Re: Monitor question
On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 12:58:42AM EST, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> Johan Kullstam put forth on 12/29/2010 11:25 PM:
> > Good for you. My gripe is that one can no longer choose. It's
> > shortscreen or nothing.
> >
> > I had an old thinkpad t42 with a 14" 1440x1050 and it rocked. It
> > weighed only 4.5 lbs even with cd drive. For me, it was an optimal
> > size and weight. The current offerings are all inferior - they are
> > heavier, have less vertical screen dimension and worse resolution.
>
> You're a member of a super-minority Johan.
Nobody would deny that IT professionals are a tiny minority. Even if you
add the comparatively much larger numbers of non-IT professionals, you
are looking at a small share of the market, and not the most profitable
thereof. The masses have much lower expectations/exigencies, resulting
in higher margins. In a somewhat different walk of life, even Blackberry
have gotten wise to these aspects and are now focusing on producing for
the masses.
> The majority of the marketplace wants wide screen, which is why you're
> finding little or nothing else but widescreen. Even the little toy
> netbook computers all have widescreen LCDs.
And using them for anything but entertainment (movies, video & TV
streaming, gaming..) is a nightmare. I was configuring one lately,
1024x600 screen resolution, out-of-the-box ubuntu/gnome desktop and even
with a very small font, and I frequently had to use Alt+left mouse to
drag the popup dialogs upwards: the ‘OK’, ‘cancel’ buttons were
off-screen.
Fortunately, I don't use GUI's much on my own machines, so I'm quite
flexible, but right now it looks like 10+ years of tweaking the ergonomy
of the desktop has gone down the tube in a matter of a few months.
The only way out of this dilemma would appear to start off with the
highest available resolution you can lay your hands on - ie. HDTV's
1080p, and try to recreate a sane 4:3 screen or thereabout and use only
part of the display¹.
As long as you are able to get such a portable system that features such
high resolution, that is.
I recently looked at the Thinkpad offering, and Lenovo's specs and
customization pages have become extremely vague about the actual pixel
dimensions of the displays available for their different models. From
what I have seen, it looks like all Thinkpads except the 15 lbs. 17"
W701ds come with 1600x900 as the highest resolution. And more often than
not that is only an option. Now that's precisely 30% shorter than the
hi-res screens of the past decade - ie. 1600x1200 or the wide-screen
1920x1200, and still 15% less height than the 1400x1050 that was
commonly featured on 15" laptops before the advent of wide screens.
Among other things, what this means is that you will have to use smaller
fonts to make an entire page of a pdf document fit on one screen. To the
point where you have to lean forward to read comfortably. And this is
even more of a problem when the document you are viewing features the
standard A4 paper size rather than U.S. letter because pages are an
extra 8.5% taller.
> That's very telling about the market.
As in.. whatever the suckers' preferences, one size fits all makes good
economic sense from the vendor/manufacturer's perspective?
cj
¹ Ubuntu's new ‘Unity’ desktop appears to be a move in that direction.
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