the 300dpi desktop - Page 2

Lt Major Burns · #9 May 23rd, 2005, 07:07 AM

the reply i wanted! i had played around with the scalable UI in tiger, and you're right - it does get ugly. windows has always had a scalable UI - all the buttons, menu bars lists are all either vector/or levels of higher and higher res bitmaps, but it's been possible since 95, and all from the desktop properties...

i just thought it was a natural progression to go to 300dpi+ UI, but obviously it has slipped into Pipe-Dream along with Flash HDD (would we need ram? if we had 80gb of flash DDR memory?)

would be nice though

elander · #10 May 26th, 2005, 04:18 AM

300 dpi isn't that far away from reality.

At least two companies have showcased 200 dpi screens, Viewsonic and IBM. IBM was even selling one, the T221.

http://tinyurl.com/dahmq

As for current graphics "looking ugly when scaled", what are you thinking of? If you have a 300 dpi screen, and show 72 dpi graphics scaled to 400% (actually 1600 but who's counting), they will look identical to 72 dpi images presented at 100% on a 72 dpi screen!

Same thing goes, naturally, for icons and everything else. No distortion will be visible, as long as integer scaling is used.

The real problems are cost, cost and availability. Cost, because the screens are really expensive, $8000+. Cost again, because the video cards are very expensive, $1000+. Availability, since they aren't selling them anymore, probably because most people just can't justify spending more than nine thousand dollars on a screen and video card.

thendis · #11 May 29th, 2005, 04:44 AM

This may be a stupid question, but what the hell.

How can it be said that monitors all run at 72 or 100dpi - I thought dpi was dependant on resolution. How can a 17" monitor that is running at 800x600 be said to have the same dpi as a 17" monitor running at 1024x768 or more? Wouldn't a 1024x768+ screen have a higher resolution than an 800x600??

By the same token, wouldn't a 15" monitor running at 800x600 have a higher dpi than a 17" monitor running at 800x600? The 15" is diplaying the same amount of pixels but in less inches, thus it would have a higher dpi.

This is doing my head in. Please someone explain this to me!

**fryke** · #12 May 31st, 2005, 10:05 AM

Hm. Yes, you're right. But from the beginning. The UI has a certain resolution "in mind". Sure, you _can_ use a 17" at 1280*1024, but IIRC, that's a higher resolution than originally (by those who made the Mac's UI) anticipated. But whether you're using a screen with 72 or 96 or 112 ppi doesn't make much difference. We're talking about much higher resolutions.

And to elander: Yes, if you're using a 72 dpi graphic on a 300 ppi screen and it's scaled nicely, it won't look much worse than a 72 dpi graphic on a 72 ppi screen. But it won't look as good as a 300 dpi graphic, not as good as a vector graphic etc. If you take the current Mac OS X UI and scale it, it _does_ look bad. If it's good enough for you, that may be so - but it's not what we envision with high resolution displays...