High-Resolution LCD Displays
posted in Technology, Graphics |Back in 2001-2002 as we were starting out the Avalon (WPF) project, we made several projections about the future course of technology. When you are building a fundamental long-term technology, it makes sense to project out a few years. The last thing you want to do is spend 5 years building something that is already obsolete by the time it ships.
We considered the expected progress of GPUs, CPUs, and many other factors. It was a bit contraversial since many of the things we were building needed my graphic horsepower than was commonly available in 2003. However I’m happy to say that the GPU designers met (and exceeded) our expectations and in 2007 even integrated graphic chipsets have plenty of power to drive rich media experiences.
One area however disappoints me. We expected that LCD screens wouldn’t just increase in size but would also increase in resolution. IBM had a display that was 204dpi, and some laptops were pushing 150dpi. My 30″ LCD at home is great and I love the 2560×1600 resolution, but imagine that same resolution in a 20″ display? Text would be soooo easy to read. Nice high-res photos and art would be beautiful. There are lots of great new huge displays but so far the marketplace has let me down and desktop LCD displays all have pretty much the same DPI, basically in the 100dpi range. Some laptops do better than this, but rarely exceed 150dpi.
Part of the problem is a classic chicken and egg one. Super-high-resolution displays are hard to use unless the applications compensate and use more pixels for basic UI elements. But traditional applications have been crap at doing this right. Its a pretty basic thing they should support since people with accessibility needs often need larger UI elements, but its still very inconsistently done. At one point we hoped tht the Vista desktop composition could automatically scale old applications that didn’t suppor this themselves, but its unclear to me whether that made it into the final release.
In the meantime support for Window management on a large display still sucks in Windows. Its much easier to use 3 displays with different windows maximized on each than doing a clean layout of your desktop on a 30″ monitor.