zed's resolution rant *spawn

The fact that the past years we've been comparing resolutions base on the number of rows, and then all of a sudden for no good reason the cinema industry decides to start counting columns. It's a pointless, standard breaking change, which is par for the course.

 

Uncomfortable for what? If it's too long to show a letter, you use the top/bottom above/below the page view to contain controls and stuff. The real complaint here appears to be entirely cosmetic, that people want their page to fit their bezel.

I use my 16:10 in landscpae for everything - Word, browsing, image editing, video editing, audio editing. Currently I have a portrait browser window and Live Messenger off to the side, although for any app I work full screen. For documents I either zoom out to fit the whole page to the vertical resolution, or zoom in to see detail and scroll through the page. Sometimes with productivity software I'd appreciate a little more screen estate to not ahve to shrink and grow controls, but it's very workable and in no way a hindrance.

Until you're watching a widescreen movie or some games. Widescreen was chosen because it better matches the human field of view. 4:3 is top heavy.

Pretty much every camera takes 3:2 aspect photos by default. And then the image is cropped to remove bits you don't want and create another aspect, which is exactly what you can do with a monitor. Just display the aspect you want.

Films and TV are proving increasingly popular. The TV is still the prefered choice, but PCs are no longer just about creating documents and browsing web pages. Evne then, web pages are formatted with widescreen in mind, providing columns either side of the main content. If screens were narrower than web pages would need considerable changes to partition information differently. And by narrower I only mean resolution. If monitor was narrow in aspect but wide anough, like 1680 x 3000, then despite looking a little odd and requiring the reader to crane their neck, it could display a web page just fine.

And don't forget where this all comes from, that TVs have developed to a resolution that serves most purposes, hence no need to make a wider range of panels. If 1080 isn't enough vertical res for you, turn a 1920 x 1080 monitor on its side. If that's too long for your document, expand the app/window to be the right proportions. There's no need to create 1920 x 1440 4:3 monitors when the market is too small. Those really wanting more screen space have super high resolution monitors.

 

The thing is the widescreen more closely matches a natural view. If you look at a 4:3 display and try to fit it exactly in your view top to bottom you're getting a lot of black space on either side. I'd much rather have a widescreen display, I only lament the loss of resolution. You can create vertical space with a larger display, I don't want to give up horizontal to get vertical.

Well looking at the imdb makes me think that might be backwards, I think Rocky might have been shot in 35mm at 4:3 with the intention to display 1.85:1 in the theater (which I believe it was, unless they just chopped stuff off for the DVD version).

I'm sure bigger budget movies like those I mentioned before would have been shot in 80mm or something.

1920x1080, but I'll probably pick up a 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 display soonish.

 

I would agree it is pointless, but not idiotic: http://xkcd.com/927/

 

? What was the point in changing it then? The existing system isn't broken or limited. If horizontal res needs including, you can either just specific the resolution, or could provide a vertical res and aspect, 1080p 16:9 and 1080p 1.89:1 for those '2k' displays which only offer 7% more horizontal resolution than 1080p, so what's the point? At this point I can only guess marketing. 2k is a miniscule advance on 1080p, so to make it sound better, give it a new name that confuses the existing naming convention...

 

I think the 2k has mainly been used in digital cinema only and it's not a new thing, because the 2k moniker exists there it would be hard to call the new much higher 8 megapixel resolution consumer displays/projectors as only 2k.

I think the 4k moniker makes a lot of sense, because it's four times 1080p. I think it's easier to market and easier on the tonque than say 2160p. The number of lines with the i/p at the end made more sense, when stuff was interlaced.

 

You wouldn't use 2160p as it's a mouthful. You'd abbreviate that to 2k, as it's about 2 thousand lines, twice the vertical resolution, just as 4k is about 4000 columns. 4k only happens to work for 4x 1080p as a coincidence; 6k would be 9x 1080p. Really for consumers they'd go with Quad HD, or SuperHD along the same lines as HD and True HD. The numerical form is really for educated persons, wherein changing from counting lines to columns was silly, due to the cinema people and the TV people working independently.

 

It comes from the edram in consoles thread.

 

QuadFullHD or QFHD is what they are calling 3840x2160 because QHD was used for 2560x1440.