see part 01

Part 03: Resolution Woes

I care a lot about the monitor I use; if I’m going to be staring at it for hours every day then I don’t want to put up with a mediocre one. There are a few things I care about in a monitor, including reflectivity, brightness, contrast, black level, colour gamut, and possibly refresh rate, but in this article I just want to talk about resolution. First off, I think I should explain exactly what we’re talking about here.

Introduction To Display Resolution

A computer screen is made of pixels, which are tiny dots too small to see individually that make up the image you see. I’m writing this on a very low resolution screen, and even this has 1024 pixels across and 768 pixels vertically. These days, the highest resolution screens go up to 2560x1600 pixels.

There are two different factors to think about here. One is the number of pixels in the screen; the other is the size of the screen. A bigger screen does not necessarily have more pixels — the big 60” TVs rich people have in their living rooms have no more pixels than even most 22” computer monitors; each pixel is simply larger. The iPhone 4 has a very small screen, and yet because its pixels are so fine it has almost as many as this monitor I’m using!

Here’s the thing though. If you increase the size of the screen but keep the pixel count the same, everything just gets bigger. But if you increase the number of pixels, something different happens.

It doesn’t actually have to be different, it just is, due to the way most software is designed. When I look to the lower-left of my screen I see the Start menu. When I look to the upper-right I see the Close button (a little “X”). These interface elements are rendered by the computer in a fixed number of pixels, and it’s the same number of pixels no matter what the screen resolution. The result of this is that a higher resolution screen keeps the Start menu and the Close button the same size but widens the space between them. If you imagine just stretching the screen bigger, the interface elements would stretch along with everything else. But if you increase the resolution at the same time (by adding more pixels), the buttons will stay the same size but be stretched farther apart.

In practice, a higher resolution screen gives you a larger workspace. Think about the tool palettes in Photoshop, for example, and imagine keeping them the same size but moving them further apart so that you can fit a bigger image in the middle. Or imagine extending the screen vertically so that you don’t have to scroll so much on web pages.

• 720p compared to 1600p. See how much extra room there is.

One final difference is that the higher resolution screens can display more detailed photos, movies and games. “High Definition” refers to a particular standardized resolution.

So to summarize: I want loads of room on-screen and I want movies to look really sharp. You can get by with less, of course, but getting by isn’t the point. I want better than that.

Terms To Be Going On With

I think perhaps some nomenclature is called for before we move on.

Resolution can be described in a couple of different ways. 1080p, for example, is shorthand for a screen of 1920 pixels across and 1080 pixels vertically; 1920x1080. 720p means 1280x720. 1440p means 2560x1440.

All of these screens have the same aspect ratio; their width-to-height ratio is 16:9. You can also get 16:10 screens, which are slightly taller, and they’ll be 1200p (1920x1200) or 1600p (2560x1600).

Where From Here?

All this explanation is just setting the scene for the continuing question of this series: why was I drawn to the iMac?

Part of my justification for the iMac’s high price was its very high resolution 1440p screen. I reasoned that you can’t get such a screen for much under €1000. This is true as far as it goes, but I’m no longer convinced that such a pixel monster is actually desirable.

Problems With Surpassing 1080p: Upscaling Films

You can’t magically add detail to a film. If the film was released in 1080p, then watching it on a 1440p screen holds no advantage. However, there might, just maybe, be a disadvantage.

A movie is ideally watched at its native resolution – that way each of the 1920x1080 pixels in the film can map neatly onto each of the 1920x1080 pixels on the screen. But stretching 1080p up to 1440p doesn’t work so well. It requires some deciphering on the part of the computer – the process is called “upscaling” - and if you think about it, it’s actually a slightly awkward thing to do. 1440/1080 is 4/3, so upscaling requires mashing three pixels into the space of four. This is never going to work perfectly.

Of course, it may work ok. I genuinely don’t know – I’ve found it difficult to get good information on this. But I’ve heard some hifi film people say that if you have two displays of equal size where one is 1080p and the other 1440p then, perverse as it sounds, a 1080p film will look better on the lower-resolution screen. Subjectively, it may even appear to be higher-resolution on the lower-resolution screen.

Games

Games present a different issue. Although the super-high resolution seems like a good idea at first glance, the problem is that you’d need one monster graphics card to drive that many pixels at any reasonable frame rate. The iMac, incidentally, does not have a monster graphics card. You can of course run the game at a lower resolution, but then there’s no advantage to the big, expensive screen.

Conclusion

1440p or 1600p screens are far more expensive than 1080p or 1200p screens. So much so, in fact, that it would make more sense to get two of the smaller ones. That would allow me to have one in landscape orientation and the other in portrait, which would be great for writing and web browsing. 

• This image is kind of rubbish and inaccurate I’m afraid, but it gives you some idea of the utility of two big monitors in portrait and landscape.

Yet another option I would consider were money no object is a twelve-inch Cintiq. Using it essentially as a €1000 mouse pad along with a 1200p screen would be a nice combination.

The high-res iMac screen doesn’t hold so much appeal for me any more.