3 ms·

I was just continuing with the comparison in taneq's post. Personally, I noticed the (admittedly very minor) improvement going from ~245 ppi to to ~260 ppi, so

by Veedrac 10y ago

I was just continuing with the comparison in taneq's post. Personally, I noticed the (admittedly very minor) improvement going from ~245 ppi to to ~260 ppi, so I doubt I'd have missed a much larger jump, but what's true for me isn't necessarily true for everyone else.

jacobolus 10y ago
Up to about 300 ppi (maybe even 400 ppi), it’s still possible for someone with good vision to notice a difference at 24 inch viewing distance. I can tell the difference too. If I bring my face to 8 inches from the display, I can notice up past 600 ppi. But being able to notice something isn’t the same as benefiting in a substantial way. 300 ppi is well past the point of diminishing returns for a laptop. If there were no competing trade-offs, having a 300 ppi display on desktops, a 400 ppi display on laptops, and a 600 ppi display on phones would be great. I just don’t think they’re worth it in return for a big hit on performance and battery life. Apple’s choice to take early-2000s ~100–120 ppi resolutions and just double them all (using a 2x mode for legacy software support) got them to IMO just about the current sweet spot for PC displays. The immediate next things to improve in displays are bit depth (12 bit/channel), dynamic range, frame rate (120 Hz? variable?), maybe color gamut (personally I wish we could get more than 3 primaries to widen the color gamut while avoiding spectrum spikiness, but there’s a big content chicken–egg problem), and power use (I want a laptop with 2 day battery life). In a decade, more software will be properly designed to handle arbitrary-resolution UI, integrated GPUs will be beefier, display protocols will support higher resolutions and framerates, and it will maybe make sense to hop up to 300+ ppi PC displays.
- Veedrac 10y ago
  To be clear, I'm not saying that everyone should use 300 ppi displays, or that everyone would benefit. But you need to remember this goes both ways. Not everybody cares about battery life. Some people want 5 hours, and everything above that is superfluous. Some people basically never even unplug their laptops. Not everybody cares about the performance difference; as long as it renders browsers and office apps, it's fine. Others want 4k because it's a pixel doubled 1080p, and they like gaming at 1080p. Some people never even use the built-in monitor. There is no single, homogeneous sweet spot. I agree that there are other useful steps. OLED laptops are happening, though scaling slowly. 144hz, variable framerate laptops are happening, and are set to completely take over the gaming laptop segment. Touch screen happened. Power efficiency is improving, a recent step being IGZO. It's not like these other aspects are being ignored.

by Veedrac 10y ago

jacobolus 10y ago

Up to about 300 ppi (maybe even 400 ppi), it’s still possible for someone with good vision to notice a difference at 24 inch viewing distance. I can tell the difference too. If I bring my face to 8 inches from the display, I can notice up past 600 ppi. But being able to notice something isn’t the same as benefiting in a substantial way. 300 ppi is well past the point of diminishing returns for a laptop. If there were no competing trade-offs, having a 300 ppi display on desktops, a 400 ppi display on laptops, and a 600 ppi display on phones would be great. I just don’t think they’re worth it in return for a big hit on performance and battery life. Apple’s choice to take early-2000s ~100–120 ppi resolutions and just double them all (using a 2x mode for legacy software support) got them to IMO just about the current sweet spot for PC displays. The immediate next things to improve in displays are bit depth (12 bit/channel), dynamic range, frame rate (120 Hz? variable?), maybe color gamut (personally I wish we could get more than 3 primaries to widen the color gamut while avoiding spectrum spikiness, but there’s a big content chicken–egg problem), and power use (I want a laptop with 2 day battery life). In a decade, more software will be properly designed to handle arbitrary-resolution UI, integrated GPUs will be beefier, display protocols will support higher resolutions and framerates, and it will maybe make sense to hop up to 300+ ppi PC displays.

Veedrac 10y ago
To be clear, I'm not saying that everyone should use 300 ppi displays, or that everyone would benefit. But you need to remember this goes both ways. Not everybody cares about battery life. Some people want 5 hours, and everything above that is superfluous. Some people basically never even unplug their laptops. Not everybody cares about the performance difference; as long as it renders browsers and office apps, it's fine. Others want 4k because it's a pixel doubled 1080p, and they like gaming at 1080p. Some people never even use the built-in monitor. There is no single, homogeneous sweet spot. I agree that there are other useful steps. OLED laptops are happening, though scaling slowly. 144hz, variable framerate laptops are happening, and are set to completely take over the gaming laptop segment. Touch screen happened. Power efficiency is improving, a recent step being IGZO. It's not like these other aspects are being ignored.