The nice thing about smaller pixels is that they do scale well. My work laptop has a 17" screen @1920 x 1200, so the effective pixel size is 0.191 mm. I only occasionally run it at full resolution, and only for short periods of time. I usually run at 1440 x 900, and when my eyes are tired I go to 1280 x 800. Most of the time, its hooked up to a 21" 1600 x 1200 LCD external display.
The nice thing about smaller pixels is that they do scale well. My work laptop has a 17" screen @1920 x 1200, so the effective pixel size is 0.191 mm. I only occasionally run it at full resolution, and only for short periods of time. I usually run at 1440 x 900, and when my eyes are tired I go to 1280 x 800. Most of the time, its hooked up to a 21" 1600 x 1200 LCD external display.
...it entirely depends on the apps you're using.
IE has nice scaling (pretty much from the start as I recall). Of course, some webpages feel compelled to lock font size to pixels (!), but bad html coding should not put limitations on how you use your PC. I've never run IE maximized, even though some webpages assumed that I would.
Many other apps scale nicely, and for the ones that don't... Assign a magnifier to a mouse button or similar. (Vista has a magnifier/zoom built-in as I recall)
I could certainly go for more pixels, and I know others who share my view. The problems you outline are solvable, unless you have a particular app that simply doesn't scale well (and that you for some reason have to use all the time).
Or put differently: You and I could have had this same argument back in 1991 when Windows 3.11 was all the rage. The dot pitch was bigger then, the screens much smaller and none (well, extremely few?) of us dreamt of the possibility for 30" flat panels...
It would be silly to introduce a panel with a million pixels across (and 1:1.6 pixels vertically) at this point, because then legacy apps would simply vanish. But at this point in time, the dot pitch of the 30" is not a big problem (it actually helps in some cases).
I realise there will be some time before all app vendors adjust. Heck, there are still games released that do not cater for users of widescreen panels. (caveat emptor) However, I don't think the rest of the world should stand still in the mean time.
From my experience, many programs (especially ones that aren't standard things that everyone uses) either have text bits that don't scale at all or text that overlaps or hides behind other stuff when it gets enlarged. Changing the dpi/font sizes in XP is not a realistic option from what I've seen. You have to just get used to the small text in most places. I don't know if this is any better in Vista.
My old laptop has a tiny dot pitch like this and the text size drives me nuts, but I would rather put up with that than have it upscale from a lower resolution or mess around with the font/dpi settings.
In general, a small dot pitch is excellent for games and graphics, but I would not want to use it in Windows. This is one thing I like about CRTs actually. You can use the monitor's max resolution in games and still have a much lower resolution in Windows where text is easily readable.
My old laptop has a tiny dot pitch like this and the text size drives me nuts, but I would rather put up with that than have it upscale from a lower resolution or mess around with the font/dpi settings.
In general, a small dot pitch is excellent for games and graphics, but I would not want to use it in Windows. This is one thing I like about CRTs actually. You can use the monitor's max resolution in games and still have a much lower resolution in Windows where text is easily readable.
postmortemIA
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- Jul 11, 2006
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You are right about overlapping and such; it is just how the GUI is programmed, often there's no enough space to reserver for larger text because everything is tightly packed.
The way XP does dpi scaling is to just increase text size for everything that contains text, and leave everything else on same size... that is a problem!
The way IE 7 scaler works is to increase size of everything on the page, so ratios between objects are preserved, and therefore whole page scales properly. But problem with this approach is that images do not look good at 110% or 125% of their size. I think this scaler exists in Vista, it lets you chose between XP style DPI scaling and its own.
FWIW, I suspect this problem may be smaller here in Europe, because we tend to use apps that have been translated to several locales. An app translated into German or Finnish will have to make adjustments to accommodate (significantly) larger words and sentences...
It also happens to be the way Windows 3.1 "solved" this problem. ("Large fonts") This problem is far from new, and most app developers should realise this by now.
Put differently: Do you guys have examples of major contemporary commercial applications that are unusuable with large fonts switched on? (personally, I would not bother with such "niceties" when/if producing freeware utils or similar, but the commercial apps I've worked on do pay some attention to these issues -- based on my own experience, I would assert that once you cross 1500-2000 users, you will start hearing more and more complaints of missing font scaling, as well as paying close attention brought on as an app is translated to different locales -- Arabic and Chinese of course being two very interesting ones!)
Next generation windows apps will use Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly "WinFX") where developers will be pushed to more vector based solutions (including vector based graphics). Windows PF exists as an add-on for XP (part of .net 3.0) and (of course) is bundled with Vista.
to OP - a friend of mine has a 37" LCD and i have a 56" DLP both display text extremely well, i sit about 12 feet from my 56" and the text is very sharp and easy to read while using wireless mouse/keyboard. I also have a 21" LCD as a second monitor
Tell me about it. It's 2007 and those idiots at MS are busy making their UI more "Applesque" instead of giving us the new filesystem they talked about and an OS that can scale DPI. There are laptops with pretty high DPI these days.
I agree. Within reason, the denser the pixel pitch, the better the display (all else being equal).
Actually, the operating systems do this well enough. Most useful programs have their own images and custom layouts that create a dependency on the default DPI. Programmers are usually nice enough people who want to do cool things, but generally they are also interested in eating and sleeping--both of which are hard to do when cramped deadlines start to slip by while catering to the 1% of the population that changes the DPI setting.
Visual Studio 2005 seems to do quite well; aside from slightly blurry icons (due to scaling), the software appears fine: all other controls have scaled along with the font. Office 2007 doesn't seem to recognize Vista's higher DPI setting at all. It seems like everything a new version of Windows comes out promising better visual quality, a new version of Office comes out that completely disregards those settings. Wierd, huh? Explorer, Control Panel, etc. all seem fine with a high DPI setting.
OSX and Linux generally have poorer font rendering, so font sizes tend to be higher by default on those platforms. I haven't used Linux in the past year or so, and modern screenshots look fine, so you might want to give it a try. But don't expect it to be compatible out of the box with everything you want to do.
Vista seems to have this covered. It's not fully vector-based yet, but the bitmapped graphics are generally larger than people will need them, and the UI/controls scale quite nicely.
I reported lots of DPI scaling problems during the public preview.
I just wish application developers would take advantage of it. The reality is that even if they started adopting the new presentation technologies in .NET 3.0, the overall situation would not change significantly perhaps for at least another year.
AFAIK, the new stuff is so different that most of an application's GUI layout and glue code (i.e. what connects it to the application's core logic, which has no UI per se) would have to be scrapped and rewritten from scratch. That's a big undertaking.
With a major UI paradigm shift, things like control behavior and options are not likely to be 1:1 with the old stuff, so the devs have to study the new programming interfaces for a while and develop solutions and workarounds for the stuff that the MS people didn't think about when the wrote .NET 3.0.
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