How long 'til 200 or 300dpi monitors?

[taltamir]

I think the biggest problem is that there is not a single OS out there, MS, linux, apple, or otherwise... that properly resizes fonts and menus to adjust for your DPI. everything always looks wrong and misshapen when you deviate. So even if a company took the plunge and made a higher DPI monitor, then the result will be tiny unreadable font... Heck my parents already use their monitor at lower resolutions and stretch it because "Everything is too small" otherwise... and increasing the font size breaks EVERYTHING (and i mean everything, web pages, system messages, menus, desktop, etc)

 

[jsoderba]

magreen: This already works on any monitor that does nearest-neighbour scaling. If you have a 1920x1200 display you can run games at 960x600 and get a sharp albeit somewhat pixelated picture. You might have to edit config files or use other tricks to get some games running at unusal resolutions though. (Game developers should build scalable UIs but some skimp out and only make a couple of fixed-res versions.)

taltamir: As I posted, Vista does do a better job than previous versions of Windows and the imminent Internet Explorer 8 will do a better job with web pages. The blog post I linked showed that Microsoft's testing lab found that only ~5% of apps had serious DPI issues on Vista.

 

[taltamir]

magreen, you would have to quadruple not double every pixel, if you just double it, you would stretch the image too much.
Anyways, doing that will completely negate the benefit of having a higher resolution, it will also require a revolutionary leap instead of an evolutionary one.

jsoderba. Better job, yes, acceptable job NO.

MS is full of it, and even if it WAS only 5%, that is still a LOT of applications that simply do not work.

There needs to be a fundamental divorcing of the resolution and the DPI, one that will not require program by program compatibility configuration.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

You say that a typical 16x10 22" monitor is about the same physical height as a regular piece of paper, but do you really view pieces of paper at the same viewing distance as you view stuff on your monitor? Or are you saying you want to scoot in so you're at less-than-arm's-length from your monitor to read your PDFs?

24" monitors have plenty of desktop real estate to view paper-sized content at full monitor-height, IMO.

 

[magreen]

Originally posted by: taltamir
magreen, you would have to quadruple not double every pixel, if you just double it, you would stretch the image too much.
Anyways, doing that will completely negate the benefit of having a higher resolution, it will also require a revolutionary leap instead of an evolutionary one.

jsoderba. Better job, yes, acceptable job NO.

MS is full of it, and even if it WAS only 5%, that is still a LOT of applications that simply do not work.

There needs to be a fundamental divorcing of the resolution and the DPI, one that will not require program by program compatibility configuration.

Right, I kindof meant quadruple, i.e. double in each direction. And I'm only talking about for games, where you'd be playing at 1900x1200 instead of 3800x2400, assuming the graphics cards aren't up to rendering at such ultra-high resolution. It wouldn't be noticable except by people who want 200dpi gaming!

I agree with you about fundamentally divorcing the resolution and the dpi. It needs to be handled just like printing is handled -- page layout is independent of the display device. The program knows you want to print to a letter-sized piece of paper, so it tells the printer driver what to fit to that letter-size and the printer driver does the rest. We should have the same thing with the screen -- the program / OS knows you have a 19"x12" monitor so it tells the display driver to fit a certain image into that space, and the display driver handles the rest, whether that means displaying it at 100dpi or 200dpi or 300dpi depending on your monitor.

Originally posted by: LokutusofBorg
You say that a typical 16x10 22" monitor is about the same physical height as a regular piece of paper, but do you really view pieces of paper at the same viewing distance as you view stuff on your monitor? Or are you saying you want to scoot in so you're at less-than-arm's-length from your monitor to read your PDFs?

24" monitors have plenty of desktop real estate to view paper-sized content at full monitor-height, IMO.

It's true, I'm using a 20.6" 1680x1050 monitor. I've been itching to get a 24" that handles 19x12, I'm sure that would be a big step up. But I still don't think it would quite equal paper -- I want to be able to sit back and comfortably read most pdf things, and if I need to zoom in I move my face closer to the monitor, just like I do with a book. I don't have to click on the edit box on my book and select to zoom to 150%, I just move my face (or the book). I want the same thing with my computer.

 

[taltamir]

it is definitely uncomfortably small on a monitor.