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Comment by jmccree | Hacker News Reader

With the new resolutions being pumped out on laptops, (2,880 x 1,620 for 15" Thinkpad W series) it was inevitable desktop monitors would have to catch up.

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A friend of mine had a retina-quality screen on his laptop in 2003. I think it was a ThinkPad with a 2048 x 1536 screen. Of course, at the time there wasn't a concept of resolution-independent scaling, so it didn't look as nice as today's retina displays.

specs: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:R50p

could laptop graphics cards handle that type of resolution back then?

1600x1200 was commonplace as early as 2001 (in a Dell Inspiron 8000, I believe).

I feel obliged to mention that I have an i8k and it's still working beautifully.

Back then almost all UI rendering was software based. The graphics card just needed a large enough frame buffer.

The lack of fancy compositing and animation effects gave these high resolutions devices comparable performance to their standard resolution counterparts.

It was a lot easier back when all you cared about was the 2D performance of basic shapes (lines, circles, fills), and the animation for moving a window was just an outline.

Back when there were CRTs, people were regularly running 2048x1536 on Windows 98 era hardware.

edit for context: bsimpson's comment originally said "I think it was a Thinkpad with a 1080p monitor"

Minor niggles:

1. 1080p would have been rare in 2003, considering 16:10 was the usual widescreen format at the time[0].

2. In order for a 1080p to be "retina" (by Apple's standards, not true retina[1]), at the typical 20" viewing distance of a laptop, it would have to be only a 9" screen. I don't think they ever made a 9" Thinkpad, but I could be wrong.

More comparative info on the Retina Display wiki page[2].

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widescreen#Transition_to_widesc...

[1]: http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_4_ShootOut.htm#Retina

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_Display#Retina_Display_m...

I looked it up, and it was 2048 x 1536, which is retina at 20", according to isthisretina.com.

Ah nice, that must have cost a pretty penny to get that screen. I still wonder if that's not quite retina though. For better or for worse, Apple coined the phrase, and I'd tend to peg off of that to make 220ppi @ 20" the lower bound for retina-quality. Maybe 200ppi. 170ppi @ 20" is quite a step down from that.

That's 4:3, not even close to the 16:9 aspect ratio that 1080p implies... and you edited your post to take that out. Okay then!

It wasn't my laptop, so I didn't know the details. I just remembered it being around 2000px. My original reply was meant to be a "hey, so I did some research and edited the post." Sorry for any confusion.

No worries! I just put some context in my reply so that it made sense, not as a comment on your edits.

2,880 x 1,620 for 15" Thinkpad W series

I wanted to get some info on this, and found this:

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/w-series/w540/

but also http://blog.laptopmag.com/lenovo-thinkpad-w540

edit: Oh shit. Looks like they're stuff a numpad on the thing.

http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/Lenovo-Announces-Thin...

WTF.

I'm super worried, as I am full on addicted to ThinkPad keyboard/hardware. I used an external usb thinkpad keyboard with a work provided macbook pro, and using same usb thinkpad keyboard plugged into my actual thinkpad to type this reply. I can't live with out my trackpoint (little red dot/nipple for you non-TPers out there). I'm really worried about the direction Lenovo is heading, but so far they have been atleast semi-cautious with the T/W series thinkpads.

I've thought about doing the same. I have a trackpoint USB keyboard for my home PC, which is nice because it matches the keyboard on my laptop.

I figure that worst case if I end up with a new laptop without the trackpoint I'd just grab another Thinkpad USB keyboard and plop it over the top.

Back when "laptop" meant "can carry short distances in a shoulder bag" I work mainly on home-built desktop machines. That meant I got the screen rez I liked, the keyboard I liked, the graphics card, etc.

I keep hoping for the day when portable components are such that I can just use the CPU in my phone (or some other) with the screen and keyboard of my choice.

As it is one has to make a list of what things you can or cannot live without and see what compromises you need to accept in a laptop.

Note that this is still not even close to the pixel density on the Thinkpad you described. The 32" Dell monitor has 140DPI, 2880x1620 has 220DPI, which is a huge difference (compare today's high resolution desktop displays with a MBP's Retina display).

For my personal use, I prefer my laptop to have a higher dpi due to the distances involved. My current 15" thinkpad 1080p display is already straining my eyesight when I use it as a 2nd monitor on my desk, but is very nice when working directly on the laptop. So I'm still excited about this.

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