A 13" 1600 x 900 screen vs a 1920 x 1080, how key?

So, I had an Envy 14 in my hands for a little while with a Nice 14'' 1600 x 900 screen, very slick looking.

However, unfortunately the Envy 14 failed me a couple of times.

As it turns out, if I order the Vaio Z from tiger-direct I can get it for around fifteen hundred, however its only the 1600 x 900.

Now, if I CTO it, I can get the 1920 x 1080, but its going to come out significantly more expensive.

How big of a difference will it be? Will it be extremely noticable?

The Envy 14 had a larger screen so at 1600 x 900 with a smaller screen it will look even more refined, correct?

How much will the lower resolution hurt??

Ty!

 

Its all preference. 1920x1080 is a high resolution. 23-24 inch monitors use this resolution so imagine that on a laptop. Personally if I got a 17" I would definitely want 1920x1080, 15" probably, 14" or lower I would not want 1920x1080. Thats just too small for my preferences (text size, etc). Also consider if you want to play games on your 13-14" notebook is going to have a lot more work to do vs 1600x900.

 

if you work with charts or anything that requires a lot of desktop space or want to watch bds or hd movies; you may want a 1080p. however if you are gaming you may want the 900p so you can play in native res longer.
i find 1080p perfect for my 15.6 inch laptop but it may be a little too small for a 14inch.
also look at screen brightness and contrast between the two screen options. with all other considerations being equal i would get the brighter screen among the two.

 

I also agree that 1920x1080 is usable down to 15", but that same resolution will start to strain your eyes when it comes to text reading on screens smaller than 15". Even if you have excellent pair of eyes, 1920x1080 on 13" screen will probably force you to enlarge your UI and text sizes. If you're okay with that, then by all means go for the 1080 option for your Vaio Z. Good luck

 

The people that can really judge this is the people that have worked on 13" 1080p screen.

I'll move this thread to the Sony forum so you get some real experiences.

 

I'm very interested in this topic. The resolution is what intrigues me about this laptop, but I'm not sure if it's too much.

I'm a computer science student and software developer so I do quite a lot of reading on the screen, but at the same time I really want real estate.

Unfortunately, here in Denmark we only have two options:
1) i7, 8gb ram, 256gb ssd, 1920x1080
2) i5, 4gb ram, 64gb ssd, 1600x900

 

I've heard that the 1080p screen is higher in quality too, not just in sharpness.

 

1080 is too small and hard on the eyes, I have 1600x900 and it still gives me eye strain and I have 20/20 vision. I constantly have to zoom in my web pages because after long periods I struggle to hold focus.

In retrospect I am really glad I went for the Z11 and didn't get the 1080 in CTO (z12) even though you can increase the DPI.

 

Got a Z11 1080p screen, but don't have any problems what so ever. OK it's VERY small in the BEGINNING. But once you get used to it, it's really not that bad.

Ok i need my glasses on all the time when i want to use it ''normally'', but hey small price to pay for such a great screen. It's really not as bad as many people say. You'll get used to it, or at least i did.

 

No problems here with my Z11 1080p. Same comments as hxkclan.

 

I am running a 2048x1536 (QXGA) on a 15" screen and I have difficulty going back to lower resolution displays.

However, having said that, you really really need to make sure that you are comfortable with your chosen resolution at no scaling (if you are using Windows).

I would really recommend that you try to see in real life how your eyes react to different resolutions / DPI.

 

Just get the 1600x900 screen and you'll save lots of money and be happy with it. It's the simpler option.

Get the 1080p and suffer slightly less bright screen, slightly lower battery life (from browsing, watching videos), lower 3D performance at native resolution and more problems with small text, eye strain, needing to mess with DPI, etc.

Only get the 1080p screen if you absolutely know what you're doing, without any doubts. If you have to ask the question, it's probably not meant for you.

 

Is it true, that the lower res. screen has better viewing angle and color stability
?

 

Problem for me is that CTO is not possible in DK and the 1600x900 model is only supplied with i5, 4GB ram and 64GB SSD. The SSD is what puts me off from it.

 

Um, why? I set the DPI to the display's DPI on all my Windows installation, and it hasn't impeded my work -- quite the opposite.

The list of programs that both
(a) will only work with 96 DPI fonts, and
(b) doesn't work when scaled
is near zilch. Those apps have already proven that they were coded with complete disregard for best practices, and are going to be so buggy anyhow that they're best avoided.

 

Yeah, I wouldn't get the 64 GB model, so you only have one choice really. It's a good choice too.

 

Living in DK it should be possible to order from germany, no?
You can customize nearly everthing on german sonystyle.

 

off:
German SonyStyle ships only to Germany, but there are other shops, where one could buy from (e.g. notebook.de or notebooksandmore.de).

on:
As it was already said, it depends on your personal preference. I personally use an old Vaio with a 13.3" screen at 1280x800 and it has always been perfect for me (I use it as my main computer and I use it a lot).
I'm still waiting with the purchase of the new Z, but I'd take the 1600x900 screen. If there was a 1366x768 option, then that's what I'd prefer. But again, it depends on your needs, I'm comfortable with the lower resolution, I don't get eye strain and have never really needed higher resolution so badly, that I'd want to change.

 

Yeah you're all right, the 1600x900 shouldn't be bad at all.

I had the Envy 14 and it looked fine and it had a good inch on this screen, so.

Plus I'm hearing about difficulty so.

Now I just want to know if theres any way to buy the carbon fiber case X_X

 

My experience is opposite of yours. Especially since the application layouts are not vector based you get really funky results with large text and small icons/symbols in lots of applications.

Following your rule (setting the DPI to the screen DPI) would make this extremely pronounced on a QXGA display (@170 DPI) and comically looking.

And as the Sony Z has the same DPI I strongly suspect that it would equally strange on the 1080p screen.

 

Text of a given point size will be exactly as large on a 170 DPI display as it is on a 100 DPI display, as long as DPI is set correctly on both.

And the icons either scale (for high-DPI aware applications that identify themselves as such), or they are scaled by Windows DPI scaling, which scales the entire application.
So you may get blurriness due to scaling for older apps that aren't high-DPI-aware, but sizewise things should be correct.

The only problem I have noticed is Firefox, which has its own font rendering engine and blatantly ignores the DPI setting -- both Windows' DPI setting, and its own in "about:config". So in Firefox, you have to adjust the font size based on Firefox believing all screens being 96 DPI. I.e. to get a 9 pt font on a 170 DPI display with Firefox, you have to set Firefox to 9*170/96 = 16
But this is obviously true whether you set the DPI or not...

 

Afaik this miss behaviour is fixed in FireFox 4 Beta

 

i have the both laptop, one Z114 with 1600x900 and Z12 with 1920x1080

I sent the Z114 to my sister in Korea and I am left with the Z12.

If i can, I want to go back to 1600x900 because it is just too much stress for my eyes. the quality is little bit better but not that noticeably better.

I can say, 1600x900 is better choice for your eyes. playing video at 900p and 1080p is not much different.

as I have the long enuf experience with both displays, I definitely recommend the 1600x900.

 

I love the 1080P screen on my VAIO Z1290X-CTO.
It wasn't even a question of whether to get it or not, you can always user more real estate. No it doesn't strain your eyes. Furthermore you can bump the res down to 1600x900 if you are trying to show someone something over your shoulder, the 1080P panel looks nice @ 900P also.

 

Seeing the 1080p screens on a Z12 at sonystyle store, here is my gathered thoughts:

1) When you turn up the DPI/font size, the advantage of a 1080p resolution is nearly gone since bigger fonts, taking more real estate to display the window.

2) When it is in 100DPI/default settings, it is merely too small to read webpages, or word processing. Might be good for blu-ray movies or games? but for everyday business productivity, you might have to squint

 

For text I agree, the benefit is gone. Pictures and movies will still be shown in high resolution.

If I were to buy the 1080p screen on the Z instead of the 1600*900, my main reason would be to watch movies.

 

This might be a stupid question, but is it possible to watch a 1080p movie (from blueray i.e.) on a screen with 1600x900 res?
Will it be streched or cut somehow to fit the screen?

 

It will scale so it will fit the screen. There will be a very small loss of detail.

 

I own a VPCZ1 1600x900>>was originally thinking "bigger real-estate must be better" but I didn't find the difference to big since I needed to scale dpi on 1080p otherwise text was a bit too small for me. Also, I play alot of games so 900 res is ideal. I think like alot of people said, unless you plan to watch alot of blu ray movies etc or working with graphs and such (things which req lots of real estate) or perhaps lots of photoshopping things like that, I think 1600x900 is ideal.

 

As an engineer, although I am using the 150% dpi setting, I totally enjoy the high resolution of the 1080p panel: Drawings and pdf documents are really crisp and you can even see all small details and text when you zoom out to the size of a page in a document which you could only dream of on a WXGA resolution. A little drawback of the big screen res is, that some (mostly older applications) do not support high DPI settings yet, so you get either blurry fonts or you have to disable the dpi settings for that program in the program properties. I read here in the forum that the 1600px panel can be set brighter than the fhd panel with a registry hack - for me the brightness of the fhd screen is as much as I need - if you work often in the sun, maybe the custom made extra brightness might be an advantage.

 

I went with the 1080p screen for the real estate since I do a lot of development work and it's nice having two VMs open side-by-side, etc. At first I started with the default text size at 125% but on a whim decided to give 100% a try. Honestly, I don't know what the big deal is with the small text at 100%. Every website I've gone to is perfectly readable at 100% and my eyesight certainly isn't the best. I have no issue with reading Word docs or using Explorer - the 1080p screen is incredibly sharp.

I don't think the 900p is a bad choice at all but most people seem to still need to set the text size to 125% at which point, why not get the extra space of the 1080p?

 

Thankfully, after Microsoft made the "new" font scaling and "high DPI aware" flag available with Vista, most apps are now well behaved three years later. Also, when Microsoft switched to making DPI aware the default in MFC in Visual Studio 2010, a lot of applications became well-behaved overnight (or will be at the first new release).
Most of the ones that are left now are either unsupported, badly coded, or both -- in which case finding alternative software is often the better option.

There are one or two installers that still give me problems, in that they become a mess with text that doesn't fit if not using scaling (i.e. they're not DPI aware), and their windows become too tall for the screen if scaling (i.e. they didn't follow MS' old guidelines about minimum screen height without providing scroll bars not exceeding 480 pixels). The apps run fine, though, so I chalk that down to some companies still using old outdated versions of InstallShield. The workaround then is to use Windows-Shift-arrows to move the window around so you can see the buttons, and tab to select them.

In summary, the situation is much better than it was, and I have no real issues running at 140 DPI anymore.

 

As I experienced, at least Skype 4.2 and some Adobe products like fireworks are not high DPI aware. You have to disable the high DPI for those applications resulting in too tiny text rather than blurry fonts.

 

Do you guys really find the text that small, as in unreadable or hard on the eyes? I was really worried that I wouldn't be able to run at 100% but honestly, it's quite easy and, as I said, my eyes are less than perfect.

Sorry, not trying to give anyone a hard time. I was just surprised because after all the reading I had done, I was concerned that I might have made a mistake with the 1080p screen. Now, after using it, I'm glad I chose it.

 

I need 1080p because i need the estate for video editing and use of external monitors, the current laptop i have is 1080p and i don't think i could go lower again

 

I would really like to know how well the scaling is on both panels (1600 and 1920) when it comes to games lets say you go down to 1400 resolution in a heavy game like starcraft II, it is all just blurry and unreadable or does it work fine? anyone got screenshots? thanks

 

screenshots are useless, since they do not show the scaling of the physical screen.

I use the full hd screen and in games and movies less than full hd, it looks awesome -- no need to worry about bad and blurry image when playing in lower resolutions. In windows downscaling to 1600x900 or less is a tiny bit noticeable with small text but even then it is crisper than my old 1280x800 15,4" laptop.

 

sweet! thats what I wanted to hear thanks a lot.