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Comment by Munksgaard | Hacker News Reader

So why is it that we're still stuck with 1920x1080 on our desktop displays? And don't even get me started on laptops!

For the longest time, operating systems didn't really work in High DPI. At Apple, a lot of the designs relied on pixel art, and scaling it looked terrible. There are breadcrumbs for scaling in OS X that date back to Tiger or Leopard.

This is one of the reasons why the iPhone4 straight up doubled the resolution even though it made for kind of a wacky display resolution (as opposed to 1024x600 or something more standard like that)

Mountain Lion is supposed to finally get all that HighDPI stuff right though, according to the rumors.

I'm only really familiar with the Apple side of things though, maybe Metro has similar design considerations in mind.

For the longest time, operating systems didn't really work in High DPI.

Back in 2000 I was using 1920x1200 on a 12" laptop. I was running both WinXP and some version of Ubuntu, and they looked fine. Every since then I've had WUXGA screens and displays, until very recently when Dell and Lenovo decided to bail and move to the 1920x1080 short screens.

It's a step backwards.

I think your definition of 'looked fine' is a lot different than Steve Jobs' and people who need bifocals.

My guess is that your task bar in XP must have been less than a centimeter tall, the system font less than a millimeter tall. I know there are a lot of people like you who value having more on the screen like that, but realistically, that's not a very large market niche.

The goal at Apple was to keep roughly the same dimensions for interface elements while increasing the sharpness of text and icons. If the user wanted to, they could reduce the font size in whatever application they were using to make practical use of the increased pixel density.

Yield, if I had to guess. Manufacturing a 24" 16:9 300dpi screen would lead to a resolution of around 6259x3543. Now consider the manufacturing waste due to defective pixels in existing screens at current resolutions, raise that rate by a few orders of magnitude to account for the need to fit more pixels of a higher density (== increased defect rate by itself) in the same physical surface area (== increased chance of a single piece of substrate containing too many defective pixels).

Finally, consider the power consumption of the 3D card required to drive a modern game natively at this resolution

Seven years ago I bought a Dell 30" with 2560x1600 resolution for about $1500. Today the biggest monitor I can find is still the same 30" at $1500. What the hell?

Maybe you haven't been looking hard enough? I've been using HP's 27"2560x1440 for months hooking up to my lowly macbook air 11. Cost ~$660, worth every cent (for comparison, brought the first Dell 24"1920 display when it first came out for ~$1k).

For laptops, the (pretty strong) rumor is that new macbook pros coming out in summer will be much higher res, potentially up to double current resolutions.

For current laptops, the macbook airs and similar PCs currently have the highest "usable" resolutions. The sony vaio z and p has the highest resolutions.

Unfortunately, you have to look pretty hard. The HP, a Dell, and Apple's Thunderbolt Display are the only three proper 27" displays on the market apart from some significantly higher-priced options. Nearly everything else from every manufacturer is one-size-fits-all 1080p, your only choice being how big the pixels are.

Interestingly, there were some cheap Korean 27" 2560x1440 displays that came to prominence recently, mainly because they were originally selling for ~$370. The panels themselves are the same as those in the 27" Apple and Dell displays, just ones that didn't meet Apple and Dell's requirements.

You can search for "Yamasaki Catleap", if you're curious about it.

spelling: Yamakasi

Interesting, never heard of them. Reviews on Amazon consist of two "I can't believe I got this for half the price of a Cinema Display" and one "handful of problems but too much trouble to send it back to Korea." Not terrible odds, I suppose.

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