help with screen res!

i am looking into the Compal HEL80 and I am aware that they offer it in both glossy wxga and matte wsxga screens. My question is whether or not the higher resolution will provide a sharper picture for movie viewing?? i have seen some 15.4" notebooks that have that wxga layout (1280x800) and did not think that the picture was as "sharp" as the 1280x768 on a 14.1" screen...o my, this has got me turning in my sleep...

 

Depends a lot on the screen, really. A glossy screen often looks better and crisper with the colors and all as compared to a matte. But it's all subjective. WSXGA can take more graphics power to fill all the pixels, especially when stretching a movie to fit the screen, so things may get blurrier or more jerky, or may not interpolate well. A DVD runs at 720x480, so keep that in mind. Anything that makes it stretch too much will just look "not sharp" (ie, a laptop screen at 1440x960 would be the same ratio as a DVD, so it'd look as perfectly sharp as it could at that resolution, each original pixel of the DVD taking 4 pixels of screen space.). Some of it depends on the DVD player software you're using, and whether the graphics card accelerates DVD decoding or not (the X1600 and Go7600 will). Lots of variables.

But now I'm just throwing out things that'll confuse the issue more You'll probably like the brightness and the color of the glossy screen more, if you can deal with the glare, and video will run faster than with the larger screen, and games as well. I had a 1280x800 laptop, it was great (an eMachines m6805) for movies and games IMHO. But to each his own

 

The quality of the screen will have a lot to do with it.

 

Perhaps the biggest determinant will be the quality of the GPU and DVD playing software, as the actual DVD res will be much lower than the native LCD res, and thus will be scaled up. Without processing by the GPU, that would lead to a very suboptimal display. Fortunately, modern GPUs can do wonders in this regard. I've not yet tried a DVD on my PowerPro L 8:15, but the 7600 is supposed to have very good DVD playback features. Perhaps not as good as the ATI cards, but still nice.

Also note that a given res on different size screens leads to different sized pixels. The 14.1" you were referring to would have much smaller pixels than the 15.4" - same number of pixels (or roughly so, in your example) means that each pixel must be smaller to fit them all in less space. So, if that's all you are referring to, the WSXGA+ would indeed be quite a bit "sharper" than the WXGA, for the same basic reason: more pixels per inch.

Note that the glossy would win out WRT color quality and contrast (under ideal conditions).

 

thanks for all your feedback! really, you guys have been a lot of help on this forum