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As an end user, I'm a fan of Apple's 'scaled resolution' solution. My Apple notebook renders the screen in memory at 3840 x 2160 and then scales that to fit the

by veidr 12y ago

As an end user, I'm a fan of Apple's 'scaled resolution' solution. My Apple notebook renders the screen in memory at 3840 x 2160 and then scales that to fit the 2880 x 1800 physical display. The benefit of this approach is that you can smoothly scale the UI to suit your age/eyesight. When working, I keep mine set to smallest/most-information setting available by default (dubbed "Looks like 1920x1200"), but when relaxing I often give my tired 40-year-old eyes a break by bumping it down to "Looks like 1680 x 1050" and making everything uniformly bigger and easier to read. When you look closely, of course it doesn't look as good as an exact match to the display native resolution does, but it looks pretty great. I think it will look even better on the 401ppi iPhone 6+ display, and the increasingly high-res screens of the future. Tying logical display resolution to actual physical pixel resolution is pretty 💡🙉 at this point.

captainmuon 12y ago
> As an end user, I'm a fan of Apple's 'scaled resolution' solution. My Apple notebook renders the screen in memory at 3840 x 2160 and then scales that to fit the 2880 x 1800 physical display. The benefit of this approach is that you can smoothly scale the UI to suit your age/eyesight. That's what Windows 8.1 does when you have two screens with very different DPI (physical). When I connect my Yoga Pro 2 (with "retina"-like resolution) to my external 23" screen, it renders most applications at the high resolution, and then downscales them so they have the same size on both displays. The biggest problem with this approach is that crisp fonts on windows rely heavily on rgb sub-pixel-rendering. If your application doesn't directly paint to individual pixels, it can't control the subpixels, and can only do greyscale antialiasing, which looks very blurred (especially next to my Yoga Pro, where text looks like printed). You can tell windows "I know what I'm doing, give me the raw pixels", but that comes with a whole lot of other problems, and I've never seen a single app get that right. (What I'd really like as a developer would be to develop in (real) cm, inches, and em. Have them exactly match the physical sizes, for mobile and desktop screens (projectors would pretend to be a desktop). Have an option to "snap" lines to physical pixels. And on non-hidpi screens, render everything with subpixel-awareness, which triples your horizontal resolution.)
mbq 12y ago
Reasonable UI systems and not-overdesigned programs respect your UI font size setting and scale the rest accordingly, while equal resolutions allow hinting to do its job and produce a sharp output in an intelligent way. The brute-force approach of densifying monitors is a dirty hack and luckily doesn't scale at all.
- veidr 12y ago
  I understand your position, but I don't agree with it at all. "Reasonable" and "not-overdesigned" are rarely concerns that last into the future. And I don't think they even hold up given today's (high-end) technology. Why on earth would font size be the arbiter of anything other than font size? Some programs don't even display text. Logically, it makes a lot more sense to scale the entire display (or, sure, subsets of it). That's still technically challenging for some of today's systems, but not all of them. And it will be a vanishingly small number of them as we move into the future.

by veidr 12y ago

captainmuon 12y ago

> As an end user, I'm a fan of Apple's 'scaled resolution' solution. My Apple notebook renders the screen in memory at 3840 x 2160 and then scales that to fit the 2880 x 1800 physical display. The benefit of this approach is that you can smoothly scale the UI to suit your age/eyesight. That's what Windows 8.1 does when you have two screens with very different DPI (physical). When I connect my Yoga Pro 2 (with "retina"-like resolution) to my external 23" screen, it renders most applications at the high resolution, and then downscales them so they have the same size on both displays. The biggest problem with this approach is that crisp fonts on windows rely heavily on rgb sub-pixel-rendering. If your application doesn't directly paint to individual pixels, it can't control the subpixels, and can only do greyscale antialiasing, which looks very blurred (especially next to my Yoga Pro, where text looks like printed). You can tell windows "I know what I'm doing, give me the raw pixels", but that comes with a whole lot of other problems, and I've never seen a single app get that right. (What I'd really like as a developer would be to develop in (real) cm, inches, and em. Have them exactly match the physical sizes, for mobile and desktop screens (projectors would pretend to be a desktop). Have an option to "snap" lines to physical pixels. And on non-hidpi screens, render everything with subpixel-awareness, which triples your horizontal resolution.)

mbq 12y ago

Reasonable UI systems and not-overdesigned programs respect your UI font size setting and scale the rest accordingly, while equal resolutions allow hinting to do its job and produce a sharp output in an intelligent way. The brute-force approach of densifying monitors is a dirty hack and luckily doesn't scale at all.

veidr 12y ago
I understand your position, but I don't agree with it at all. "Reasonable" and "not-overdesigned" are rarely concerns that last into the future. And I don't think they even hold up given today's (high-end) technology. Why on earth would font size be the arbiter of anything other than font size? Some programs don't even display text. Logically, it makes a lot more sense to scale the entire display (or, sure, subsets of it). That's still technically challenging for some of today's systems, but not all of them. And it will be a vanishingly small number of them as we move into the future.