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Offer an intermediate resolution on New 17" Inspirons (1680x1050)

230 points posted to Monitors and Displays, Sales Strategies by benjesuit 06/25/07

WUXGA (1900x1200) is a huge jump from your next option of WXGA(1440x950).

What about WSXGA (1680x1050)? Perfect all around compromise between the two resolutions. And perfect for browsing, gaming, movies, etc.

@1900x1200, manhy web pages are hard to read because their fonts do not scale and they're designed for 800x600 or 1024x768. And who wants to zoom flash graphics all the time?

C'mon Dell. Even HP offers WSXGA on their 17" DV9500T.

kenjennings
06/25/07		 Me? I'd like a 18/19/20" LCD on a laptop with something like 2560x1600 resolution. But, I'm abnormal.

Actually, you can't put something like that on your lap. It''s a notebook. Actually, its too big to be a notebook. What do we call these things? Deskbook? Dell calls the M2010 The Showstopper, but the screen resolution isn't any better than some of the smaller notebooks.
johnnilsson
06/25/07		 Edit: Oh nothing.
essell55
07/11/07		 I agree the WUXGA is only good for the 20" screens, and 1680 is great for gaming and everything else on an 17"... I've been waiting for a Wsxga 17" dell for months now...

INSPIRON AND VOSTRO!!!
dara
10/15/07		 I totally disagree. I want WUXGA on the 14.1" Saying 1680x1050 on a 17" is perfect for movies is silly. WUXGA is perfect for movies. Period. Now perhaps you think you can save a few bucks with the compromise resolution, which if true is a reason to choose it. But there is almost no downside to more resolution other than a few bucks - you can scale most things that matter appropriately. And for TrueHD movies, you don't have to scale at all to watch them natively on WUXGA.

Dara Parsavand
benjesuit
10/16/07		 What's silly Dara is the fact that you didn't take into account the underpowered graphics cards that Dell is installing @ 1900x1200. That's nearly 30% more pixels that have to be drawn with a 256MB Nvidia 8 series graphics card. If Dell gave the option of 8700m GT 512MB on a 17" Inspiron/Vostro, then yes, perfect!

BTW, you've got to be kidding about 1900x1200 on a 14.1 inch screen. Now, THAT's silly. Bear in mind that there is no TV manfacturer that uses the resolution under 32". And that's for a very good reason.
dara
10/16/07		 benjesuit,

Good point about the video card. For watching TrueHD movies in MPEG2 or MPEG4, it may be useful to have hardware decoding and a big fat video card. I'm not sure though, these days the processors are pretty powerful and software decoding may be perfectly adequate (movies are not games - I'm sure for high resolution games you can always use more video card). And software decoding is OK since I'm not doing anything else with the computer when I'm watching a movie (I used to hate it with really old computers where you couldn't even listen to an MP3 file the same time as working). I actually want the high-res screen more for photographs than movies, so the video card hardly matters as long as it can drive a still image (and it doesn't take much to drive a 6 MB WUXGA image).

But your other point is sadly mistaken. I'm certainly not kidding, and it certainly isn't silly to want 161 DPI on a laptop. My last laptop had 145 (a Sony 12.1”) and I don't consider it the least bit state of the art. At 12" viewing distance, 60 pixels per degree (roughly, the eye's limit) is 286 DPI. Why wouldn't I prefer more until running up against this limit? Do you realize this limit isn't exceeded until outfitting a Dell 1420 with a QWUXGA (3840x2400) display? (And even there, you could just push your eyes a little closer.) I hope you realize digital cameras have been capturing at QWUXGA resolutions for a while now. Do you know the OpenMoko (Linux phone) runs at 286 DPI? Your comment that you don't see smaller than 32" 1080p TVs does not at all bolster your point and it actually reinforces mine. The average buyer (or even 10% of the buyers) of a 1080p TV is not planning on sitting closer than 3 feet to the screen. At 3 feet, this is equivalent to being 1 foot away from a 10.7” laptop with WUXGA. People who sit further than 3 feet (most people) will see an even denser image until they get 6 feet away or so and they will hit their eye's limit. So it makes perfect sense TV companies would stop there given the greater viewing distances. And laptop companies should probably not shrink QWUXGA screens much beyond 14.1", e.g. don't plan on seeing a QWUXGA phone.

(sorry for all the English units, hopefully this will all be metric someday)

Dara
wing044
10/19/07		 Totally agree with you. Dell's 17" Inspirons have always been offering these strange options. It was a hard decision between matt 1440x900 and glossy 1920x1200 when I bought my 9300. This was two years ago and today still no intermediate resolution available.
winoffice
Jan 6		 Just order a 1920x1200 display. A 1920x1200 display can be configured to 1680x1050.
 
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