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Comment by dedward | Hacker News Reader

I'd never want to go back to 4:3 - but I do miss the higher DPI we had, what, a decade ago ? My 15" 4:3 1600x1200 toshiba was awesome. Give me a modern widescreen laptop with the same (or given it's been a decade, how about even higher) DPI and I'll be happy.

The high-DPI laptop screens didn't stick around long - I suspect mainly because OS support at the time didn't adjust well - fonts were too small for many people to read, the settings to adjust them for the higher DPI screens didn't work all that well and caused a lot of apps to misbehave , and so the market clearly preferred the lower DPI screens. Given they were probably much cheaper to produce - it's a no-brainer for the manufacturers - drop the high-density displays.

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It's a shame that DPI hasn't benefited from Moore's law. Developers shouldn't need to worry about pixels, but there still aren't enough to spare. Unfortunately, netbooks and tablets have taken us a step backwards (most web developers had already abandoned support for 800x600 screens, and even some native apps can't accommodate such short vertical resolutions). I'd much rather target precise measurements or percentages and let the OS adapt the output to a very high resolution display.

It's a shame that DPI hasn't benefited from Moore's law.

Moore's law holds that the number of transistors that will fit on a chip doubles every two years, later reduced to 18 months: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law . Unless I'm missing something -- which is always possible -- it doesn't have anything to do with monitors.

If you're going to be pendantic, do it right: Moore's Law is about the price of transistors on a single IC. For instance, the actual Moore's Law hasn't quite stalled yet, we're still getting transistors for cheaper even if clockspeeds themselves have stalled. It's also independent of the wafer size so you can still get a generation of Moore's Law just by growing the wafer size without raising the price.

I daresay monitors actually have benefited from that, but instead of raising resolution we've been dropping prices. Though I would imagine LCD-related fab processes not technically under Moore's Law are responsible for more of that.

It should be obvious what he means, which is that the number of X in a piece of technology is multiplied by Y every Z <period of time>.

I think that both HP and Dell offer 1920 wide 15" displays. But where I could get 24" display with similar DPI/PPI?

There was an IBM display with ~3800x2560 22" a few years ago. Sadly, it was discontinued some years after being introduced. IIRC 2008 or 2009 some manufacturer wanted to make them again, with a roughly 10k$ price.

Edit: That was the IBM T220/T221. In 2007, Toshiba announced a revival, but didn't end up producing them.

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