Where are all the high-resolution desktop displays?

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/130605-where-are-all-the-high-resolution-desktop-displays

by yarianluis • 14 years ago

43 52 14 years ago

munger• 14 years ago

Also, bring back 16:10! Stop putting 1366x768 screens on laptops that are 14, 15 and even 17 inches and saying it's HD! Get off my lawn!

Zak5• 14 years ago

16:10? Let's just go all the way - 16:12!

hayksaakian3• 14 years ago

I see what you did there.

Zak5• 14 years ago

This is old, and includes an update mentioning Apple's Retina Macbook Pro, introduced after the article was published.

I think a better question is why nobody else is offering high-res panels on laptops. The Nexus 10 tablet has more pixels than any non-Apple laptop ever produced.

joonix• 14 years ago

I just bought a $500 laptop for my father and was surprised at how laptop displays haven't gotten much better since I last shopped over 3 years ago. They're all x768, even on 15.6" notebooks. The pixels are easily noticeable on the 15" Samsung I bought for him. I would have thought displays improved over all these years, even on low end laptops, but I guess other than the shift to LED-lit screens a few years ago, not much else has happened outside of MacBooks and some Ultrabooks.

DeepDuh3• 14 years ago

At 500$ I wouldn't be surprised at all. Did you read the article? That's just 200$ over the manufacturing cost of a retina iphone. I'm rather surprised that lenovos retailed at 2500$ are still stuck at low resolutions - and they still have quality control issues like overheating GPUs. People that call out rMBPs as expensive clearly don't get what they're about, there are simply no comparable alternatives at that price point.

Note: Other points critizised such as repairability are very valid however.

jyap2• 14 years ago

It is because the PC industry doesn't innovate. It was driven to commoditization and 4 to 5 percent profit margins.

michaelt• 14 years ago

Until recently, graphics scaling didn't work very well - so high resolution meant tiny icons and text over-running its allocated space.

OS and software vendors didn't fix this because no-one had high resolution displays, and display makers didn't make high resolution displays because everything looked like ass.

I'm not a big apple user, but I'll admit there are times when having the hardware and OS designed under the same command has its advantages.

rythie2• 14 years ago

It's that the software (Windows primarily) can't adapt for high PPI displays. 1920x1080 displays on laptops were around several years ago.

Zak5• 14 years ago

2048x1536 displays were available on laptops a decade ago[0], and they were IPS. That's a megapixel more than 1920x1080.

I'm sure the inability of Windows to cope with the high resolution gracefully was part of the reason those never really caught on, but there wasn't much of an effort to market them either. Did you know they existed? I barely did, and I pay a great deal of attention to such things. There was no meaningful effort to market them. They were custom-order options that only a few enthusiasts and institutional IT departments would even be aware existed.

My mother knows what a "retina display" is.

[0] If you're curious, the models offering QXGA panels were the NEC Versa P700 and the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad R50p. Such panels can be made to work with several other 15" 4:3 Thinkpad models.

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

If monitors are stuck at 2560x1600 forever because it's "good enough", I'm going to be very disappointed. I'm sure I'm not the only one who sits 10 inches away from his screen.

davidcuddeback• 14 years ago

I don't think you'll need to worry about that. At least a couple manufacturers are working on 4k (3840x2160) monitors. The most promising one I've seen is Sharp's PN-K321, expected to be about $5500 when it comes out [1].

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/27/sharp-pn-k321-4k-igzo-lcd...

mtgx• 14 years ago

Why are 4k monitors and TV's so much more expensive than 1080p ones? If it's priced per pixel, they still should be only around 4x more expensive, but the current prices are much higher. I mean we're even seeing 10" 2560x1600 (2x the pixels) very high quality IPS displays in sub $500 devices, where the 10" display itself is probably $100 at most. So what's going on? Is it just the "rip off the earlier adopter with a 10x-the-cost price tag" strategy at play here?

yantis5• 14 years ago

I current use three 3840x2160 monitors (4K displays) (55" each) which in my opinion is a huge upgrade to my previous six 30" Apple cinema display configuration.

I got mine from IDT (http://toshibadisplays.com) for around 30k USD each a couple years ago. I think they might be considerably less now especially with the new 32" 4K displays coming out in 2013.

The resolution is split so every display is basically 1920x2160 x2. The hard part is driving these since each one is considered two monitors by the host OS. I use a Quadro Plex 7000 to power two of them and just use my third one with Synergy on a second machine.

Nvidia has a tool called Mosiac which allows you to turn the screens into one big screen. I also think the ATI Eyeinfinity cards are an option but I personally never tried those.

DeepDuh3• 14 years ago

I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining working on so much screen estate, I think it would rather distract me. However I'd like to try some flight simulators there ;).

What field do you work in?

kayoone• 14 years ago

id like to know what are you work in to justify that kind of setup :)

raphman• 14 years ago

I, too, would like to learn more about a) why you are using such a setup, and b) how having so much screen real estate affects how you work.

yantis5• 14 years ago

I consider my line of work a general technologist. I find I have to consume huge amounts of information so I can advise the people I work with. Though for programming or reverse engineering its amazing. I love the fact I can run Visual Studio on one screen and still have the ability to have WinDbg and IDA Pro as well as the app I am working on all running and visible as well as keep whatever dashboards open at the same time. I also like to have at least one Linux virtual machine open simply because I prefer Linux for quick tasks so I always have a terminal open and ready to go (VMs really are awesome for compartmentalizing but its a whole another topic).

Its really hard to describe the effect of this size of screen and resolution. You can consume information at a much faster and natural rate as compared to a smaller display that is high resolution (ie: a 2880x1800 retina). I think your brain has to use extra processing power to scale the fonts up or something or maybe the patterns your brain uses to build the letters and words just work better when its clearly visible without any thinking. Who knows... I just know it increases my productivity leaps and bounds.

I figure for something that I spend over a third of my life in front of I want them to make me as efficient as possible. Some people like to buy cars. I like to buy things to be more efficient and these monitors help me do this.

BTW, All of these mount nicely on a geek desk without the top (the smaller of the two versions they sell). They just fit perfectly. So I use four Geek desks.. 3 for the monitors and one in the center. If you want an amazing desk setup that is the way to do it. That way you can sit or stand when you work.

mietek• 14 years ago

Can you quote the make and model of these monitors? The site you linked only seems to list 1920x1080 displays.

yantis5• 14 years ago

Even though they sell them as Toshiba monitors they ship you Chilin brand model ST-HB561X. Here is a PDF of the specs: www.chilinsolutions.com/LiteratureRetrieve.aspx?ID=51570 according to the rep they are the same.

It may also be worth noting that these operate at 50 Hz (I didn't see it int he specs above). Which is fine for me for pretty much anything. I mention this because 10 years ago or so I was using an IBM T220 with a refresh rate of 24 Hz with a similar resolution and it was brutal. Though I honestly never am bothered by the 50 hz refresh and only notice it if I am trying to push some game to max settings.

garyrichardson2• 14 years ago

I declare BS. I'm sitting on my couch looking at my 55" TV right now. I can not contemplate a work environment where three 55" monitors would be usable for coding. You'd spend way too much time swivelling your head back and forth at any distance that text would be reasonable to read. Either that, or you have the monitors so far away that it's like using 30" monitors at low res.

In a NOC? Maybe. Day trader? Possibly. Not someone using a computer with the information density of source code.

yantis5• 14 years ago

Distance is 3 1/2 feet for the front monitor and 3 feet for the side monitors but with a bit more angle on the sides. Also, worth noting for me I find I use the left and middle one 90% of the time and the 3rd one is mostly for dashboards and email etc. I would assume that is probably very similar any any multi monitor setup.

I am trying to relate to your comment on your 55" TV. I guess the best way I can explain it is If its like any other TV out there it has a resolution of 1920x1080 at 1080p. So if you tried to do any work at any distance it would be useless like you stated above. As a thought experiment take your TV and chop it into four sections and take your TVs resolution and put it in one of those squares. That is what 3840x2160 resolution is like. Its any easy way to remember 4K as 4 times your 1080p resolution (though it really means 4K as in 4000). Hopefully that helps explain it better. If not just let me know.

Too2• 14 years ago

Where are all the high resolution desktop displays? They are stuck in the 90s. Back then I had a 21" CRT that could run at something like 2400x1800. Not all the way to retina but still in a different league than todays screens. It could also run at something like 120Hz refresh rate, but then you had to turn down the resolution to more like 1280x1024.

stinos2• 14 years ago

exactly. I loved those displays, running at at least 90Hz. That in a dual moitor setup was hard on your desk becasue of the weight, but awesome for programming. Being so used to the vast amount of vertical space, I felt sort of let down by the 'now let's make all widescreen displays' movement. 1080 pixels vertically really doesn't do it for me. But maybe it's just me? Sometimes I see people programming, with the editor taking up only half of the screen and the rest all IDE windows and toolbars and whatnot. That's like 15 lines of code on one screen. I don't get it.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

Yep, this is why I try to avoid IDEs whenever I can. The best "IDE" is Vim running in Screen in urxvt.

Too2• 14 years ago

Rotate the screen 90 degrees :)

blaabjerg• 14 years ago

I'm quite pleased with the el cheapo 2560x1440 Korean 27" IPS panel I bought on eBay a few months back. Set me back less than $300 including shipping to Europe.

It's nowhere near the pixel density of the small devices of course, but it's quite adequate for my use.

TheHeasman• 14 years ago

Also; there's been an international LCD price fixing conspiracy,

That... makes the most sense compared to the other arguments http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/november/lcd-price-fixi...

zyb09• 14 years ago

Because the demand for HiDPI desktop displays isn't there yet. You would buy one, and so would I, but overall they wouldn't sell much, compared to the standard 1080p panels. We have to wait another year until Apple introduces Retina iMacs, tells everybody how awesome they are and why people absolutely need Retina displays. Then suddenly there will be steep increase in the demand of HiDPI panels, and a few month later every manufaturer starts offering them. If I learned anything the last few years, it's that's how it works.

melling• 14 years ago

So, we all agree that "Retina" displays are better? The problem is that it won't become popular until a company, which tends to be Apple, comes along with the right marketing so the average consumer feels the need to spend the extra money on the technology. Personally, I wouldn't mind if Microsoft joined in and promoted HiDPI, for example, with Windows 8.

Apple introduced USB in the later 90's. It took forever before the PC industry adopted it. I don't think anyone has to pay licensing fees for Thunderbolt connectors. How long do we have to wait before every PC ships with a port?

moe• 14 years ago

Typing this on a 27" 2560×1440 I don't see myself needing much more.

Text remains crisp down to sizes much smaller than what I can comfortably read at a normal viewing distance, so there's little I could do with even more pixel estate.

That is not to say that I wouldn't like a display with even higher resolution, but the returns diminish really rapidly from here.

I'm definitely looking forward more to panels improving on other metrics such as contrast, color reproduction and viewing angles (IPS glow).

rartichoke• 14 years ago

Prices are insane because monitor manufacturers are the scum of the earth. They are constantly getting in trouble for price fixing.

It's ridiculous that in today's day and age we still have inferior monitors compared to the mid/late 90s. The korean 27" S-IPS 1440 monitors are $275-300ish US.

Where are all the high-resolution desktop displays?

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