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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

According to the technical specs, the new MBP will support both 1920x1200 and 1680x1050 as "scaled" resolutions. Usually "scaled" meant you'd get blurrovision but with such a high DPI screen, scaling up to 2880x1800 might be bearable? I'm intrigued to see how it looks because 1920x1200 at 15" would be ideal.

UPDATE: 2880 / 1920 = 1.5 and the iPad 3's Retina display (at least) is a very precise linear RGBRGBRGBRGB arrangement - http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ipad-3... - so running 1920 wide on 2880 would essentially result in "pixels" of RGBR BRGB RGBR BRGB and so on with an extra "shared" green across two pixels. I'm NOT a display or color expert and really hope someone who is will respond but that seems to me like it could render rather nicely with some fringing between sharply contrasting colors (e.g. yellow and blue or green and magenta).

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According to Jason Snell of MacWorld, it doesn't look blurry at non-native resolutions. https://twitter.com/jsnell/status/212321903740862465

> I'm certainly very intrigued to see how it looks because 1920x1200 at 15" would be ideal.

Ditto. My concern is the same as the author's. Any antialiasing while looking at code drives me nuts, so I use a pixel-perfect bitmap font and turn antialiasing off. I'll have to play with a machine at the Apple store to see if it'll be noticeable when using a "scaled" resolution.

I like bitmap fonts, but I prefer them not to be so tiny that my nose touches the screen.

If people are finding them too small, making a new bitmap font which is big enough to use on a Retina display is not an issue in the slightest.

Anandtech says that the resolutions are actually calculated at double the resolution and then scaled down, so if you pick 1920x1200, the GPU actually calculates 3840x2400 and then scales it down to 2880x1800.

The results apparently are fairly good compared to past attempts at non-native resolutions.

Update: Here is the article, http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-ma...

> running 1920 wide on 2880 would essentially result in "pixels" of RGBR BRGB RGBR BRGB and so on

What about vertical blurriness? If you just grouped the subpixels that way you would get non-square pixels, so you would still need to apply scaling in the vertical direction.

Ohh, I knew there had to be a flaw in my thinking and you've found it. Yep, you're right.

My guess is it'll still be unreasonably blurry – I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

Update on this – I saw it in the store and it looks really good. It's barely blurrier than the 1440 x 900 setting and definitely looks better than a native 1920 x 1200 panel would.

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