I have a new TiBook 800 and I love the new built-in display. I was a little concerned by the numbers at first too, but the visual effect compared to my old 1152x768 display is that the 1280x854 simply looks sharper and roomier. Text is still comfortably large enough to read easily.
This is one of the funniest threads I've ever seen. Mr. kittylitter's fixed-pixel fonts are too small on the high-resolution, crisp, bright screen on a Powerbook, so he decides the problem is the Powerbook, not his site?
First, he ought to try to read his site on one of the enormously popular Wintel laptops with 1600x1200 15-inch screens. Or as others noted, whether he'll grind in his heels in protest when crisp paper-like screens of 200 to 300dpi arrive in coming years. I'm curious if he'll start a letter-writing campaign to the computer manufacturers to recall those computers, because his fonts are too small on them. Stop the assembly lines! Stop responding to consumer demand! The web designer has spoken!
He has fallen prey to the all-too-common disease of designers, who think that their designs exist only for their own sense of self-satisfaction, rather than to be read or used by the public. If the public (using their high-resolution screens) can't read your site, it's your fault, (or possibly the fault of your tool), but not the public's fault.
I think it's ivory. Strange about your soundsticks. I have the same computer as you, and they work fine, actually seem louder off of the TiBook than they were off of an iMac.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Just another positive data point... my new TiBook 800 and my Soundsticks and iSub get along just fine.
While I understand the point, most PC laptops of comparable price as the PowerBook ship with MUCH higher resolution screens. 1600x1200 on a 15". Not at all good for your design.
The 'thousands of people' not buying the powerbook due to the new screen resolution seem to be just you. I can assure you that there is NO WAY that Apple will decrease the resolution. If anything, resolutions will get even higher, and your text will be even more unreadable.
Personally, I have no problems using your site at 1152x on a first-generation Titanium or one of the latest- the 1280s... this is rather futile. If you don't like the new resolution, buy an old one...
Lets face it Apple WILL see sense and return t o the old resolution for the powerbook - there are thousands of people I have read reports of not buying this new edition because of this - what a turkey of an idea <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>
Yep. People have been asking for a better resolution on the Ti's all along and Apple gave it to them. Now that a few people are bitching they're gunna change it back Idiot.
For most people having more screen real estate is far more important than how a web site using 8-point fonts will look to a potential client. Besides, at about 101 dpi, the new TiBook display isn't too far off from the common 96 dpi Windows standard, and that wouldn't be a bad resolution for you to aim your design at anyway.
While I won't dispute your web design talents, and am willing to believe you've won awards for your work, I would still question the wisdom of using such small fonts as I saw on your web site for anything but sidebars, footnotes, and redundant labeling of button or links the function of which is already graphically clear.
The 800x600 or 1024x768 standards are good targets in terms of screen real estate -- a good way to make sure that the vast majority of users will not get clipped text, clipped images or unwanted scrollbars.
But those standards shouldn't be used as a basis for expected pixel density. To make your sites easily readable for the greatest number of users, you have to aim high in that regard, not low. To cover both ends of the spectrum at once, perhaps the 12.1" display in an iBook might be close to ideal.
For myself, I'd rather have more screen real estate to spread out in to do my work, and only occasionally switch to a lowest-common-denominator display to check my work. For that use, the scaled display modes, even if a little blurry, are good enough for me.
<strong>You know, we're squabbling here about aesthetics and the design of current sites, but the fact is that we MUST make progress where DPI is concerned eventually. Self-assembling organic LED monitors are going to be available, and sooner than you might think. Displays will be capable of not 72 DPI, not 96 DPI, but orders of magnitude higher. Many suspect we'll eventuallly have monitors capable of higher resolution than magazine print today.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I think the transition to higher display resolutions is going to be a rocky one. It's hard to break the neat one-to-one pixel relationship between display pixels and source pixels that many small fonts and bit-mapped images depend upon. For example, take one of the emoticons used on this web site -->
With current display technology, you can't scale that graphic up or down by, say, 15% or 43%, without the end result looking terrible. If you tried to use some sort of vector rather than pixel representation for this symbol, the end result would probably be a little fuzzy and wobbly at any size that you'd normally want to use in the context of running text. To get a crisp, clear, annoying little lemon yellow grin, you have to map what you want, pixel by pixel, both in creating and in displaying the image.
Only when we get to around 200 dpi, with I'd guess 300 dpi being much better for such things, will it be possible to make a clean break from deliberately targeting display pixels to using abstract vector graphics for small fonts, small icons, and fine lines.
300 dpi might not sound very impressive to those who remember 300 dpi laser printers, but you have to remember that that was 300 dpi of black or white, fully on or fully off, binary pixels. 300 dpi combined with 24-bit color and anti-aliasing will be breathtaking.
We're awfully close to 150 dpi displays as it is right now. Probably someone has 200 dpi in a lab somewhere. But I'd think that affordable, mass-market 300 dpi computer displays are a few years off at least. I expect a transition period with many instances of fuzzy and/or too small graphics and text until it all settles down into a new paradigm where computer displays are treated, in terms of resolution, more like printers are treated today.
phew, kittylitter seems to have left, what an ass.
How much processing power would it take to output a virtually seamless (pixel-less) picture onto a 300 dpi screen? i suppose video card technology will progress at a similar pace to the displays. all i know is that the 1024x768 on my iBook looks virtually seamless when i move my head back a few feet, a monitor with 300 dpi would look like real life!
<strong>Will we sit in front of our computers at a single resolution all day, passive and unchanging? No. We will use Zoom, as well as the zoom features in our various applications, to adjust according to what we're doing. Those of us who work in FrameMaker or Photoshop already adjust the zoom dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It's one thing to zoom around in PhotoShop while you're editing and tweaking an image. It would be quite another thing if you HAD TO rely on zooming in and out when browsing a web page, in a constant struggle between lost detail, eyestrain, and screen real estate.
Dismiss it as being "passive" if you like, but most of the time people will want to set one display resolution and stay there, rather than "interact" with their computers like a farsighted person struggling with tiny print and a magnifying glass.
<strong>Will there be distortion? Sometimes, yes. Is there distortion today? All the time. We're just used to the type we have now.</strong>
Being used to something, and liking it, are two different things. Given that 200+ dpi displays aren't here yet, I'd dearly love to turn off antialiasing on smaller fonts with OS X, except that in many cases the fonts aren't very well hinted for non-antialiased use. I'd much prefer it if OS X fonts at 12 points or less looked as clean as Geneva, Monaco, or Times in OS 9.
Of course, give me 200 dpi or more and I'll be happy with antialiased fonts at all sizes.
<strong>As for your wasteland comment, and your suggestion that 800x600 is currently the only reasonable non-native resolution on these 1600x1200 screens, well, obviously that's the best non-native resolution on a 1600x1200 screen. Each pixel takes exactly four blocks, which produces precisely the same display as if the screen were actually an 800x600 screen, except that each "pixel" is made of four.</strong>
That was indeed my point. But I'd also point out that 800x600 is a very cramped resolution these days, and a lot of people find 800x600 spread on a large display to look awkwardly oversized.
<strong>So when laptops have 2048x1536 displays, the nexxt logical step, then we can drop down to 1024x768 and get exact output.
It turns out that the wasteland isn't a wasteland at all.</strong>
2048x1536 on our hypothetical 15" display is about 170 dpi, and that's functionally equivalent to an 85 dpi display using a clean 4:1 antialiasing. The "See Spot Run" oversized text would be gone, so maybe we can consider 170 dpi a reasonable entry point to a usable micropixel display technology, but it's still a little shy of the screen real estate most people want these days unless you use that 170 dpi on a bigger display.
<strong>Any of the even resolutions from 130 DPI to 200 DPI can be exactly converted to 65 through 100 DPI, and since the "normal" Mac DPI is 72, 65 isn't a hardship, and anything from there up to 100, just over the "normal" Windows DPI of 96, will look just fine.</strong>
I might be willing to concede 170 dpi in some circumstances, but below that, with half-resolutions like 65 and 72 dpi (even if 72 dpi is nominally, though not very much in practice, the Mac standard) such displays would look clumsy to most people these days.
<strong>Finally, the idea that running at non-native resolution is inherently ugly is a fallacy. Use Photoshop and scale any image you like to any higher size using cubic resampling and you'll get a nice output. Not flawless, but hardly ugly.</strong>
Photographic images react to this kind of manipulation better than line art, bit-mapped icons, and bit-mapped text, plenty of which still exist out there, especially on the web, and won't be replaced any time soon. Such graphics often do turn ugly when you try to scale them smaller, or just a little bigger, using bilinear or bicubic resampling.
Well say pretty soon we get 200 dpi screens, which is about twice the latest powerbook's resolution. The pb's screen is pretty darned detailed, twice the resolution would be virtually seamless unless you got your eyes like an inch away from the screen. I guess I don't really see the need for anything more than that.
Several people have now said that scaling the fonts at all looks terrible...
Where exactly do you think your fonts come from now? Do you think that when you open Word and select a 9pt font, then a 10pt, then a 69pt, then a 48pt, that the computer has versions of the font for all these sizes? Hundreds of bitmap fonts?
Hardly. These days computers use TrueType or PostScript fonts for almost everything. These are splined fonts. When rendered, they look *perfect* at any resolution except the very lowest ones, 12pt or below, where it gets hard to describe the shapes with the limited number of available pixels.
What you're thinking of is resampling of an already rendered bitmap image. That's becoming less and less common. Moreover, the higher the DPI of the display, the less resampling and then magnifying causes distortion. For example, displaying an 800x600 image on a 1024x768 LCD screen means some of the 800 lines will take 2 lines on the screen and some will take 3. That's a 50% difference, and is noticeable. Displaying the 800x600 image on a 4000x3000 screen, some of the 800 source lines will take 6 lines and some will take 7. That's a 15% distortion. The more pixels you have, the better you can scale.
As for kittylitter's specific objection to the JPGs looking ugly when scaled, it's clear that however good his or her aesthetic skills are, he or she doesn't understand the mathematics of the situation. The JPGs CAN'T look much uglier scaled up than when made. When they're scaled up to the same size on the screen they had one a lower-resolution screen they look THE SAME, barring the distortion from odd and even lines mentioned above. They're blockier than everything else on the page because they're a lower resolution pictures. That's what they originally looked like. They look bad if they are scaled to larger on the screen than they originally were. It's a different proposition.
One creates the JPGs at a _high resolution_ and programs the code to _scale down_ if necessary. Scaled down images, properly resampled, are beautiful. Just look at the dock. Set the size to small, and the magnification to maximum. The icons are 128x128, so at maximum under the cursor they're quite large and clear. They scale down smoothly all along the dock to a small 32x32 at the end. No jagged edges at all.
The fact is that higher resolutions provide greater flexibility. This is a truly ridiculous thread.
Well, yes and no. When high resolution is only used to cram the same things we'd normally view on bigger screens or with lower resolutions into a smaller space, all you get is eyestrain. This is a game of trading off readability for real estate, and for most people that's going to be a bad tradeoff even before you get down to about 130 dpi, like these 1600x1200 15" PC laptops that are out there now.
Sure, you can use non-native resolutions, if that's what you mean by flexibility, but they don't look very good. The only really high quality non-native resolution for such a display is 800x600, which is not very practical nowadays.
If I had to use one of these kinds of laptops, I'd hate being stuck with choices I'd have: (1) Sharp and crisp, but with tiny, tiny text. (2) Sharp and crisp, with all of my default font settings cranked up to, say, 18-pt, but then having my text out of proportion with many graphical elements, icons, and scattered bits of pre-bitmapped text. Also, many pieces of software will have fixed font sizes that I can't change, so I'll be stuck with tiny text in many places anyway. (3) Comfortably sized text, more consistent proportions between text and graphics, but an overall very fuzzy display with noticeable scaling artifacts. (4) Cleaner scaling, but really big, BIG text and very little screen real estate.
I think the range of pixel densities from about 110 dpi up to about 200 dpi is going to be a resolution wasteland for display devices. These resolutions aren't high enough to use for making a clean break from the current macro pixel-oriented display paradigm. Pixels at these resolutions, however, are also too small for practical use with that same paradigm.
We're talking about the "new Macintosh Powerbook high display resolution" in this thread. On the Macintosh, Mac OS X has provided, or will in Jaguar, all the tools to genuinely solve this problem.
Will we sit in front of our computers at a single resolution all day, passive and unchanging? No. We will use Zoom, as well as the zoom features in our various applications, to adjust according to what we're doing. Those of us who work in FrameMaker or Photoshop already adjust the zoom dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day.
Will there be distortion? Sometimes, yes. Is there distortion today? All the time. We're just used to the type we have now. Right now we have spatial aliasing, causing jaggies. Right now we have rather large colour blocks in compressed video. Right now we have a certain amount of sparkle on bilinearly filtered pictures.
But on OS X, we have less of all these things.
As for your wasteland comment, and your suggestion that 800x600 is currently the only reasonable non-native resolution on these 1600x1200 screens, well, obviously that's the best non-native resolution on a 1600x1200 screen. Each pixel takes exactly four blocks, which produces precisely the same display as if the screen were actually an 800x600 screen, except that each "pixel" is made of four. So when laptops have 2048x1536 displays, the nexxt logical step, then we can drop down to 1024x768 and get exact output.
It turns out that the wasteland isn't a wasteland at all. Any of the even resolutions from 130 DPI to 200 DPI can be exactly converted to 65 through 100 DPI, and since the "normal" Mac DPI is 72, 65 isn't a hardship, and anything from there up to 100, just over the "normal" Windows DPI of 96, will look just fine. That is to say, any screen in the 130 to 200 DPI range has a corresponding exact output screen at half the DPI which is in the old generation of monitor densities. So 1600x1200 is a little inconvenient because its half-resolution is 800x600. That just means we should crank it up further to give you worry-warts a more comfortable half-resolution.
Finally, the idea that running at non-native resolution is inherently ugly is a fallacy. Use Photoshop and scale any image you like to any higher size using cubic resampling and you'll get a nice output. Not flawless, but hardly ugly. On the other hand, try looking at an 800x600 desktop on a 1024x768 display. It will look, as you say, pretty bad. That's because the monitor can't do cubic resampling. Guess, however, what Quartz Extreme will do, via OpenGL. Well, bilinear filtering, which isn't as good but isn't half bad.
To recap the salient points of the thread:
-Vector graphics allow Zooming of the whole Mac OS X screen with every element in proportion, according to the Jaguar specifications.
-Higher-resolution screens allow better anti-aliasing of scaled images. Unevenness between adjacent scanlines, which is the cause of bad display at non-native resolutions, is inversely proportional to the native resolution.
-Content should be created for the highest size currently on the market and then scaled down. Then one can always scale up later as needed.
-Screens of 1600x1200 or more have perfect half-resolutions in the "normal" range.
-Monitors cannot perform advanced interpolation, so non-native resolutions look ugly, but the computer hardware can, and in Jaguar, it will.
<strong>Will we sit in front of our computers at a single resolution all day, passive and unchanging? No. We will use Zoom, as well as the zoom features in our various applications, to adjust according to what we're doing. Those of us who work in FrameMaker or Photoshop already adjust the zoom dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It's one thing to zoom around in PhotoShop while you're editing and tweaking an image. It would be quite another thing if you HAD TO rely on zooming in and out when you browsing a web page in a constant struggle between lost detail, eyestrain, and screen real estate.
Dismiss it as being "passive" if you like, but most of the time people will want to set one display resolution and stay there, rather than "interact" with their computers like a farsighted person struggling with tiny print and a magnifying glass.
<strong>Will there be distortion? Sometimes, yes. Is there distortion today? All the time. We're just used to the type we have now.</strong>
Being used to something, and liking it, are two different things. Given that 200+ dpi displays aren't here yet, I'd dearly love to turn off antialiasing on smaller fonts with OS X, except that in many cases the fonts aren't very well hinted for non-antialiased use. I'd much prefer it if OS X fonts at 12 points or less looked as clean as Geneva, Monaco, or Times in OS 9.
Of course, give me 200 dpi or more and I'll be happy with antialiased fonts at all sizes.
<strong>As for your wasteland comment, and your suggestion that 800x600 is currently the only reasonable non-native resolution on these 1600x1200 screens, well, obviously that's the best non-native resolution on a 1600x1200 screen. Each pixel takes exactly four blocks, which produces precisely the same display as if the screen were actually an 800x600 screen, except that each "pixel" is made of four.</strong>
That was indeed my point. But I'd also point out that 800x600 is a very cramped resolution these days, and a lot of people find 800x600 spread on a large display to look awkwardly oversized.
<strong>So when laptops have 2048x1536 displays, the nexxt logical step, then we can drop down to 1024x768 and get exact output.
It turns out that the wasteland isn't a wasteland at all.</strong>
2048x1536 on our hypothetical 15" display is about 170 dpi, and that's functionally equivalent to an 85 dpi display using a clean 4:1 antialiasing. The "See Spot Run" oversized text would be gone, so maybe we can consider 170 dpi a reasonable entry point to a usable micropixel display technology, but it's still a little shy of the screen real estate most people want these days unless you use that 170 dpi on a bigger display.
<strong>Any of the even resolutions from 130 DPI to 200 DPI can be exactly converted to 65 through 100 DPI, and since the "normal" Mac DPI is 72, 65 isn't a hardship, and anything from there up to 100, just over the "normal" Windows DPI of 96, will look just fine.</strong>
I might be willing to concede 170 dpi in some circumstances, but below that, with half-resolutions like 65 and 72 dpi (even if 72 dpi is nominally, though not very much in practice, the Mac standard) such displays would look clumsy to most people these days.
<strong>Finally, the idea that running at non-native resolution is inherently ugly is a fallacy. Use Photoshop and scale any image you like to any higher size using cubic resampling and you'll get a nice output. Not flawless, but hardly ugly.</strong>
Photographic images react to this kind of manipulation better than line art, bit mapped icons, and bit mapped text, plenty of which still exist out there, especially on the web, and won't be replaced any time soon. These things do often turn ugly when you try to scale them smaller, or just a little bigger, using bilinear or bicubic resampling.
"It's one thing to zoom around in PhotoShop while you're editing and tweaking an image. It would be quite another thing if you HAD TO rely on zooming in and out when you browsing a web page in a constant struggle between lost detail, eyestrain, and screen real estate.
"Dismiss it as being "passive" if you like, but most of the time people will want to set one display resolution and stay there, rather than "interact" with their computers like a farsighted person struggling with tiny print and a magnifying glass."
First, I don't mean passive in a perjorative sense. Passive means not taking an action, and I mean only that most people have had the luxury to be passive for a little while, hardly two or three years. Before that more than half of people had 15" monitors, and had to deal with a lot of zooming even when typing in Word.
Second, I hardly think scrolling around a magnified desktop is "struggling." The reality is that we already scroll around web-pages. That's why we have scroll bars. We've been scrolling since the beginning of the GUI.
Fundamentally, what I'm saying is that to complain because you've been given as much resolution as is practical right now, and that using a half-resolution of that forces you back to where you were only a few short years ago, is picky. It's a matter of demanding less than the most available real-estate on the most powerful processors with the bext video cards available. That's not a commercially sound combo, and Apple needs to go where the market wnats it to.
You have so many options to get the combination you want: buy an older PowerBook, run off a desktop monitor most of the time using the portability only for when you must have it (at which time dealing with a little scaling trouble should be secondary to using the computer), accept switching resolutions occasionally and scrolling web-pages, accept web-pages being out of proportion from time to time (remember just a few short years ago when tables weren't compatible across both browsers and pages were therefore wonky?), buy an iBook (they're also cooler to the touch and have better battery-life), plug Sony monitor-glasses into the VGA port....
Most of us, though, just want as much as we can get so we can get our jobs done. That is what a Pro laptop is for: enabling professionals to have the screenspace they need to run programs with all the palettes and toolbars visible in a portable form-factor.
Finally, if you're having eye-strain with small text, you need reading glasses. Don't be shy, everybody needs them eventuallly. Presbyopia, the inability to adjust focus, can start in one's twenties, and almost everyone gets it eventually. Though I have terrible eyes, I can read amazingly tiny text because I have glasses that let me focus comfortably at the right distance from the screen. It's not as if that distance changes all the time; you're supposed to keep it the same for ergonomic reasons.
<strong>Fundamentally, what I'm saying is that to complain because you've been given as much resolution as is practical right now, and that using a half-resolution of that forces you back to where you were only a few short years ago, is picky. It's a matter of demanding less than the most available real-estate on the most powerful processors with the bext video cards available. That's not a commercially sound combo, and Apple needs to go where the market wnats it to.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I hope you didn't confuse what I've been saying as a defense of kittylitterdesign's dislike of the new PowerBook with its new resolution. I have one and I love it, and I consider the new 1280x854 resolution a smart move on Apple's part.
My comments about a "resolution wasteland" spun off from talk of PC notebooks with 15" 1600x1200 displays -- which, when used at native resolution really are pushing reasonable limits for anyone's eyes, normally in need of reading glasses or not. I still see the range of pixel densities from 110-200 to be less than practical, involving too many compromises and tradeoffs. You might convince me to narrow that range a little, but I still believe there's a range of pixel densities that won't be very useful for computer displays.
Comments
<strong>Lets face it Apple WILL see sense and return t o the old resolution for the powerbook </strong><hr></blockquote>
Bullshit. Won't happen. Buy a 14" iBook.
First, he ought to try to read his site on one of the enormously popular Wintel laptops with 1600x1200 15-inch screens. Or as others noted, whether he'll grind in his heels in protest when crisp paper-like screens of 200 to 300dpi arrive in coming years. I'm curious if he'll start a letter-writing campaign to the computer manufacturers to recall those computers, because his fonts are too small on them. Stop the assembly lines! Stop responding to consumer demand! The web designer has spoken!
He has fallen prey to the all-too-common disease of designers, who think that their designs exist only for their own sense of self-satisfaction, rather than to be read or used by the public. If the public (using their high-resolution screens) can't read your site, it's your fault, (or possibly the fault of your tool), but not the public's fault.
...moving on...
[ 06-19-2002: Message edited by: Mithras ]</p>
<strong>
I think it's ivory. Strange about your soundsticks. I have the same computer as you, and they work fine, actually seem louder off of the TiBook than they were off of an iMac.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Just another positive data point... my new TiBook 800 and my Soundsticks and iSub get along just fine.
The 'thousands of people' not buying the powerbook due to the new screen resolution seem to be just you. I can assure you that there is NO WAY that Apple will decrease the resolution. If anything, resolutions will get even higher, and your text will be even more unreadable.
Personally, I have no problems using your site at 1152x on a first-generation Titanium or one of the latest- the 1280s... this is rather futile. If you don't like the new resolution, buy an old one...
<strong>
Lets face it Apple WILL see sense and return t o the old resolution for the powerbook - there are thousands of people I have read reports of not buying this new edition because of this - what a turkey of an idea <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>
Yep. People have been asking for a better resolution on the Ti's all along and Apple gave it to them. Now that a few people are bitching they're gunna change it back
<strong>Oh and just to recap - the new resolution is a terrible terrible move by Apple - I am amazed no one else agrees????
<img src="graemlins/oyvey.gif" border="0" alt="[No]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>
For most people having more screen real estate is far more important than how a web site using 8-point fonts will look to a potential client. Besides, at about 101 dpi, the new TiBook display isn't too far off from the common 96 dpi Windows standard, and that wouldn't be a bad resolution for you to aim your design at anyway.
While I won't dispute your web design talents, and am willing to believe you've won awards for your work, I would still question the wisdom of using such small fonts as I saw on your web site for anything but sidebars, footnotes, and redundant labeling of button or links the function of which is already graphically clear.
The 800x600 or 1024x768 standards are good targets in terms of screen real estate -- a good way to make sure that the vast majority of users will not get clipped text, clipped images or unwanted scrollbars.
But those standards shouldn't be used as a basis for expected pixel density. To make your sites easily readable for the greatest number of users, you have to aim high in that regard, not low. To cover both ends of the spectrum at once, perhaps the 12.1" display in an iBook might be close to ideal.
For myself, I'd rather have more screen real estate to spread out in to do my work, and only occasionally switch to a lowest-common-denominator display to check my work. For that use, the scaled display modes, even if a little blurry, are good enough for me.
<strong>You know, we're squabbling here about aesthetics and the design of current sites, but the fact is that we MUST make progress where DPI is concerned eventually. Self-assembling organic LED monitors are going to be available, and sooner than you might think. Displays will be capable of not 72 DPI, not 96 DPI, but orders of magnitude higher. Many suspect we'll eventuallly have monitors capable of higher resolution than magazine print today.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I think the transition to higher display resolutions is going to be a rocky one. It's hard to break the neat one-to-one pixel relationship between display pixels and source pixels that many small fonts and bit-mapped images depend upon. For example, take one of the emoticons used on this web site -->
With current display technology, you can't scale that graphic up or down by, say, 15% or 43%, without the end result looking terrible. If you tried to use some sort of vector rather than pixel representation for this symbol, the end result would probably be a little fuzzy and wobbly at any size that you'd normally want to use in the context of running text. To get a crisp, clear, annoying little lemon yellow grin, you have to map what you want, pixel by pixel, both in creating and in displaying the image.
Only when we get to around 200 dpi, with I'd guess 300 dpi being much better for such things, will it be possible to make a clean break from deliberately targeting display pixels to using abstract vector graphics for small fonts, small icons, and fine lines.
300 dpi might not sound very impressive to those who remember 300 dpi laser printers, but you have to remember that that was 300 dpi of black or white, fully on or fully off, binary pixels. 300 dpi combined with 24-bit color and anti-aliasing will be breathtaking.
We're awfully close to 150 dpi displays as it is right now. Probably someone has 200 dpi in a lab somewhere. But I'd think that affordable, mass-market 300 dpi computer displays are a few years off at least. I expect a transition period with many instances of fuzzy and/or too small graphics and text until it all settles down into a new paradigm where computer displays are treated, in terms of resolution, more like printers are treated today.
How much processing power would it take to output a virtually seamless (pixel-less) picture onto a 300 dpi screen? i suppose video card technology will progress at a similar pace to the displays. all i know is that the 1024x768 on my iBook looks virtually seamless when i move my head back a few feet, a monitor with 300 dpi would look like real life!
<strong>Will we sit in front of our computers at a single resolution all day, passive and unchanging? No. We will use Zoom, as well as the zoom features in our various applications, to adjust according to what we're doing. Those of us who work in FrameMaker or Photoshop already adjust the zoom dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It's one thing to zoom around in PhotoShop while you're editing and tweaking an image. It would be quite another thing if you HAD TO rely on zooming in and out when browsing a web page, in a constant struggle between lost detail, eyestrain, and screen real estate.
Dismiss it as being "passive" if you like, but most of the time people will want to set one display resolution and stay there, rather than "interact" with their computers like a farsighted person struggling with tiny print and a magnifying glass.
<strong>Will there be distortion? Sometimes, yes. Is there distortion today? All the time. We're just used to the type we have now.</strong>
Being used to something, and liking it, are two different things. Given that 200+ dpi displays aren't here yet, I'd dearly love to turn off antialiasing on smaller fonts with OS X, except that in many cases the fonts aren't very well hinted for non-antialiased use. I'd much prefer it if OS X fonts at 12 points or less looked as clean as Geneva, Monaco, or Times in OS 9.
Of course, give me 200 dpi or more and I'll be happy with antialiased fonts at all sizes.
<strong>As for your wasteland comment, and your suggestion that 800x600 is currently the only reasonable non-native resolution on these 1600x1200 screens, well, obviously that's the best non-native resolution on a 1600x1200 screen. Each pixel takes exactly four blocks, which produces precisely the same display as if the screen were actually an 800x600 screen, except that each "pixel" is made of four.</strong>
That was indeed my point. But I'd also point out that 800x600 is a very cramped resolution these days, and a lot of people find 800x600 spread on a large display to look awkwardly oversized.
<strong>So when laptops have 2048x1536 displays, the nexxt logical step, then we can drop down to 1024x768 and get exact output.
It turns out that the wasteland isn't a wasteland at all.</strong>
2048x1536 on our hypothetical 15" display is about 170 dpi, and that's functionally equivalent to an 85 dpi display using a clean 4:1 antialiasing. The "See Spot Run" oversized text would be gone, so maybe we can consider 170 dpi a reasonable entry point to a usable micropixel display technology, but it's still a little shy of the screen real estate most people want these days unless you use that 170 dpi on a bigger display.
<strong>Any of the even resolutions from 130 DPI to 200 DPI can be exactly converted to 65 through 100 DPI, and since the "normal" Mac DPI is 72, 65 isn't a hardship, and anything from there up to 100, just over the "normal" Windows DPI of 96, will look just fine.</strong>
I might be willing to concede 170 dpi in some circumstances, but below that, with half-resolutions like 65 and 72 dpi (even if 72 dpi is nominally, though not very much in practice, the Mac standard) such displays would look clumsy to most people these days.
<strong>Finally, the idea that running at non-native resolution is inherently ugly is a fallacy. Use Photoshop and scale any image you like to any higher size using cubic resampling and you'll get a nice output. Not flawless, but hardly ugly.</strong>
Photographic images react to this kind of manipulation better than line art, bit-mapped icons, and bit-mapped text, plenty of which still exist out there, especially on the web, and won't be replaced any time soon. Such graphics often do turn ugly when you try to scale them smaller, or just a little bigger, using bilinear or bicubic resampling.
[ 06-20-2002: Message edited by: shetline ]</p>
Where exactly do you think your fonts come from now? Do you think that when you open Word and select a 9pt font, then a 10pt, then a 69pt, then a 48pt, that the computer has versions of the font for all these sizes? Hundreds of bitmap fonts?
Hardly. These days computers use TrueType or PostScript fonts for almost everything. These are splined fonts. When rendered, they look *perfect* at any resolution except the very lowest ones, 12pt or below, where it gets hard to describe the shapes with the limited number of available pixels.
What you're thinking of is resampling of an already rendered bitmap image. That's becoming less and less common. Moreover, the higher the DPI of the display, the less resampling and then magnifying causes distortion. For example, displaying an 800x600 image on a 1024x768 LCD screen means some of the 800 lines will take 2 lines on the screen and some will take 3. That's a 50% difference, and is noticeable. Displaying the 800x600 image on a 4000x3000 screen, some of the 800 source lines will take 6 lines and some will take 7. That's a 15% distortion. The more pixels you have, the better you can scale.
As for kittylitter's specific objection to the JPGs looking ugly when scaled, it's clear that however good his or her aesthetic skills are, he or she doesn't understand the mathematics of the situation. The JPGs CAN'T look much uglier scaled up than when made. When they're scaled up to the same size on the screen they had one a lower-resolution screen they look THE SAME, barring the distortion from odd and even lines mentioned above. They're blockier than everything else on the page because they're a lower resolution pictures. That's what they originally looked like. They look bad if they are scaled to larger on the screen than they originally were. It's a different proposition.
One creates the JPGs at a _high resolution_ and programs the code to _scale down_ if necessary. Scaled down images, properly resampled, are beautiful. Just look at the dock. Set the size to small, and the magnification to maximum. The icons are 128x128, so at maximum under the cursor they're quite large and clear. They scale down smoothly all along the dock to a small 32x32 at the end. No jagged edges at all.
The fact is that higher resolutions provide greater flexibility. This is a truly ridiculous thread.
[ 06-19-2002: Message edited by: AllenChristopher ]</p>
<strong>The fact is that higher resolutions provide greater flexibility.
[ 06-19-2002: Message edited by: AllenChristopher ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, yes and no. When high resolution is only used to cram the same things we'd normally view on bigger screens or with lower resolutions into a smaller space, all you get is eyestrain. This is a game of trading off readability for real estate, and for most people that's going to be a bad tradeoff even before you get down to about 130 dpi, like these 1600x1200 15" PC laptops that are out there now.
Sure, you can use non-native resolutions, if that's what you mean by flexibility, but they don't look very good. The only really high quality non-native resolution for such a display is 800x600, which is not very practical nowadays.
If I had to use one of these kinds of laptops, I'd hate being stuck with choices I'd have: (1) Sharp and crisp, but with tiny, tiny text. (2) Sharp and crisp, with all of my default font settings cranked up to, say, 18-pt, but then having my text out of proportion with many graphical elements, icons, and scattered bits of pre-bitmapped text. Also, many pieces of software will have fixed font sizes that I can't change, so I'll be stuck with tiny text in many places anyway. (3) Comfortably sized text, more consistent proportions between text and graphics, but an overall very fuzzy display with noticeable scaling artifacts. (4) Cleaner scaling, but really big, BIG text and very little screen real estate.
I think the range of pixel densities from about 110 dpi up to about 200 dpi is going to be a resolution wasteland for display devices. These resolutions aren't high enough to use for making a clean break from the current macro pixel-oriented display paradigm. Pixels at these resolutions, however, are also too small for practical use with that same paradigm.
Will we sit in front of our computers at a single resolution all day, passive and unchanging? No. We will use Zoom, as well as the zoom features in our various applications, to adjust according to what we're doing. Those of us who work in FrameMaker or Photoshop already adjust the zoom dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day.
Will there be distortion? Sometimes, yes. Is there distortion today? All the time. We're just used to the type we have now. Right now we have spatial aliasing, causing jaggies. Right now we have rather large colour blocks in compressed video. Right now we have a certain amount of sparkle on bilinearly filtered pictures.
But on OS X, we have less of all these things.
As for your wasteland comment, and your suggestion that 800x600 is currently the only reasonable non-native resolution on these 1600x1200 screens, well, obviously that's the best non-native resolution on a 1600x1200 screen. Each pixel takes exactly four blocks, which produces precisely the same display as if the screen were actually an 800x600 screen, except that each "pixel" is made of four. So when laptops have 2048x1536 displays, the nexxt logical step, then we can drop down to 1024x768 and get exact output.
It turns out that the wasteland isn't a wasteland at all. Any of the even resolutions from 130 DPI to 200 DPI can be exactly converted to 65 through 100 DPI, and since the "normal" Mac DPI is 72, 65 isn't a hardship, and anything from there up to 100, just over the "normal" Windows DPI of 96, will look just fine. That is to say, any screen in the 130 to 200 DPI range has a corresponding exact output screen at half the DPI which is in the old generation of monitor densities. So 1600x1200 is a little inconvenient because its half-resolution is 800x600. That just means we should crank it up further to give you worry-warts a more comfortable half-resolution.
Finally, the idea that running at non-native resolution is inherently ugly is a fallacy. Use Photoshop and scale any image you like to any higher size using cubic resampling and you'll get a nice output. Not flawless, but hardly ugly. On the other hand, try looking at an 800x600 desktop on a 1024x768 display. It will look, as you say, pretty bad. That's because the monitor can't do cubic resampling. Guess, however, what Quartz Extreme will do, via OpenGL. Well, bilinear filtering, which isn't as good but isn't half bad.
To recap the salient points of the thread:
-Vector graphics allow Zooming of the whole Mac OS X screen with every element in proportion, according to the Jaguar specifications.
-Higher-resolution screens allow better anti-aliasing of scaled images. Unevenness between adjacent scanlines, which is the cause of bad display at non-native resolutions, is inversely proportional to the native resolution.
-Content should be created for the highest size currently on the market and then scaled down. Then one can always scale up later as needed.
-Screens of 1600x1200 or more have perfect half-resolutions in the "normal" range.
-Monitors cannot perform advanced interpolation, so non-native resolutions look ugly, but the computer hardware can, and in Jaguar, it will.
Just in case anyone cares, here are the dpi for mac screens:
Portable
New PB: 101, iBook 12.1': 106, iBook 14.1': 91
Displays
15': 85, 17': 96, Cinema 22': 86, Cinema 23': 98
<strong>Will we sit in front of our computers at a single resolution all day, passive and unchanging? No. We will use Zoom, as well as the zoom features in our various applications, to adjust according to what we're doing. Those of us who work in FrameMaker or Photoshop already adjust the zoom dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It's one thing to zoom around in PhotoShop while you're editing and tweaking an image. It would be quite another thing if you HAD TO rely on zooming in and out when you browsing a web page in a constant struggle between lost detail, eyestrain, and screen real estate.
Dismiss it as being "passive" if you like, but most of the time people will want to set one display resolution and stay there, rather than "interact" with their computers like a farsighted person struggling with tiny print and a magnifying glass.
<strong>Will there be distortion? Sometimes, yes. Is there distortion today? All the time. We're just used to the type we have now.</strong>
Being used to something, and liking it, are two different things. Given that 200+ dpi displays aren't here yet, I'd dearly love to turn off antialiasing on smaller fonts with OS X, except that in many cases the fonts aren't very well hinted for non-antialiased use. I'd much prefer it if OS X fonts at 12 points or less looked as clean as Geneva, Monaco, or Times in OS 9.
Of course, give me 200 dpi or more and I'll be happy with antialiased fonts at all sizes.
<strong>As for your wasteland comment, and your suggestion that 800x600 is currently the only reasonable non-native resolution on these 1600x1200 screens, well, obviously that's the best non-native resolution on a 1600x1200 screen. Each pixel takes exactly four blocks, which produces precisely the same display as if the screen were actually an 800x600 screen, except that each "pixel" is made of four.</strong>
That was indeed my point. But I'd also point out that 800x600 is a very cramped resolution these days, and a lot of people find 800x600 spread on a large display to look awkwardly oversized.
<strong>So when laptops have 2048x1536 displays, the nexxt logical step, then we can drop down to 1024x768 and get exact output.
It turns out that the wasteland isn't a wasteland at all.</strong>
2048x1536 on our hypothetical 15" display is about 170 dpi, and that's functionally equivalent to an 85 dpi display using a clean 4:1 antialiasing. The "See Spot Run" oversized text would be gone, so maybe we can consider 170 dpi a reasonable entry point to a usable micropixel display technology, but it's still a little shy of the screen real estate most people want these days unless you use that 170 dpi on a bigger display.
<strong>Any of the even resolutions from 130 DPI to 200 DPI can be exactly converted to 65 through 100 DPI, and since the "normal" Mac DPI is 72, 65 isn't a hardship, and anything from there up to 100, just over the "normal" Windows DPI of 96, will look just fine.</strong>
I might be willing to concede 170 dpi in some circumstances, but below that, with half-resolutions like 65 and 72 dpi (even if 72 dpi is nominally, though not very much in practice, the Mac standard) such displays would look clumsy to most people these days.
<strong>Finally, the idea that running at non-native resolution is inherently ugly is a fallacy. Use Photoshop and scale any image you like to any higher size using cubic resampling and you'll get a nice output. Not flawless, but hardly ugly.</strong>
Photographic images react to this kind of manipulation better than line art, bit mapped icons, and bit mapped text, plenty of which still exist out there, especially on the web, and won't be replaced any time soon. These things do often turn ugly when you try to scale them smaller, or just a little bigger, using bilinear or bicubic resampling.
"Dismiss it as being "passive" if you like, but most of the time people will want to set one display resolution and stay there, rather than "interact" with their computers like a farsighted person struggling with tiny print and a magnifying glass."
First, I don't mean passive in a perjorative sense. Passive means not taking an action, and I mean only that most people have had the luxury to be passive for a little while, hardly two or three years. Before that more than half of people had 15" monitors, and had to deal with a lot of zooming even when typing in Word.
Second, I hardly think scrolling around a magnified desktop is "struggling." The reality is that we already scroll around web-pages. That's why we have scroll bars. We've been scrolling since the beginning of the GUI.
Fundamentally, what I'm saying is that to complain because you've been given as much resolution as is practical right now, and that using a half-resolution of that forces you back to where you were only a few short years ago, is picky. It's a matter of demanding less than the most available real-estate on the most powerful processors with the bext video cards available. That's not a commercially sound combo, and Apple needs to go where the market wnats it to.
You have so many options to get the combination you want: buy an older PowerBook, run off a desktop monitor most of the time using the portability only for when you must have it (at which time dealing with a little scaling trouble should be secondary to using the computer), accept switching resolutions occasionally and scrolling web-pages, accept web-pages being out of proportion from time to time (remember just a few short years ago when tables weren't compatible across both browsers and pages were therefore wonky?), buy an iBook (they're also cooler to the touch and have better battery-life), plug Sony monitor-glasses into the VGA port....
Most of us, though, just want as much as we can get so we can get our jobs done. That is what a Pro laptop is for: enabling professionals to have the screenspace they need to run programs with all the palettes and toolbars visible in a portable form-factor.
Finally, if you're having eye-strain with small text, you need reading glasses. Don't be shy, everybody needs them eventuallly. Presbyopia, the inability to adjust focus, can start in one's twenties, and almost everyone gets it eventually. Though I have terrible eyes, I can read amazingly tiny text because I have glasses that let me focus comfortably at the right distance from the screen. It's not as if that distance changes all the time; you're supposed to keep it the same for ergonomic reasons.
Edited for punctuation.
[ 06-20-2002: Message edited by: AllenChristopher ]</p>
<strong>Fundamentally, what I'm saying is that to complain because you've been given as much resolution as is practical right now, and that using a half-resolution of that forces you back to where you were only a few short years ago, is picky. It's a matter of demanding less than the most available real-estate on the most powerful processors with the bext video cards available. That's not a commercially sound combo, and Apple needs to go where the market wnats it to.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I hope you didn't confuse what I've been saying as a defense of kittylitterdesign's dislike of the new PowerBook with its new resolution. I have one and I love it, and I consider the new 1280x854 resolution a smart move on Apple's part.
My comments about a "resolution wasteland" spun off from talk of PC notebooks with 15" 1600x1200 displays -- which, when used at native resolution really are pushing reasonable limits for anyone's eyes, normally in need of reading glasses or not. I still see the range of pixel densities from 110-200 to be less than practical, involving too many compromises and tradeoffs. You might convince me to narrow that range a little, but I still believe there's a range of pixel densities that won't be very useful for computer displays.