I bought a laptop in 2005; It was towards the high end of what retailers carried in stores at the time, although it was on clearance, making way for the Windows Vista machines that replaced it, and I got an employee discount on the display model. It was a good deal.
It had a 15.4 inch screen at 1280x800 resolution.
Since then, Apple came out with the Retina Displays on their mobile devices, and has shuffled in an era of pushing their 27 inch displays with 2560x1440 resolution for some time now.
One would then assume that a laptop built in 2012 would be boasting improved resolution in both dimensions... Yet my fairly high end Toshiba is shamefully left behind with 1366x768 resolution. What gives?
See, Apple is pushing the pixel density envelope, so to speak, but the rest of the industry is stuck following some TV standards game like they've realized consumers don't WANT a computer, consumers want a TV that they can browse the internet with...
I watched it happen while I was working at a major office supply store: The marketing material on these laptops started changing to claim that these laptops supported "Full HD" resolutions... Which were oddly lower resolution than the laptops they were replacing... Yet, consumers flocked to them, like they were somehow better; Apparently the ability to watch Bluray at it's native resolution has gotten everyone so happy in their pants that higher resolutions don't even occur to them. Good job consumers, you have successfully turned your laptops into very powerful televisions. And how many of you actually have bluray players that can use those "Full HD" displays? Well, let's just say that my expensive high end laptop didn't make the "Contains a bluray player" cut.
Recently Toshiba announced the pending release of their new line of "4K HD" laptop displays... The price of which are unknown, but "Expensive" seems to be a safe guess. You can read about them here: http://betanews.com/2014/01/06/toshiba-unveils-first-ever-4k-laptops-but-do-consumers-actually-need-them/
Does content exist at that resolution? No... Does a laptop user need that aspect ratio? No. Even if they COULD use it, could one even see pixels that small on a 15 inch screen? I would argue nay.
Do *I* need a 4K resolution display? No, never... But do I want it, because it's the only way I can break this "Full HD" artificial limit on screen resolution? Well, I guess I don't have an overabundance of choice, do I?
Monday, January 6, 2014
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