11 ms·

1080p screen is a no-go. come on yall, it's 2021

by ruined 5y ago

cupofjoakim 5y ago
Hard disagree. On a 15.6" 1080p really is sufficient. The upsides of not wasting battery and just performance of not having to push more pixels makes it worth it. Even gaming channels like LTT talk about this a bit. That being said - if you're coming from the macbooks retina it's definitely a downgrade. My guess however is that this device won't have a screen that is that good either way though.
- ciupicri 5y ago
  Gamers are known of playing at lower resolutions so they would get more FPS.
- bscphil 5y ago
  At 15.6 inches I think it depends pretty heavily on how good your operating system's font rendering is. If you're stuck on Windows I can't imagine using anything lower than 4k at that size. On the other hand, I'm using a 17.x inch laptop currently, only about a foot and a half from my face, at only 1080p, and it's fine. (Before you blame my vision - I'm actually nearsighted. My vision is near-perfect at this distance.) I certainly wouldn't accept this DPI from a current laptop, of course; the font rendering certainly could be a lot better and more density would be nice for easier photo editing and so on, but I think a lot of people have forgotten just how good 1080p can be if it's handled well in software. A whole generation spent most of their time on crappy CRTs. Compared to that almost any HD screen is an enormous improvement.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Sweet spot @15" for me is 1200p if I can get it 1440p otherwise. I haven't used a computer with less than 1200 vertical lines since 2004 and I don't plan on changing it.
- ayushnix 5y ago
  > Hard disagree. On a 15.6" 1080p really is sufficient. Considering what I've recently learned about the fractional scaling mess, I would only buy laptops with a 1440p or 4K display because they don't need fractional scaling. I really wish there were more 24 inch 4K or 27 inch 5K monitors on the market and not the 27 inch 4K mess we're getting. I'm not sure what monitor manufacturers are thinking.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    What do you mean by "need fractional scaling"? This really depends on what you prefer, but I'm on 15" with 100% scale and enjoy it.
    - ayushnix 5y ago
      Yes, I didn't take 15 inch laptops into account because I have a 14 inch laptop. See my reply here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28376008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28376008
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    15.6″ 1366×768: 100ppi. It could be improved by 90% scaling, but that doesn’t tend to work quite so well. Basically everyone uses it at 1×. 15.6″ 1920×1080 (1080p): 141ppi. Generally comfortable at 1–1.25×, most will use at 1×. 15.6″ 2560×1440 (1440p): 188ppi. Generally comfortable at 1.33–1.75×, most will use at 1.5×. Definitely uncomfortable at both 1× and 2×. If you don’t like fractional scaling, you don’t want 1440p. 15.6″ 3840×2160 (4K): 282ppi. Generally comfortable at 2–2.5×, most will use at 2×. These figures I’m suggesting are aiming for about 110–140dpi. I have a 15.6″ 2560×1440 screen, and 1.5× scaling mostly works very well, basically perfectly under Windows which I never use and with only minor issues under Linux/Sway with high-DPI XWayland patches once I’ve manually intervened to fix a few variously broken things.
    - ayushnix 5y ago
      Hmm, I guess I didn't think about the 15.6 inch size in laptops. I have a 14 inch laptop so I was thinking in terms of that size. 1080p on my laptop needs 1.2 — 1.3 scaling to look "normal". I know people dismiss this as personal taste but 1) IINM, Windows defaults to 125% automatically on such a display and 2) I have a hard time reading text without scaling my 14 inch 1080p display. Sure, people, resort to scaling just the fonts but everything looks out of place if you do that. The fonts are big but the UI elements are still small. Personally, I chose to compromise as well by scaling just the fonts on SwayWM because fractional scaling introduces slightly noticeable degradation of font quality which is unacceptable to me. But yeah, in that case, 4K display on a laptop looks like a safe bet so I would only go for that in the future. Thanks.
- orangecat 5y ago
  Even gaming channels like LTT talk about this a bit. The major benefit of high-DPI displays isn't for gaming or graphics, it's for text. Once you're used to decent resolution and scaling, reading on anything else looks like a blurry mess.
  - approxim8ion 5y ago
    I think this is the key. I've never used very good or very high-res screens for a sustained period of time, so I haven't gotten used to it. Personally I'm not too keen on jumping on them. My 1366x768 15.6" screen renders text just fine for me.
jm4 5y ago
I would have thought the same several years ago. At age 40+, 1080p on a laptop is still good. Even at 1080p, I have to go into accessibility settings to enlarge text. I'm pretty much out of the market for 4k screens on laptops these days. Also had to switch to a big phone and crank up the text size.
- slantyyz 5y ago
  50+ with bad eyes, and I think the difference between 4K and 1080p is still very noticeable on a 15.6" laptop, in terms of sharpness. Having said that, most people probably set the text magnification on a 4K screen to be the same as a 1080p screen, so any real estate gains tend to be a wash. Since getting presbyopia several years ago, I had single vision glasses prescribed for using a computer. So when I am using a computer, as long as the screens are around 21" to 27" away from my eyes, everything is sharp. It sucks having an extra pair of glasses (and remembering to swap them when not using a computer), but I would go nuts if I didn't have them.
  - ayushnix 5y ago
    > Having said that, most people probably set the text magnification on a 4K screen to be the same as a 1080p screen, so any real estate gains tend to be a wash. If someone's buying a laptop with a 4K display for real estate, he's probably misinformed. You buy a 4K display on a laptop for the pristine ~293 PPI vs a mediocre ~146 PPI on a 1080p display which would look even worse considering it would need fractional scaling while the 4K display would work with integer scaling.
    - slantyyz 5y ago
      > 1080p display which would look even worse considering it would need fractional scaling That depends on the OS though, right? I don't know about Linux or Mac, but I'm pretty sure that if you scale on Windows, you're still running at the native resolution, but the UI elements get scaled. Nothing should look weird. At least that has been my experience on Windows... outside of apps that don't follow Microsoft's scaling guidelines.
Rd6n6 5y ago
1440p is the way to go. 4K is harder to sustain and you start needing some scaling as well
kazinator 5y ago
It's a 15" screen! For 4K to even begin to make sense, you need a 40" diagonal, and with your face about a foot away from it. (For a more detailed explanation, ask a local fifth grader.)
- ohazi 5y ago
  40" diagonal seems a bit extreme. I think my 27" 4k display is perfect. My dad has slightly worse eyes and prefers his 32" 4k display, which I find noticably grainier but perfectly serviceable.
  - DiabloD3 5y ago
    48" 4k is equivalent to having a quad of 24" 1080ps. Putting a trio of portrait 24" 1080ps gives you 42" of almost 4k (3240x1920 as opposed to 3240x2160). I don't see whats extreme about this at all, its a better use of area than my trio of 24" 1080ps (in landscape) that I use now.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > Putting a trio of portrait 24" 1080ps gives you 42" of almost 4k (3240x1920 as opposed to 3240x2160). As opposed to 3840 × 2160, no?
      - DiabloD3 5y ago
        Yup, my bad, typo.
    - ohazi 5y ago
      I didn't mean to imply that a 40" diagonal was necessarily excessive (if you have the space, go for it!), I was just disagreeing with the claim that you need a screen that big for 4k. I have a smaller 4k screen, and I think the pixel density is perfectly fine.
      - DiabloD3 5y ago
jcelerier 5y ago
a lot of computers being sold today are still 1366x768
- Koshkin 5y ago
  ... and 4 GB of RAM
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Nothing wrong with that for a lightweight Linux dev/browsing machine. More than that just goes unused.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      Depends on your browsing habits. I often end up with hundreds of Chrome tabs, which can easily result in 16GB of RAM being consumed by it alone. Thankfully there are plugins to automatically suspend unused tabs which help with that.
      - yoyohello13 5y ago
        I read this workflow a lot and it absolutely boggles my mind how people can have some many tabs open. You can’t possibly be able to make sense of all those tabs at once. And if your not using the tab, why not just bookmark it? Seems the only purpose of 100+ tabs is wasting ram.
        kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        With a browser that allows customization, you can configure vertical tabs to fill up excess wide screen real estate. Then you can credibly manage dozens of tabs.
        sofixa 5y ago
        I have bookmarks, Pocket for "read one day", Raindrop for more advanced "might be useful one day" bookmarks. I still work on multiple projects, for work or personal, more or less simultaneously ( as in the same week(s)), and until I'm fully finished with something i don't close the tabs related to it. Some things just get blocked/stuck/lose their priority, for which case i do the occasional cleaning. So just the stuff I'm more or less currently on, plus articles to read "soon", plus mandatory work related tabs (Jira, etc.) and it quickly explodes to 10GB+ of RAM.
abledon 5y ago
Isn't 1080p way better for battery life + its mostly indistinguishable in pixels? unless you are like, looking really close at the pixels? remember its 1080p inside a 15" monitor, not a 24" monitor a PC has.
- MisterTea 5y ago
  If you spend a lot of time reading/typing text on a computer, hiDPI helps as the text is a lot sharper. Though honestly I don't care as much and find that 1080 is an acceptable resolution for smaller screens (<= 22").
- jagger27 5y ago
  It's like no one here has used a MacBook before. They've been putting 2560 by 1600 displays in 13" MacBooks for what, a decade now?
  - bluedino 5y ago
    Mac OS doesn't have all the goofy issues that Linux and Windows do when using hidpi/4k whatever screens.
    - sz4kerto 5y ago
      Windows has practically perfect hidpi nowadays. Also on moderately hidpi screens (eg 4K 32"), MacOS is extremely blurry.
  - as1mov 5y ago
    Eh not really, I've used the hidpi MacBooks for work, it doesn't really make a big difference. I can tell the difference between a 1440p/4k and a 1080p screen, but it doesn't bother me to the point where I won't buy machines which don't have it, it's just a nice bonus.
- SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
  Very distinguishable after daily use of a MacBook Pro.
Koshkin 5y ago
Should be good up to 24"
kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
Well, (it's been a while so this might be really false now) Linux might have not-so-great support for HiDPI screens. Either way, I can't really see the difference between 1080p and 4K, so it wouldn't matter for me.
- Aeolos 5y ago
  That might be correct when talking about _video_, but is factually incorrect when talking about _text_. To understand why, just print an identical piece of text on 600, 300, 150 and 75 dpi on your printer and look at the printouts side by side. There is a significant downgrade in quality between each step, and anything below 300 dpi looks quite bad. 15.6" at 1080p is ~141 ppi[1] which is in the "not good" range. Your OS attempts to salvage the situation by applying font hinting (i.e. distorting your fonts to fit the pixel grid) and antialiasing (subpixel on linux, grayscale on the latest versions of windows & macos) - both of which are imperfect workarounds for the lack of resolution. The MacBook Pro is ~217 ppi (1800p at 15.6"), which is better but still not perfect. A 4K 15.6" screen works out at ~282 ppi, which is starting to be good enough to finally turn off font hinting and view fonts as intended by their designer rather than squished by subpar display technology. [1] https://www.sven.de/dpi/ https://www.sven.de/dpi/
  - bscphil 5y ago
    > both of which are imperfect workarounds for the lack of resolution Imperfect, certainly, but they are pretty good workarounds that usually generate perfectly readable text. In my experience, when text looks bad at 1080p, it is more often because hinting has been done badly, heavily distorting the letter forms, rather than the inherent limitations of the resolution. To be clear, I certainly prefer reading text at higher DPIs, but at should be seen as one particular tradeoff to be weighed against the heavier battery and graphics demands of higher pixel count screens.
  - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
    I understand what you're saying, but antialiasing, despite its being a flawed workaround, seems to work well enough for me that even when reading text on a 4K display it's not a huge difference that I can notice it so much that it bothers me (I used a 4K monitor for a couple of years). Sure, 4K for text might be better, but it doesn't mean that I notice a difference.

1080p screen is a no-go. come on yall, it's 2021

by ruined 5y ago

1080p screen is a no-go. come on yall, it's 2021

Hard disagree. On a 15.6" 1080p really is sufficient. The upsides of not wasting battery and just performance of not having to push more pixels makes it worth it. Even gaming channels like LTT talk about this a bit. That being said - if you're coming from the macbooks retina it's definitely a downgrade. My guess however is that this device won't have a screen that is that good either way though.

ciupicri 5y ago
Gamers are known of playing at lower resolutions so they would get more FPS.
bscphil 5y ago
At 15.6 inches I think it depends pretty heavily on how good your operating system's font rendering is. If you're stuck on Windows I can't imagine using anything lower than 4k at that size. On the other hand, I'm using a 17.x inch laptop currently, only about a foot and a half from my face, at only 1080p, and it's fine. (Before you blame my vision - I'm actually nearsighted. My vision is near-perfect at this distance.) I certainly wouldn't accept this DPI from a current laptop, of course; the font rendering certainly could be a lot better and more density would be nice for easier photo editing and so on, but I think a lot of people have forgotten just how good 1080p can be if it's handled well in software. A whole generation spent most of their time on crappy CRTs. Compared to that almost any HD screen is an enormous improvement.
aidenn0 5y ago
Sweet spot @15" for me is 1200p if I can get it 1440p otherwise. I haven't used a computer with less than 1200 vertical lines since 2004 and I don't plan on changing it.
ayushnix 5y ago
> Hard disagree. On a 15.6" 1080p really is sufficient. Considering what I've recently learned about the fractional scaling mess, I would only buy laptops with a 1440p or 4K display because they don't need fractional scaling. I really wish there were more 24 inch 4K or 27 inch 5K monitors on the market and not the 27 inch 4K mess we're getting. I'm not sure what monitor manufacturers are thinking.
- viraptor 5y ago
  What do you mean by "need fractional scaling"? This really depends on what you prefer, but I'm on 15" with 100% scale and enjoy it.
  - ayushnix 5y ago
    Yes, I didn't take 15 inch laptops into account because I have a 14 inch laptop. See my reply here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28376008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28376008
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  15.6″ 1366×768: 100ppi. It could be improved by 90% scaling, but that doesn’t tend to work quite so well. Basically everyone uses it at 1×. 15.6″ 1920×1080 (1080p): 141ppi. Generally comfortable at 1–1.25×, most will use at 1×. 15.6″ 2560×1440 (1440p): 188ppi. Generally comfortable at 1.33–1.75×, most will use at 1.5×. Definitely uncomfortable at both 1× and 2×. If you don’t like fractional scaling, you don’t want 1440p. 15.6″ 3840×2160 (4K): 282ppi. Generally comfortable at 2–2.5×, most will use at 2×. These figures I’m suggesting are aiming for about 110–140dpi. I have a 15.6″ 2560×1440 screen, and 1.5× scaling mostly works very well, basically perfectly under Windows which I never use and with only minor issues under Linux/Sway with high-DPI XWayland patches once I’ve manually intervened to fix a few variously broken things.
  - ayushnix 5y ago
    Hmm, I guess I didn't think about the 15.6 inch size in laptops. I have a 14 inch laptop so I was thinking in terms of that size. 1080p on my laptop needs 1.2 — 1.3 scaling to look "normal". I know people dismiss this as personal taste but 1) IINM, Windows defaults to 125% automatically on such a display and 2) I have a hard time reading text without scaling my 14 inch 1080p display. Sure, people, resort to scaling just the fonts but everything looks out of place if you do that. The fonts are big but the UI elements are still small. Personally, I chose to compromise as well by scaling just the fonts on SwayWM because fractional scaling introduces slightly noticeable degradation of font quality which is unacceptable to me. But yeah, in that case, 4K display on a laptop looks like a safe bet so I would only go for that in the future. Thanks.
orangecat 5y ago
Even gaming channels like LTT talk about this a bit. The major benefit of high-DPI displays isn't for gaming or graphics, it's for text. Once you're used to decent resolution and scaling, reading on anything else looks like a blurry mess.
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  I think this is the key. I've never used very good or very high-res screens for a sustained period of time, so I haven't gotten used to it. Personally I'm not too keen on jumping on them. My 1366x768 15.6" screen renders text just fine for me.

jm4 5y ago

I would have thought the same several years ago. At age 40+, 1080p on a laptop is still good. Even at 1080p, I have to go into accessibility settings to enlarge text. I'm pretty much out of the market for 4k screens on laptops these days. Also had to switch to a big phone and crank up the text size.

slantyyz 5y ago
50+ with bad eyes, and I think the difference between 4K and 1080p is still very noticeable on a 15.6" laptop, in terms of sharpness. Having said that, most people probably set the text magnification on a 4K screen to be the same as a 1080p screen, so any real estate gains tend to be a wash. Since getting presbyopia several years ago, I had single vision glasses prescribed for using a computer. So when I am using a computer, as long as the screens are around 21" to 27" away from my eyes, everything is sharp. It sucks having an extra pair of glasses (and remembering to swap them when not using a computer), but I would go nuts if I didn't have them.
- ayushnix 5y ago
  > Having said that, most people probably set the text magnification on a 4K screen to be the same as a 1080p screen, so any real estate gains tend to be a wash. If someone's buying a laptop with a 4K display for real estate, he's probably misinformed. You buy a 4K display on a laptop for the pristine ~293 PPI vs a mediocre ~146 PPI on a 1080p display which would look even worse considering it would need fractional scaling while the 4K display would work with integer scaling.
  - slantyyz 5y ago
    > 1080p display which would look even worse considering it would need fractional scaling That depends on the OS though, right? I don't know about Linux or Mac, but I'm pretty sure that if you scale on Windows, you're still running at the native resolution, but the UI elements get scaled. Nothing should look weird. At least that has been my experience on Windows... outside of apps that don't follow Microsoft's scaling guidelines.

Rd6n6 5y ago

1440p is the way to go. 4K is harder to sustain and you start needing some scaling as well

kazinator 5y ago

It's a 15" screen! For 4K to even begin to make sense, you need a 40" diagonal, and with your face about a foot away from it. (For a more detailed explanation, ask a local fifth grader.)

ohazi 5y ago
40" diagonal seems a bit extreme. I think my 27" 4k display is perfect. My dad has slightly worse eyes and prefers his 32" 4k display, which I find noticably grainier but perfectly serviceable.
- DiabloD3 5y ago
  48" 4k is equivalent to having a quad of 24" 1080ps. Putting a trio of portrait 24" 1080ps gives you 42" of almost 4k (3240x1920 as opposed to 3240x2160). I don't see whats extreme about this at all, its a better use of area than my trio of 24" 1080ps (in landscape) that I use now.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Putting a trio of portrait 24" 1080ps gives you 42" of almost 4k (3240x1920 as opposed to 3240x2160). As opposed to 3840 × 2160, no?
    - DiabloD3 5y ago
      Yup, my bad, typo.
  - ohazi 5y ago
    I didn't mean to imply that a 40" diagonal was necessarily excessive (if you have the space, go for it!), I was just disagreeing with the claim that you need a screen that big for 4k. I have a smaller 4k screen, and I think the pixel density is perfectly fine.
    - DiabloD3 5y ago

jcelerier 5y ago

a lot of computers being sold today are still 1366x768

Koshkin 5y ago
... and 4 GB of RAM
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Nothing wrong with that for a lightweight Linux dev/browsing machine. More than that just goes unused.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Depends on your browsing habits. I often end up with hundreds of Chrome tabs, which can easily result in 16GB of RAM being consumed by it alone. Thankfully there are plugins to automatically suspend unused tabs which help with that.
    - yoyohello13 5y ago
      I read this workflow a lot and it absolutely boggles my mind how people can have some many tabs open. You can’t possibly be able to make sense of all those tabs at once. And if your not using the tab, why not just bookmark it? Seems the only purpose of 100+ tabs is wasting ram.
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        With a browser that allows customization, you can configure vertical tabs to fill up excess wide screen real estate. Then you can credibly manage dozens of tabs.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        I have bookmarks, Pocket for "read one day", Raindrop for more advanced "might be useful one day" bookmarks. I still work on multiple projects, for work or personal, more or less simultaneously ( as in the same week(s)), and until I'm fully finished with something i don't close the tabs related to it. Some things just get blocked/stuck/lose their priority, for which case i do the occasional cleaning. So just the stuff I'm more or less currently on, plus articles to read "soon", plus mandatory work related tabs (Jira, etc.) and it quickly explodes to 10GB+ of RAM.

abledon 5y ago

Isn't 1080p way better for battery life + its mostly indistinguishable in pixels? unless you are like, looking really close at the pixels? remember its 1080p inside a 15" monitor, not a 24" monitor a PC has.

MisterTea 5y ago
If you spend a lot of time reading/typing text on a computer, hiDPI helps as the text is a lot sharper. Though honestly I don't care as much and find that 1080 is an acceptable resolution for smaller screens (<= 22").
jagger27 5y ago
It's like no one here has used a MacBook before. They've been putting 2560 by 1600 displays in 13" MacBooks for what, a decade now?
- bluedino 5y ago
  Mac OS doesn't have all the goofy issues that Linux and Windows do when using hidpi/4k whatever screens.
  - sz4kerto 5y ago
    Windows has practically perfect hidpi nowadays. Also on moderately hidpi screens (eg 4K 32"), MacOS is extremely blurry.
- as1mov 5y ago
  Eh not really, I've used the hidpi MacBooks for work, it doesn't really make a big difference. I can tell the difference between a 1440p/4k and a 1080p screen, but it doesn't bother me to the point where I won't buy machines which don't have it, it's just a nice bonus.
SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
Very distinguishable after daily use of a MacBook Pro.

Koshkin 5y ago

Should be good up to 24"

kaladin-jasnah 5y ago

Well, (it's been a while so this might be really false now) Linux might have not-so-great support for HiDPI screens. Either way, I can't really see the difference between 1080p and 4K, so it wouldn't matter for me.

Aeolos 5y ago
That might be correct when talking about _video_, but is factually incorrect when talking about _text_. To understand why, just print an identical piece of text on 600, 300, 150 and 75 dpi on your printer and look at the printouts side by side. There is a significant downgrade in quality between each step, and anything below 300 dpi looks quite bad. 15.6" at 1080p is ~141 ppi[1] which is in the "not good" range. Your OS attempts to salvage the situation by applying font hinting (i.e. distorting your fonts to fit the pixel grid) and antialiasing (subpixel on linux, grayscale on the latest versions of windows & macos) - both of which are imperfect workarounds for the lack of resolution. The MacBook Pro is ~217 ppi (1800p at 15.6"), which is better but still not perfect. A 4K 15.6" screen works out at ~282 ppi, which is starting to be good enough to finally turn off font hinting and view fonts as intended by their designer rather than squished by subpar display technology. [1] https://www.sven.de/dpi/ https://www.sven.de/dpi/
- bscphil 5y ago
  > both of which are imperfect workarounds for the lack of resolution Imperfect, certainly, but they are pretty good workarounds that usually generate perfectly readable text. In my experience, when text looks bad at 1080p, it is more often because hinting has been done badly, heavily distorting the letter forms, rather than the inherent limitations of the resolution. To be clear, I certainly prefer reading text at higher DPIs, but at should be seen as one particular tradeoff to be weighed against the heavier battery and graphics demands of higher pixel count screens.
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  I understand what you're saying, but antialiasing, despite its being a flawed workaround, seems to work well enough for me that even when reading text on a 4K display it's not a huge difference that I can notice it so much that it bothers me (I used a 4K monitor for a couple of years). Sure, 4K for text might be better, but it doesn't mean that I notice a difference.