Sony Vaio Z590 - 1600 x 900 - what other resolutions?

Hi,

What other resolutions are available on the sony vaio z590 when personalizing the display settings?
Does the display look good at these other resolutions?

Thanks in advance,
Mo

 

i would say no
laptop screens usually only look good with its native resolution

 

the z540 comes in 1280x768, so.. shouldnt the 590 be able to handle this too?

 

Terse answer: No.

Short answer: Yes, it can scale to 1280x768, but it looks truly horrible.

Long answer:

Unlike CRTs ("tube" displays), there's a fixed correlation between number of pixels and number of coloured dots that light up. The display on a Z-590 will always be 1600x900, no matter what.

What the drivers CAN do is "scale" the image. If it's an even division of the screen dimension, that will work well. Playing an 800x600 game on a 1600x1200 screen, for example, will look crisp.
If there isn't an even division, however, the display will have to be approximated, and will look blurry, inconsistent (the width of a line is thicker one place than another) or both.

If the aspect ratio (width divided by height) is the same for both resolutions, it may be liveable, even if it's blurry. DVD video in 16:9 format on the 1600x900 display of a Z590, for example, will look pretty good.
If it's not the same aspect ratio, it will not just look blurry but compressed in one direction (squat or thin).

What the drivers also can do if scaling from a smaller resolution is displaying the unmodified image with black borders. But then you get a tiny image in the middle of the screen.

For video, the best approach is to scale it up as much as possible while still maintaining the aspect ratio. If it's not the same, insert black borders either on top and bottom, or on the sides.
An example: Good video software on a 16:10 display computer (like the Z540) will insert a small black border above and below when showing 16:9 videos. With bad video software that simply scales to full screen, geometry will look odd. A person of average height and weight will look slightly taller and skinnier. Until he lies down, and suddenly looks fatter and shorter. And cars in particular look odd -- when they turn a corner, they become longer or shorter.
(With the Z590, the native resolution is 1600:900, which is 16:9, so this is no problem.)

Another issue with scaling which affects normal desktop use is ClearType font display. Windows XP and Vista uses subpixels to enhance the display of fonts, making them appear better designed and more readable even at small font sizes. This breaks horribly when scaling a picture, because the subpixels no longer appear where they're supposed to.

To summarize, unless you watch video, scaling just doesn't work well for LCDs. Do your utmost to avoid it, and always work in the LCD screen's "native" resolution.

The nVidia card in the Z590 can be set to 1280x768, but it looks horribly ugly, to the point of being unusable.

Out of curiosity, why would you want this resolution?

 

I've got a question for you about resolution. After hours of comparing the screens of the Z to the Samsung x360, I finally decided on the Z.. Your comments about resolution effects on video has me wondering, is there any difference between a DVD played on a Z590 (1600x900) or played on a Z550 (1280x768)? The Z I demoed in the store was the lower resolution version and it appeared no part of the movie was cropped off. Would there be any difference if I played the movie on a Z590? Thnaks

 

sorry guys! i gave you the wrong resolution for the z540, it's actually 1366x768 resolution (16:9 ratio). (sorry i got it mixed up with another laptop that actually has 1280x768)

thanks for the info arth1, now it makes a lot more sense

I actually went to see a 590 set to 1366x768 and then i switched it to 1600x800, and i didn't notice a difference in clarity, but i wasn't paying much attention that day.. so take this on a grain of salt

 

lol i was just gonna say that this was 1366 still a great default resolution though

 

If playing a standard widescreen DVD, you won't notice much difference between a 1366x768 and 1600x1200 display, unless you freeze the image and look at it through a magnifying glass.

What will make a difference is HD movies -- both 720p and 1080i/1080p. 720p because scaling 720 to 768 won't work well (the closer the resolutions are, the worse the result will be when scaling, especially when scaling up). 1080p because you lose far more detail.

But for TV and DVD, no, you shouldn't notice any difference. The CPU and GPU are powerful enough too, even on the slowest models, so neither will give you any jerkiness (unless you do really intensive tasks in the background).

If downgrading to XP, make sure you buy the PureVideo decoder from nVidia. It makes a heck of a difference for video quality and CPU use while decoding.