News of the year in the technology industry. “The Fit’s most important spec its display, with a nod to Sony’s TV division: they come with 1600×900 or 1920×1080 touchscreens and nothing else. ‘We’re not going to offer 1366×768,” reps said. ‘We’ve killed that.'” This is Sony’s new, simplified entry-level notebook line. Very, very welcome news in a world where even a supposedly “Pro” laptop that costs $1199 ships with… A 1280×800 resolution. This bottom-of-the-barrel crap needs to be eradicated, and good on Sony for taking this step.
I’d prefer a 1600×1200 resolution!
Because I actually work on the laptop and never use it to watch movies.
You (and NuxRo) are right on… I recently managed to re-purpose a NEC Multisync LCD2190UXp display (1600×1200 4:3) from a patent look-up PC not being used anymore at the public library system I work at for myself.
This is the best monitor I have ever used bar none and wish had one at home. Wide-screen displays are good for watching movies but suck for doing real work or even just browsing the web.
First, I agree that 1600*1200 is more workable than 1920*1080 but this garbage 1366*768 has got to go.
I mean it is not even showing all the fine details of HD videos that it is meant for, and as for web-browsing, text work and other stuff, it is very limiting to use.
Just the other day (about a week ago) I went thru the stock at the local Business Depot and Best Buy.
What a horror, dozens of machines with good specs on memory, CPU and available ports. Final found one with a 2 TByte hard drive, 2 USB 2.0, 1 USB 3.0, HDMI & VGA outputs, a up to date i7 CPU and then a screen of only 1366*768 and they wanted $1199 for it. Rip-off!
Found a Toshiba the almost same specs, 3 USB 2.0 and 500 GByte drive (the savings will go into a SSD) but at-least the screen was 1920*1080 and the price $799.
Seems it is not just about costs to make the machines, but how much profit they can fool people to give them.
I prefer 1920×1200, more workspace then 1600×1200 while keeping the vertical space while still being able to properly display 1080p video while the laptop isn’t being used for work.
IMO this doesn’t go far enough, I’d rather see 1920×1200 be the floor at 10.1″ and by the time you get to 15.6″ you should be up to 3840×2400 WQUXGA displays. All modern GPUs can now handle this resolution, so you don’t need funky setups like the old days treating the screen as multiple independent displays to reach that resolution.
Why 3840×2400 WQUXGA? It scales perfectly. 1 pixel @ 1920×1200 scales perfectly into a square of 4 pixels @ 3840×2400 so you don’t need to treat it all that differently for font scaling, but when resolution independence gets better everything will look much crisper.
Another advantage to 1600*1200 is easy scaling without the fuzz.
1600*1200 easy to 800*600 for poorer eye-sight.
1920*1200 becomes 960*600 also easy to read.
1366*768 becomes yuck if you scale it down. Of-course you don’t but you lost the chance to see finer detail in a lot of material. Even people with poorer eyesight will notice if difference went viewing some material.
Well, make it 3840×2400 at 10.1 cause I have super-eye /s
I’ll probably get hate for saying it but…I don’t see a probably with 1366×768 on smaller devices. I have a EEE 1215B 12 inch netbook that runs at that res and I have to say it works fine, websites are easy to read and navigate, movies look fine, running office programs on it is fine, I don’t see a problem.
If anything I’d say that trying to jam high res screens into SFF devices? Kinda pointless. Now 16×9, I can see that, but pushing it up to 1080P on a small screen, what is the point? you gonna get a magnifying glass so you can enjoy those teeny tiny pixels? IMHO 1080P and better needs to be at LEAST 16 inches as far as screen size to truly enjoy the better picture, otherwise it just becomes a numbers game.
Well, some people use their laptop with the monitor at 4″ distance from their face, so they ABSOLUTELY NEED, say, 1920×1200 at 10.1″. Or 1920×1080 at 5″ smartphone. Or 3840×2400 at 15.6″ /s
You make the false assumption that you need to have the screen a few inches from your face to tell the difference. The whole point is to have the resolution so high that the physical pixels are so small that their size ad shape are imperceptible.
Who cares about a dead or stuck pixel that is too small to see from the surrounding pixels? How about eliminating the need for anti anti-aliasing since the resolution is so high that you can’t see that the pixels aren’t round?
In other words…a numbers game. I bet you my last dollar we could load up a movie on my 1366 and you could load the same movie on some teeny tiny 1080p and your average user wouldn’t be able to tell the difference because with a screen that small its really not gonna make a difference to most folks, its really not.
Of course Sony is gonna find out what Intel did with the ultrabooks, folks will look at that much more expensive system running the same content in the store beside a 1366×768 system at a MUCH cheaper price and they’ll buy the 1366×768. Also remember we are talking MOBILE devices here and there is no hand waving away the simple fact that the 1080P screen is gonna require much more power to draw than the 1366×768 so you’ll have a more expensive machine with terrible battery life or a less expensive device with good battery life..yeah…I don’t think most customers will be having a hard time choosing which one they want when those are the choices.
Thank. You. Sony. [starts the slow rising clap].
Never thought I’d say that.
There are options.
Not everyone can see or appreciate Higher Definition.
Save the planet.
Waste not, Want not.
Don’t buy low res if you want high res.
Uneeded pixels destroy more trees
Edited 2013-05-07 15:19 UTC
Destroy more trees? How in the hell is that even possible?
I think it’s what we call sarcasm
.
As he says, “Not everyone can see or appreciate Higher Definition”
Your eye-sight has to be pretty bad not the see the difference with web pages being cut-off and the percentage of the screen taken up with menu-bars/ribbons when your screen is only 768 high.
Edited 2013-05-07 19:42 UTC
Aging population makes this viable?
That is great news for all the people with perfect vision, I went out and specifically bought a laptop with 1366×768 because it is easier to read on. So this means I won’t be buying any Sonys in the near future.
Well if the OS vendors got resolution independence sorted pixel size wouldn’t matter.
In fact the text would be sharper and less fuzzy, rather than smaller.
An iPhone 4 doesn’t have smaller text or icons than a 3GS, just sharper.
Windows Blue is getting automatic DPI scaling which should help on the Desktop side of things with resolution independence. The Metro side already scales rather well, afaik.
yah, and fills it with absolutely nothing. The information density in metro apps is simply appaling
that’s how microsoft solved the scaling problem; Zero times anything is still zero. So no matter what resolution you use, metro will display about the same amount of information: zero.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/Hh780612.aspx
thanks for letting me know the altitude at which the joke crossed over your cranium…
Says who? You? With how much experience writing Metro apps?
Metro applications can indeed scale, and up their density to whatever the developer wants. Microsoft doesn’t dictate clutter or sparseness, that’s up to the developer.
Don’t let those pesky facts ruin your day though.
I’m not complaining about possibilities, just what exists.
The plain matter is that most metro apps are very sparse.
Uh, just increase the dpi.
This seems counter productive. Buy a high resolution screen so you can mimic a lower resolution screen…
The penalties (power, cost, cpu/gpu, etc…) to render a higher resolution and pretend its a lower resolution are not worth the trade off. As far as I am concerned its a one sided relationship where there is heavy cost with no gain. If I were a PC gamer, or a graphic artist that goes gaga over smoother fonts, I may have a different opinion, but I am neither and I enjoy reasonable size interface elements.
Ha, I had the same reaction at first. But I doubt too many people like us who have crappy vision are buying laptops in the first place. We’re probably too small of a minority to really matter.
On my desktop, I run at a very odd resolution of 1152 x 864. That’s as small as I can make things and still be able to see.
You are probably right we don’t matter. I like having a laptop for a few different reasons and spend much more time on it than a desktop.
Thom I have tried changing DPI but most times it makes things fuzzy and I have enough issues seeing the screen without adding fuzz.
Just because a screen is capable of running at 1920×1080, it doesn’t mean that you have to run it at that resolution. With without altering the DPI, you can just drop the resolution down to a more comfortable size.
It’s really no different to any other piece of hardware you buy that you don’t always run at maximum settings (I don’t drive everywhere at 200 kilometers an hour just because my car can reach those speeds).
To be honest, this should be common sense to anyone tech-savvy enough to frequent OSN.
Running an LCD panel at a lower-than-standard resolution tends to give a fuzzier-looking picture, especially for text.
Bumping up the font size to give the equivalent “screen space” as a lower resolution without the fuzies is possible, but tends to be inconsistent in how well apps handle it.
For example, I’ve got the Dell XPS 13 ‘Sputnik 2’ (Ubuntu 12.04) with a 1080p panel; I often run it at native 1080p but with the font sizes scaled up to 150%, which gives the same screen space as a 1280×720 screen but is *much* sharper.
Unfortunately current Linux desktop environments aren’t smart enough to handle different font sizes on different screens, so when attaching an external 1080p monitor I have to crank the font size back down to 100% and switch the internal panel to a lower, fuzzier resolution to get physical sizes to match to my satisfaction.
What I really want is fully scalable ‘retina display’ layout for Linux…. we’ll see what comes through with all the Wayland changes.
Have you only tried GNOME on Linux? X11 handles different DPI for different screens just fine. Only desktops that are stupid enough to override that DPI (such as GNOME) would be unable to handle this case.
Edited 2013-05-07 17:25 UTC
X11 can “handle” that by making your screens separate, with no ability to move windows between screens. This may have been impressive in the ’80s, but isn’t really something I’d be willing to put up with.
There is one major difference. LCD screens, which dominate the market now, have exactly ONE native resolution. If you run a different resolution everything is fuzzy. The solution is resolution independence not changing the resolution.
My vision isn’t great and I welcome the higher resolution. It’s pretty easy to adjust the font size and it’s always possible to lower the screen resolution. You don’t have to use the monitor’s max resolution if you don’t want it. This move by Sony is great for those who want higher resolutions and will have zero affect on people with poor vision.
Yeah. Just like how Gnome3,Unity and Windows8 are great for those who want higher resolutions and have zero effect on people who want a computer that’s actually usable.
Pinhead.
I want 4:3 or 3:2! Laptops are not for watching frakking movies!
That is unfortunate. I love Sony products but I will not buy a (non TV) device with a resolution much higher than 1366×768 and these are becoming increasingly hard to find. Another one bites the dust.
I don’t know where you live, but in Brazil it’s very very hard to find any laptop that’s not 1366×768. If you want more, you have to pay for high-end Dell’s.
Wow, people actually want low screen resolutions by choice?
Yep, they’re called morons.
Wanting a resolution that is more pleasing to look at is hardly grounds for such a statement.
While I have 20/20 vision, looking at tiny windows, tiny buttons, and tiny text is not my idea of an enjoyable experience. Increasing the DPI to effectively mimic a lower resolution, while paying the cost (monetary) and (power) and (processing power) to get exactly what I can already get with a lower resolution screen seems like quite the effort for no gain.
That’s only because your OS sucks monkey nuts at DPI scaling.
Hell,yes pea-brain. Unlike you and your friends, not everyone is a brain-damaged gamer.
I feel honored that you paused your game to tell me off…
How is a a lower resolution better? Is because buttons and other things get smaller? That isn’t an issue of resolution. It’s an issue of “resolution independence” with the graphical interface. I don’t think people should be demanding LOWER resolutions, but more resolution independent interfaces.
How is a a lower resolution better? Is because buttons and other things get smaller? That isn’t an issue of resolution. It’s an issue of “resolution independence” with the graphical interface. I don’t think people should be demanding LOWER resolutions, but more resolution independent interfaces. [/q]
God almighty. What ever happened to using the simplest solution, a lower res screen instead of dealing with this garbage?
“Low resolution” is relative to the physical size of the display. 1366×768 is not necessarily low.
Yep, agreed! And distance from our eyes to the screen. If I’m a normal person with 11.6″ netbook 1366×768 screen, with ~50cm distance from eyes to screen (most relaxed position for typing or enjoying moview), I think it’s crispy enough.
Are you that guy that used to work in the IT lab at the school I went to that had all of the 1600×1200 LCD displays set to 1024×768 instead of increasing the font DPI to 120 in Windows, which caused them to look like a blurry pile of crap because you didn’t know that LCDs only look good at their native resolution or at exactly half of it?
I.E. If you are running a 1920×1200 display and have to run it at a lower resolution the only way for it to not look blurry is to run it at 960×600. Remember this if you have a crap GPU and want to play a game, this may just allow you to get acceptable performance since it’s only 1/4th the total number of pixels that the GPU has to crank out, but they are scaled perfectly across 4 of the physical pixels of the screen.
I do not understand how my desire for a lower resolution screen is equivalent to someone who has no idea how LCD screens work.
In fact, someone as you describe, would not care one way or the other about screens using higher resolutions since they would simply put it to some arbitrary resolution they like, without a care.
I on the other hand use my devices on their native resolution and prefer my windows, buttons, text, icons, and other screen elements to be a reasonable size without paying the penalties to have a high resolution screen mimic this with higher DPI.
Wrong, having the higher resolution means that those elements, even when blown up looks better as the limitation is in the screen’s physical pixels and your eyes ability to see them. Want nicer looking fonts? Get a higher DPI screen. If they are too small to read increase their size.
You claim to have 20/20 vision, i on the other hand do not, I have astigmatism and I’m near sighted. But this doesn’t keep me from seeing a huge difference between a 15″ 1366×768 res screen and a 15″ 1920×1200 screen even when the DPI and zoom settings are at the operating system default of 96 DPI.
In short, stop trying to hold back progress based on your own limitations.
Don’t get me wrong the MBP is a nice laptop, it just hasn’t had much to do with being specifically Pro in a long time.
I see the ‘MBPro with retina display’ at 2560×1600 which -speaking roughly- beats the crap out of 1600×900.
There is a price tag but it seems that Apple realizes there are people willing to go super-pro and people not willing to go super-pro.
But, as a matter of fact, I thought this piece of news was about… Sony?
Pffft “super-pro,” you ain’t ballin’ unless you go hyper-pro son.
I don’t see how “pro” is a function of screen resolution.
Well, it seemed so to the OP… which is why I spoke like that.
Some people think bigger is better.
Until OP has to travel with his 40″ “pro” laptop I guess.
For me a laptop screen mustn’t be too small, but almost just as important not too big. My MacBook Pro is the right size at 1280×800.
Besides, screen size is just one of many aspects that defines the quality of a laptop.
… and some people need to understand the difference between “diagonal size” and “resolution.”
It’s one of those things I suspect you can spend the rest of your life explaining and it keeps coming back.
People complain about widescreen monitors, but they are a huge advantage if you use a tiling window manager. You can use 2 windows side-by-side and even eliminate the need for 2 monitors in some cases, without the burden of resizing them manually.
I know there are tiling software for Mac and Windows, however, they are too limiting when compared with those available for X11.
I do this withing visual studio. I have two 1440×900 screen monitors at work.
Yes, display real estate can be really helpful. I have 2x 1920×1200 displays for work, one of which constantly runs mtputty with 4 sessions, all of them large enough to be comfortably readable and work in.
However, when I’m on the road I have to be constrained to a 1366×768 xps13, which is nice and light and all, but it’s really uncomfortable to do real work on it for more than 2-3 hours at a time. I really like Sony for dropping these displays, and if others don’t follow suit, it’s easy to guess what company we’ll buy our next laptops from.
I always thought 1366×768 was never intended for “working” people, they probably just used it because it let them lower the prices a bit, but overall it was an idiotic move.
The sad reality is that once you are over 40 a very high resolution monitor is basically useless due to presbyopia.
But im an old blind fart, and i demand there should always be 640×480 !
I agree with a couple of others here that this mistaken idea of computers as DVD players reduces their utility. I currently keep an old Dell I have alive because I can’t find a laptop with 1920×1200 anymore. I may have to build my next portable machine (if not battery-powered) using one of the bare Retina screens you can find on eBay. Or load Linux or a BSD on a Transformer Infinity.
Congrats to Sony for this move, but they could take it further.