the scaled down one, which looks fuzzy).

Thanks very much

 

Posting screenshots won't help you. There is nothing to see regarding pixelpitch in screenshots.

1366x768 is the junk resolution that is bought by the idiots (the majority) and the few with bad eyes.

I've got no clue how you can do any serious work at x900, leave alone x768.

 

The T440s only comes with HD+ and FHD screens, HD (1366x768) is not even available as an option. Your best bet is to go to stores and check out some laptops with similar screens in-store. 1600x900 at 14.0" has around 131 PPI, so if you look at a 1920x1080 15.6" laptop, you can get a rough approximation (141 PPI, which is more pixel-dense) of what to expect.

There are not as many high-quality 1600x900 panels around, however, so another option would be to get a laptop with a FHD screen and increase the DPI settings in the OS.

 

The benefit of the FHD LCD is it an IPS screen, which will offer you wider viewing angles and higher contrast. It's a higher quality screen and higher quality screen is easier on the eyes for extended usage. As Midnight Sun noted, you can bump the DPI up to make text larger. A FHD LCD run at 125% DPI will be largely the same as a HD+ LCD, though scaling is not always a perfection solution. It does better in Windows 8, but is not Apple like.

 

Be aware that DPI scaling can be a problem if you use external monitors. Windows 7 renders everything at the same DPI, while 8 renders it at the DPI of the primary screen and raster resizes for everything else (making it blurry). I will also note that 1600x900 on my 1080p t440s screen looks much blurrier than an actual 14" 1600x900 screen - usable, but far from ideal.

 

Fair enough. Good point. Thank you.

Bumping the DPI messes up the title bar text etc. in some applications. My preference is to up the font size and most applications allow that. For those that don't, it's really a pain to see that tiny text.

So, essentially you're saying that an FHD screen at 125% DPI will provide the same screen estate as HD+, but will be easier on the eyes and will have wider viewing angles becaue of better quality display(IPS)?

That's exactly what my experience has been as well. Non-native resolution doesn't look good at all. Very blurry. This is why I considered going HD+ rather than FHD.

Could anyone here with a T440s with HD+ display or even WXGA screen comment on the display please?

You do have a point. I think I was looking at the T440 with WXGA screen and confused it with T440s. I stand corrected, thank you.

I did exactly that and I didn't like the FHD display in store. Text at small font sizes (e.g. Consolas 10 or 11) already started to give me headaches.

 

Right, you'll never want to run an LCD display at non-native resolutions (unless there's perfect scaling, like 3200x1800 --> 1600x900, but that's a different story). There's very few owners of the T440s here that have the HD+ display, but NotebookCheck has looked at the screen in detail. Compare that with the FHD screen version here.

Note that the contrast level provided by the IPS FHD screen is 3-4 times that of the TN HD+ screen.

My recommendation would be to go in-store and mess with the Windows 8.1 DPI settings on the higher-resolution laptops. See if that resolves your problems.

 

That's been my experience. YMMV.