LCD resolutions: Calling experts

alexachucarro

alexachucarro

I'm 1/4 Basque you know?...
My mate goes on how Dell's laptops display 1920 x whatever res. for their screens. Yet the Ti has just reached 1520 x whatever. I recently read an article explaining LCD stuff. I know about the TrueRes for an LCD screen. I'm also aware that LCD as a technology has limit to its smallness. So how is it a 14.1" Dell has a greater res than Apples 22" Cinema Display.

Cnay anyone clarify for me. I'm assuming that the Dell's aren;t at theit TrueRes.

???
 
That's the reason why the original Cinema Display was so cheap!!! (seriously!)

How Dell reaches the 1920, I don't know, but I guess it's some kind of "virtual" resolution, like only displaying every second pixel or something...but I really don't know...
 
If a 15" laptop LCD could display 1920 resolution, you wouldn't be able to read it. Just the other day I saw a guy with a Toshiba Satellite 5105 (very very nice laptop) that had a 15" display running at 1600x1200, and while nice, it was very hard to read.

However, Apple is lagging behind the other players in this area with the TiBook. First off, the ATI Radeon Mobility, while bumped up recently to 32MB, is still a lame video chipset. The nVidia GeForce4Go is readily available, and better suited for a mobile workstation. Plus, with the TiBook topping out at 1280 width resolution, Apple is two steps behind the competition. I really want to replace my rev. A PBG4/500, but Apple has yet to give me any incentive to do so.
 
I just checked - the Dell's resolution is 1600x1200, which is about the best you can get for a 15" display - anything more and the text will be unreadable...

Apple's PBG4 is at 1280x854.
 
Actually, I'm glad the resolution isn't any higher on the new TiBooks. If you have to do graphical work for press, the resolution should be as close to 'real' as possible. 72 dpi, anyone?
 
Acutally, you can down sample to other resolutions which come close to the 72dpi that's optimal for print projects.

However, I don't even think that Apple's LCD displays are 72dpi anymore. 15.2" x 72dpi = 1094.4, so Apple's PBG4 displays are significantly higher than 72dpi, as are most LCDs these days...

Down sampling on LCDs can somtimes look really bad & smudgey, but on those Toshibas, when you downsample to 1280x960, it looks very very good.
 
Yeah, downsampling on Apple's LCDs seems to look worse than downsampling on almost any other LCD I've used (try scaling the Cinema Display down one notch--oooh, yuck!)
 
Macs have (typically) been 96dpi for screens... haven't they?

It's all academic in the long run anyhow... the only really good way to proof is through a hardcopy.
 
No, Macs are traditionally 72 dpi (so a 72-point font is exactly one inch tall), for graphics professionals this has been a key reason to use the Mac. Windows has always used the totally random and confusing 96 dpi measurement, which has no real purpose except to be "different". Thus, 12-point fonts on a Mac are smaller, look cleaner, and have much better kerning than 12-point Windows fonts (on average, but not all the time). Also, on a Mac, in any program OTHER than Word for the Mac, there is no need to type two spaces after a period (between sentences)-- the Mac adjusts spacing to be enough without any additional help. This is something that a lot of people don't know, but it makes things look much nicer in the final print because there is a decent amount of white space but never TOO much white space. :)

Hope that helps explain it a bit.
 
Always 72 dpi. It's acceptable that notebooks have a higher resolution (pixels per inch), but it shouldn't be too much. The 1152*768 in my TiBook feels very natural for my graphical work. I think I could also work with 1280*854 as this isn't *that* much higher, but I tried a Dell once with 1600*1200 and it's just not a workable solution.

Higher resolution TFT screens will make sense if they actually *double* the resolution to 144 dpi or even 288 dpi - but only if the software (the operating system) adapts to that.

This requires, of course, both better screens and better graphics adapters.
 
I am really happy with the new TiBook's resolution. It's fantastic - very readable, but still large enough to get graphical work done.

When I was shopping around for a new laptop, I looked at the 1600 x 1200 resolution laptops on the Sony Vaio's, and they were absolutely unusable! Text looked small and ugly. It was such a turn off.
 
Yeah, I've found the Sony laptops to have WAY too high screen rezzes. Ever wonder why Japanese teenagers like everything really compact and small, and then they grow up and EVERYONE in japan has glasses it seems like? There's a reason--they look at things too small for most of their life and then they have eye problems later.

LOL just my interpretation :)
 
Yeah, most apps running at 1600x1200 on a 15" screen would be a major turn off. However, once you've run Lightwave at that resolution, it's very hard to go back.

I really want a Lightwave capable portable, but Apple keeps coming 2 steps shy of delivering what I need, primarily in the graphics department. I'm trying to holdout until the next PB revision (probably MWSF 2003). Hopefully Apple will have wised up by then an put a decent GeForce4 chip in the PB, and upgraded the architecture to include DDR SDRAM too.
 
Honestly, I like running LightWave at 1152x870... seems fine to me... :p but then again, since I usually use an LCD iMac i'm sort of stuck at 1024-- which admittedly is a bit cramped for LightWave :)
 
The 'obsolete' standard of 72dpi is *not* obsolete at all. Only if you set your monitor to 72dpi (if you can) you'll get a 100% view @ 100% in print design applications. Also the size of fonts in WYSIWYG applications only apply at 72dpi.

As a big part of Mac users is in the design business, it'll take a *hard* step to increase resolutions of screens. The Mac OS interface will either have to actually double in resolution, too or be resolution independent. Things like the Dock already *are* kind of resolution independent. But all the widgets are not. Imagine the font size of the menus at the top of your screen at 144dpi, at 200dpi, at 300dpi? It'd shrink to unreadable instantly.
 
Hmmm, so you failed trigonometry, eh?
Click to expand...

Get over yourself. It was a quick computation. So what if I wasn't using the correct formula - it still proved my point.

There's just too many pseudo intellectuals running around...
 
I'm waiting on some hack from somebody to be able to set my rez on my iBook a bit higher than 1024. It's ANNOYING that my Dell Inspirion can display 1400 clearer than my iBook.

after using Photoshop on a higher res - at home, I run 1600x1200 - there is no going back.
 
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