Posted by Spartanicus on 09/14/05 01:44

Jim Higson <jh@333.org> wrote:

>> Many people are confused about the issue of resolution on CRT monitors,
>> they think that by increasing the Screen Area setting, the resolution
>> follows suit. For colour CRT monitors this is only true up to a certain
>> point. Colour CRTs use a mask and phosphor clusters known as "dots",
>> these dots have a physical dimension referred to in specifications as
>> "dot pitch" [1]. A few examples: 0.24mm dot pitch = ~105PPI max
>> resolution, 0.27mm dot pitch = ~94PPI max resolution.
>
>As an aside, I used to actually quite like the effect of a CRT at
>resolutions above what the dot pitch said it could handle. So long as it
>didn't bring down the refresh rate, the low-GPU fake antialiasing in games
>looked fine

Fair enough if you prefer to trade in a certain loss of definition for
an aesthetic effect.

>Hmmm... what is the current state of vector interfaces? I think I read
>somewhere GNOME uses lazy rasterised SVG for all icons etc. I might have
>been reading about a future version, mind.

I'm not particularly familiar with GNOME and the likes. To solve the
problem on Windows would require a fundamental change in the OS, and
many of the applications that run on it. Vector based UI elements could
impose a resource penalty. Given the backward compatibility problems, I
can imagine that OS developers are not eager to change to such a system.
The benefits would only really become evident with future hardware. That
said, I occasionally use a Dell laptop with a 147PPI resolution screen,
and these are already really uncomfortable to use due to this issue.

>Maybe future very high res screens are where Opera will gain greater use,
>because it can zoom the bitmapped parts as well as increase the text size.

Apart from the OS UI elements, the effect of high resolution screens on
bitmapped content should also be considered. It may become necessary to
integrate high quality image resizing into the OS to handle the variety
of output resolutions. To get the benefit content providers such as web
authors may need to provide oversized bitmapped content, or make bitmaps
available in multiple sizes.

--
Spartanicus

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