Best screen resolution for Retina 13

[stewacide]

Nope. It's common sense. An interpolated image will never look as good as 1:1 pixel mapping. The only resolutions that the 13" rMBP are clear in are 1200x800 retina, or native 2400x1600. All other resolutions will be blurry. Some people can tolerate that level of blur, some cant.

I would have thought so initially, but messing around and examining blown-up screenshots and thinking about it a bit I've come to the conclusion that there isn't any quality sacrifice with the scaled resolutions, at least with text, since even at "native" best-retina text is still virtually supersampled in software (i.e. it's not rendered to the pixel grid, but drawn in the 'correct' position as if it were drawn in a higher resolution and downsampled). Plus the resolution is just so damn high that any subtle imperfections are invisible.

This is provided you TURN SUB-PIXEL AA OFF, which you really should, since it degrades text in all cases at these resolutions, and ESPECIALLY with the supersampled resolutions, where it's totally counter-productive.

People seeing "blurry" text at scaled resolutions are simply seeing the sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Same as text has always been blurry in OSX. With the Retina Mac you can finally turn this nonsense off.

p.s. to turn off sub-pixel AA go into General settings and turn off LCD smoothing. Or just visit Apple's website, since they seem to turn off SPAA in css. I think the App Store app also disables it, as do various other apps/parts of apps because it can be problematic for various reasons. Microsoft has also disabled sub-pixel AA in Windows 8 Metro and marked it deprecated elsewhere as it's becoming redundant; I assume Apple will do so in the near future as well.

 

[MikeyMike01]

This is provided you TURN SUB-PIXEL AA OFF, which you really should, since it degrades text in all cases at these resolutions, and ESPECIALLY with the supersampled resolutions, where it's totally counter-productive.

People seeing "blurry" text at scaled resolutions are simply seeing the sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Same as text has always been blurry in OSX. With the Retina Mac you can finally turn this nonsense off.

You're absolutely right. This has made a tremendous improvement in sharpness at my chosen resolution.

I'm glad you pointed this out.

 

[bodhi_kev]

I would have thought so initially, but messing around and examining blown-up screenshots and thinking about it a bit I've come to the conclusion that there isn't any quality sacrifice with the scaled resolutions, at least with text, since even at "native" best-retina text is still virtually supersampled in software (i.e. it's not rendered to the pixel grid, but drawn in the 'correct' position as if it were drawn in a higher resolution and downsampled). Plus the resolution is just so damn high that any subtle imperfections are invisible.

This is provided you TURN SUB-PIXEL AA OFF, which you really should, since it degrades text in all cases at these resolutions, and ESPECIALLY with the supersampled resolutions, where it's totally counter-productive.

People seeing "blurry" text at scaled resolutions are simply seeing the sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Same as text has always been blurry in OSX. With the Retina Mac you can finally turn this nonsense off.

p.s. to turn off sub-pixel AA go into General settings and turn off LCD smoothing. Or just visit Apple's website, since they seem to turn off SPAA in css. I think the App Store app also disables it, as do various other apps/parts of apps because it can be problematic for various reasons. Microsoft has also disabled sub-pixel AA in Windows 8 Metro and marked it deprecated elsewhere as it's becoming redundant; I assume Apple will do so in the near future as well.

This comment is genius. Indeed, turning SUB-PIXEL AA OFF makes the text as sharp as it is on "default for mac" resolution. Great find. This should be written somewhere, so anyone with a Retina screen knows about it. With this in mind, turning up the resolution to 1680x1050 is the best option for a 13' Retina screen, hands down. I have tried using the default, 1440x900, 1680x1050 and 1920x1200 for the same amount of time respectively, and found that the 1680x1050 one fits best for all ocassions. The text is still big enough so one does not have to stress the eyes to much and the screen space still remains big enough for multitasking. I would recommend going to 1920x1200 only with a 15' Retina screen. Using it on the 13' might work for a short period of time, but I found the eyes stressing to much after a while. Thus, 1050p for 13' and 1200p for 15' seems to be best. These two should indeed become the new defaults.