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Comment by amarshall | Hacker News Reader

That doesn’t really help, as while typically it’s assumed the aspect ratio is 16:9, that’s not always true, making such a scheme ambiguous. Listing vertical resolution with aspect ratio is fairly sane, though. Or use standardized specific resolutions (e.g. FHD, QHD, 4K UHD).

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These specifications don't mean anything for a lot of people. To me they sound like marketing buzzwords that companies use to try to sell me inferior products. I'd much rather have them say 2k than any of the "FHD" abbreviations.

I actually like the abbreviations because, while exceedingly optimistic if you sound out what each letter means, every vendor maps them to the same number of pixels. For example "QHD" or "Quad HD" means 2560x1440. "That's not 4 times HD, what a dumb name," I hear you scream. But in this system, HD is 1280x720, not 1920x1080 as everyone in the real world understands it. But it's fine, because anyone selling their monitor as QHD will be giving you a 1440p display. They get to mislead you as to the specifications... in a standard way that everyone agrees is the maximum amount of misleading they can get away with, so you actually know what you're getting! (If they did 4x "real" HD, then they'd call it "UHD" or "Ultra High Definition".) It's all genius and I love it.

Perhaps they don’t mean anything for a lot of people, but ambiguous terms mean nothing precise to anyone at all, so how useful are they really? At least a term one doesn’t know they can look up and learn, rather than be perpetually misled by ambiguous terms.

If anything 2K and 4K and 1440p are the more marketing terms because their ambiguity allows companies to apply them to products in a misleading way to market their product as something better than it is.

At least FHD almost universally means 1920×1080 and is googlable. This is less true for QHD / QHD+, unfortunately.

I thought QHD was almost unambiguously 1440x2560 (4xHD), and QHD+ was wider than that.

I think QHD+ is a little more ambiguous, as it could also reasonably be used to refer to taller displays (16:10 display at 2560x1600, for instance).

Also, annoyingly enough, QHD itself can stand for "Quad HD" or "Quarter HD", the old smartphone standard of 960x540, which admittedly has pretty much entirely fallen out of use

Isn't that qHD?

Today, it is. But humans are usually not very good at paying attention to the case and machines are too often very bad at preserving it (the best — or should I say worst — example being search engines). And that's without even taking into account the fact that the need to distinguish both didn't exist before QHD was a thing and that most people have no idea there's ambiguity at all.

It's exactly the opposite. Whenever you see 2K you have to check what they actually mean with that. I can be ~2000xAnything or they can blatantly lie and name 1440x1440 2K. FHD however is defined its exactly 1920x1080 and nothing else.

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