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Hmm, silly monitor resolution question.

Greencardman

Greencardman

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 24, 2003
490
2
Madison, WI
Ok, this is a dumb question, but my friend says her new 19" display has a resolution of 1680 x 1050. Is that normal? Cause my PC laptop has that same resolution, and its a heck of a lot smaller, like 15" diagonally. So whats the deal? Am i missing something here? Shouldn't her's be quite a bit higher res, cause its not a crappy monitor, its pretty new.
 
Greencardman said:
Ok, this is a dumb question, but my friend says her new 19" display has a resolution of 1680 x 1050. Is that normal? Cause my PC laptop has that same resolution, and its a heck of a lot smaller, like 15" diagonally. So whats the deal? Am i missing something here? Shouldn't her's be quite a bit higher res, cause its not a crappy monitor, its pretty new.
Click to expand...

No, that sounds about right for a 19" LCD. It's on the very high side for a 15" laptop screen.... That's the resolution of Dell's 19" LCD (1905FPW, IIRC).
 
mkrishnan said:
No, that sounds about right for a 19" LCD. It's on the very high side for a 15" laptop screen.... That's the resolution of Dell's 19" LCD (1905FPW, IIRC).
Click to expand...

My 19" LCD is 1280x1024???
 
Most computer software has been developed to operate at relatively low DPI'S... because CRT monitors have traditionally had DPIs that corresponded to 72DPI-ish. But your laptop runs at almost twice that (I calculated about 130 DPI?). This applies, to some extent, even to 12" notebooks which run at 1024x768.

The result is that while you get more things on the screen, things that were not rendered in a resolution-independent way (like the system bar) have very distorted sizes.... The long term fix is res-independent UI, in which case a screen like yours will be much better than one with the lower resolution, but until then, it's sort of a mixed bag....

The resolution Dot's 19" LCD runs at was pretty much the standard resolution for most 19" CRTs.
 
1680 x 1050 is a widescreen resolution, not the normal aspect ratio

Other screen resolutions are
640 x 480 normal 13"
800 x 600 (PC) or 832x624 (Mac) (normal 14" - 15")
1024 x 768 (normal 15" - 17")
1152 x 870 (normal 17" - 19")
1280 x 960 (widescreen)
1280 x 1024 (normal 19"-20")
1680 x 1050 (widescreen)
1600 x 1200 (normal)

The size of the characters and images on the screen is determined by the resolution you set and the physical size of the display. A 1680 x 1050 15" screen is going to have REALLY small text.
 
my text seems fine to me. I have dell inspiron 9100 laptop, and I can see everything pretty good. Then again, I am a designer, and people complain they can't see my text, but i didn't think it was THAT small. Thats why i was wondering what the deal was, cause I didn't know how my res could be that high and a 19" the same, but have so much more space.
 
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