There's been a lot of info going round about the new RMBP but after reading many opinions I could never find one that satisfied my question on how good the scaling is, so after seeing one of these laptops in flesh I thought I'd share my view on it.
Choosing the right screen size / screen resolution combo has always been difficult for me. I tend to lean towards wanting higher-than-average screen resolutions as I don't mind things being a bit small if the tradeoff is screen estate.
Being a casual gamer however I debate if I should get a higher-res screen that is powered by the same GPU (think hi-res option on the 15" MBP) as driving more pixels means lower performance. And yes I hate the blurry effect of using anything other than native resolution so that's never been an option.
So I was interested in knowing how good the RMBP's scaling was as having more pixels means that interpolation will be harder to spot. I think the sweet spot for when I am doing work would shift between 1680x1050 and 1900x1200, and for browsing/gaming I'd settle for 1440x900 as I would benefit from more performance.
This, then, could become the ideal screen for me as I would no longer be debating at purchase-time what resolution to get.
After playing around with all of the available scaling options I must say I am very impressed. I cannot tell the difference between any RMBP scaled resolution and a normal MBP running native res, that's how good it is (and I'm quite picky with this stuff).
You can definitely choose any resolution you'd like from those available and never feel you're trading off quality. Now, obviously you can only get the "Retina" double-resolution effect at the "native" 1440x900 so you do lose that by using any of the other resolutions. I almost feel this resolution is overkill at the average viewing difference to be honest, although things do look incredibly crisp and I reckon you can easily get spoiled if you look at it for too long
Switching between the various scaling options is super-fast as well so it's as good in practice as it is in theory. Here's hoping for keybinds to set this!
Choosing the right screen size / screen resolution combo has always been difficult for me. I tend to lean towards wanting higher-than-average screen resolutions as I don't mind things being a bit small if the tradeoff is screen estate.
Being a casual gamer however I debate if I should get a higher-res screen that is powered by the same GPU (think hi-res option on the 15" MBP) as driving more pixels means lower performance. And yes I hate the blurry effect of using anything other than native resolution so that's never been an option.
So I was interested in knowing how good the RMBP's scaling was as having more pixels means that interpolation will be harder to spot. I think the sweet spot for when I am doing work would shift between 1680x1050 and 1900x1200, and for browsing/gaming I'd settle for 1440x900 as I would benefit from more performance.
This, then, could become the ideal screen for me as I would no longer be debating at purchase-time what resolution to get.
After playing around with all of the available scaling options I must say I am very impressed. I cannot tell the difference between any RMBP scaled resolution and a normal MBP running native res, that's how good it is (and I'm quite picky with this stuff).
You can definitely choose any resolution you'd like from those available and never feel you're trading off quality. Now, obviously you can only get the "Retina" double-resolution effect at the "native" 1440x900 so you do lose that by using any of the other resolutions. I almost feel this resolution is overkill at the average viewing difference to be honest, although things do look incredibly crisp and I reckon you can easily get spoiled if you look at it for too long
Switching between the various scaling options is super-fast as well so it's as good in practice as it is in theory. Here's hoping for keybinds to set this!