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Why no Retina monitor for MBP?

M

mortenjensen

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 19, 2012
241
21
Hi all,
I have a MBP 15'' which at work is attached to a Dell 24'' IPS-panel giving me 1920px wide screen.
My next MBP will be a retina-model - and I would then like to upgrade my monitor to a retina-monitor.

However, I have not seen any such.

Why is that?

Morten
 
1) Larger screens at high pixel densities have larger chances of dead/defective pixels which makes them more costly to produce. This gets better over time as the production technology improves.

A 27" display at roughly the same pixel density as the retina Macbooks would be something like 5120x2880 pixels. That's 14,745,600 pixels that have a chance to be defective.

2) Right now there isn't a good display cable standard to handle that high resolution. I think that a future version of Displayport is planned to be able handle larger resolutions.

We'll probably see such a display from Apple in two or three years.
 
I am just thinking of a screen with the same resolution as the 15'' MBP retina.
A 24'' (not 27, too big for a regular desk, IMO).

Why is that more difficult to produce than panels for the MBP? It should be easier since it is bigger!

Morten
 
mortenjensen said:
I am just thinking of a screen with the same resolution as the 15'' MBP retina.
A 24'' (not 27, too big for a regular desk, IMO).

Why is that more difficult to produce than panels for the MBP? It should be easier since it is bigger!

Morten
Click to expand...

A smaller display/surface collects less dust during manufacturing maybe.

Just a hunch, I have little knowledge of what the manufacturing procedure is.
 
mortenjensen said:
I am just thinking of a screen with the same resolution as the 15'' MBP retina.
A 24'' (not 27, too big for a regular desk, IMO).

Why is that more difficult to produce than panels for the MBP? It should be easier since it is bigger!

Morten
Click to expand...

I think the issue there is how you handle scaling the interface.

The retina MBPs went to double the dpi of the previous versions, so that the GUI is now 2x the pixels in each dimension. That makes handling the scaling easier, especially for apps that haven't been updated yet.

To do that on a ~24" monitor you'd want to jump up to something like 3840x2160, which is what the industry is calling 4k resolution.

Going to an intermediate resolution, like 2880x1800, would mean that the text and interface would either be really tiny or really big, or not quite as sharp as it could be by using one of the scaled display modes. Basically it would just be like a 15" RMBP display blown up with no extra screen real estate, but the modes other than "best for retina" would look worse because on a large monitor you would notice the scaling more.
 
Why do you want a "Retina" monitor. I sit about 2-3 feet from the monitor and I can't see the pixels nor have I really tried either.
 
I know the viewing distance is a factor. Still, my ips monitor is far from crisp as the retina screen. I would gladly pay to have a 24'' retina crisp monitor

Morten
 
mortenjensen said:
I am just thinking of a screen with the same resolution as the 15'' MBP retina.
A 24'' (not 27, too big for a regular desk, IMO).

Why is that more difficult to produce than panels for the MBP? It should be easier since it is bigger!

Morten
Click to expand...

There are a lot of 24" and 27" computer displays that have similar resolution as the 15" rMBP. The Thunderbolt Display comes pretty close (and has the sameish resolution as the 13"), but there are more than a few out there.

Just remember that resolution and pixel density are two different things. A 50-inch television with the same resolution (the dimensions, 2880x1800 for example) will have dramatically lower pixel density (the number of pixels in one square inch). Pixel density is what makes for the Retina magic.
 
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