high def 15" MBP

[Scottyfrombi]

I am not clear on this and wonder if someone here can help me understand. The 17" comes with a 1920x1200 mp screen which is referred to as High Definition. I understand that the next OS, Leopard will allow any computer to be used at any resolution so that theoretically, the 15" could be used at 1920x1200 mp resolution. I understand that this would not be very practical because the image details would be extremely small. However if one did up the resolution on a 15" in Leopard, would this make it a "high definition"?

I understand also that the 17" HD has 133mp per inch as opposed to 115 or so mp per inch in the 15" MBP. Would the higher resolution on the 15 " make it appear as sharp as the 17" in the same resolution?

I guess the equivalent of the 17" 1920x1200 is the 15" used at the native resolution of the 17" (1680x1050)mp. So if the 15" were set using Leopard to 1680x1050, would it appear essentially the same, meaning as sharp and clear as the 17" set to 1920x1200? Or does the 17" high definition give it a crisper appearance because the 15" is not "high definition"?

Hope this makes sense. I am a bit confused. Also, if Leopard is going to allow the 17" to be used at 1920x1200, why pay the $100 upgrade today to get that feature?

 

[Scarlet Fever]

the resolution of a display is a hardware thing. You can't show more pixels than the number that physically exist on a display. You can't drive pixels that don't exist.

 

[Scottyfrombi]

What are people referring to when they say that Leopard is not resolution dependent? Will Leopard somehow allow us to see things like fonts at one resolution and images at another on the same screen at the same time or vise versa? Or allow us to zoom in and out on an image like Photoshop does for example? If so, could we then zoom a movie or stretch out a movie that is not in wide screen format?

 

[squeeks]

Resolution Independence
The old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology. Macs now ship with displays that sport native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system, including the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks, will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays.

The introduction of resolution independence may mean that there is work that you’ll need to do in order to make your application look as good as possible. For modern Cocoa and Carbon applications, most of the work will center around raster-based resources. For older applications that use QuickDraw, more work will be required to replace QuickDraw-based calls with Quartz ones.

source: http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/

 

[theman]

^^ hmm, that sounds nice. Maybe i will be able to see things on my mbp screen! I finally got the fonts to be a bit bigger, but other things are still pretty small. my eyes are getting overly strained all the time.