# the 300dpi desktop



## Lt Major Burns (May 22, 2005)

How many years away are we (or is it even going to happen) from a 300dpi desktop?  i mean, 300dpi is the right sort of resolution to print at.  screens and desktop areas are currently only 72dpi.  when you pick an image off the net to print, it's going to be a quarter of the size you see it if you want to print it.


i was thinking about this when i was taking a screen grab of my work  - the screen grab wasn't printable, because it was a quarter of the resolution of the carefully planned 300dpi work.

will a 300dpi desktop ever become a reality - it seems like a natural destination for progress on the desktop, and needs another of those often talked about progressions - the scalable GUI.  i want to work in 300dpi, i just hope i get to see it before the decline of my career...

any thoughts? or any rumours or projects of 300dpi development?


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## Pengu (May 22, 2005)

Um. the Cinema displays are 100PPI (pixels per inch) (which is why a document doesn't look "100%" in word or whatever. it assumes 72DPI not 100)

in Preview.app, there is an option in the preferences to "respect image DPI for "actual size""..
i guess this means that an image with a setting of 300dpi at 300x300px will look the same (with that setting turned on) as an image at 100dpi, 100x100px??


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## Lt Major Burns (May 22, 2005)

no, what i mean is something a lot more fundamental - a 300dpi screen, a 300dpi GUI - 72/100ppi in screens is fine for now, but is lacking, in terms of a design-for-print environment, and just any environment would benefit from it being a little more "real-world"

when it is showing 100%, or actual size or whatever, the image is nowhere near as detailed as it's printed counterpart.

i want it so eventually (it's blatantly not possible now) i can proof on screen - no need to print out, or at least a far more reduced need.


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## Natobasso (May 22, 2005)

Well, as for the internet, imagine it loading four times as slowly and that's what you'd get with all 300 dpi images.  You probably don't want that. The W3W consortium set the 72 dpi standard for the internet.

As for your computer screen, it too is set to 72 dpi but I couldn't find a good reason for it. Since everyone used to be on slow connections, using a 300dpi standard when only 72dpi could be viewed would have been a huge waste of bandwidth. I'm not sure now why we can't go to 300dpi resolution with the proliferation of high-speed cable connections.

I do graphic design so 300dpi would be great, but that resolution is more for printing out a document. I think most companies would rather not have their proprietary images they post on the web be perfectly suitable for printing without any regulation

Just 1.5 cents.


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## Pengu (May 22, 2005)

um. i don't think this topic has ANYTHING to do with the internet. he asked if/when we can expect displays that can handle 300DPI/PPI, to elimintate the need for printed proofs... i said that apple's Cinema Displays are currently 100PPI.

i'm not saying this is the solution. simply stating that apple is shipping monitors that are 100ppi.


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## Natobasso (May 22, 2005)

um, whatever.

ppi and dpi are two totally different things.

You will never eliminate the need for printed proofs as long as printed material exists. There's big difference between pixels on a screen and dots on paper and you'll never overcome that.


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## Lt Major Burns (May 22, 2005)

why do we have nice 128x128 pixels? the little ones did an ok job...  a 300 ppi OS (or more) _is_ progress, and not just for the sake of it. the bandwidth problem... isnt one anymore - you physically nearly can't get a page to load faster now with safari and 512kb/s broadband. 2mb broadband is becoming popular, so that automatically erases the 4x load time.  at the moment, your dock icons look great, because they're not pixelated. what if all the system fonts weren't smoothed down to sort of look nice, they were actually smooth. 300dpi smooth. look at the type currently on this page - it's a very simple sans serif, because it needs to be legible on our shitty 72/100ppi screens (!).  Yes, it looks great now, but how long has the 72dpi standard been around? 10 years? 300ppi would make our current set-up look like vhs.  why do we have to bitch about the font smoothing looking smudgy, or just crap, when we don't actually need any?

i'm not sure where this is going. i'm not trying to troll (although, i agree i'm starting to sound like that [sorry]), i just had a flash of inspiration whilst not doing any work, an wondered if anyone had had the smae idea or knew of any projects that had the same idea.

EDIT: no, i don't just want a display that can handle 300ppi.  that should be a pre-requisite.  i want the whole thing to be 300ppi - 

MacOS 12 - 300dpi edition. SuperHD MacOS.


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## fryke (May 23, 2005)

I think they'll call it "Mac OS X version 10.9.9 Extreme". The "Extreme" will be an integral part of the name, of course. 

But back on topic:

Mac OS X (in version 10.4) already incorporates a scalable UI. If you install the developer tools, you can actually use Quartz Debug.app to scale the UI. (Only apps started _after_ the setting will inherit the change.)
What we _see_ there is that there are quite a bunch of bitmap graphics in the OS' interface. Scaled, they start to look ugly. I think a switch to 300ppi displays would be the wrong step.

The first step should be to use vector graphics in the UI. And _only_ vector graphics. Maybe some high-res textures somewhere. But better not. Because actually, I think we should have 150 and 180 and 270 and 300 and 600 and 765 ppi screens. The OS should be completely scalable - not set to an either/or setting of 72 or 300 ppi.

And about the internet graphics: I guess browsers would have to simply scale 72 dpi images (looks ugly, but at least they get the size right, then, and the page layout) - and more modern webpages would adopt a way to deliver images based on user settings (i.e. "I want, say, 'middle resolution' images for my high-res screen...").

We've been talking about 300 ppi screens like forever (or since the Macintosh II or something) - and they simply haven't happened. Just like we haven't replaced our harddrives with much faster RAM disks (or flash-RAM disks), although _that_ had been proposed at various times. Harddrives simply got bigger/faster/cheaper - so the move to non-moveable parts didn't make real sense. Or like those incredible e-paper solutions. You know: Displays for PDAs that only need power for changing the black-value (or white-value) of a pixel. Rumours of such displays were running wild back when the Newton was old and the Palm was new.

The 300 ppi display remains a myth - at least for now and probably at least another five years.


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## Lt Major Burns (May 23, 2005)

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


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## elander (May 26, 2005)

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.


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## thendis (May 29, 2005)

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!


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## fryke (May 31, 2005)

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...


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