Why do most laptops still come with crap displays?

ponder

ponder

Honorary Master
Joined
Jan 22, 2005
Messages
99,272
Reaction score
31,598
Location
Niflheimr
In this day & age where tablets & phones are coming out with hi-res displays in small sizes one would expect every single laptop to at least have a FullHD display but no most still seems to have 1368x768 res displays. Things have not really changed much on this front.
 
They have the same specs as the CRT monitor that I had on my 486 (except for mass and thickness).
 
It's a good question though I guess they trying to keep costs down, and increase the specs of the machine in terms of processing power.

If you plugging a screen in, then I guess it doesnt matter hey, but I agree the resolutions that come on laptops these days is abysmal.

It's a trade-off I guess... Higher res requires more processing power, well for games anyway!
 
ponder said:
In this day & age where tablets & phones are coming out with hi-res displays in small sizes one would expect every single laptop to at least have a FullHD display but no most still seems to have 1368x768 res displays. Things have not really changed much on this front.
Click to expand...

Things have changed a lot. Laptops are coming out with 3 and 4k displays. The problem is twofold:
1) Production cost of the displays. Laptops are a cutthroat business and manufacturers compete on driving pricing downwards.
2) Cost of components needed to drive higher res displays.

But yea I'm sitting and staring at a 1366 15.6" screen now and it's an awful experience.
 
I always wonder why the trackpads on most are still behind times as well, especially compared to apples trackpad.
 
Interesting topic, this had been trending since 2012 already, here is a techreport article:

http://techreport.com/news/24212/is-1920x1080-the-new-1366x768

Is 1920x1080 the new 1366x768?
by Scott Wasson — 4:49 PM on January 14, 2013
One of the stories that came out of this year's CES is a classic good news/bad news sort of scenario for PC users.

The good news is that PC displays are finally shedding the bonds of the nearly ubiquitous 1366x768 resolution and lousy TN panels that have plagued them for several years now. We saw a host of new Windows 8-based laptops, tablets, and all-in-one PCs in various locations across Vegas last week, and the vast majority of them sported 1920x1080 displays based on IPS panels. They were sharper, bolder, and brighter than the displays they replace—and a great many of them support multitouch input, as well.

I couldn't be happier about that part of this tale. After years of folks like us grumping about the awful state of PC displays, it seems the industry has decided to shift en masse to a much better standard, and one can't help but root for these superior displays to infiltrate as much of the PC market as possible.

And yet... there's bad news here, too. The problem is that 1080p displays appear to be settling in as the new standard across a broad swath of systems of different types and sizes. For instance, we saw 1080p displays on an 11.6" AMD-based tablet, on a 13.3" Samsung laptop, and on a larger 15.6" Samsung laptop.

Uh oh.

On the 11.6" tablet, a 1080p display looks to be quite interesting. The pixel density doesn't quite rival the iPad, but text crispness and clarity does, thanks to an assist from Microsoft's ClearType sub-pixel anti-aliasing tech. As the display size rises, though, the pixel density of a 1080p display drops, to the point where it's not nearly as impressive in a 15.6" laptop.

If, indeed, PC makers are simply trading 1366x768 for 1080p, as we fear, then this trend is a decidedly mixed blessing. Yes, it's positive progress, but it's not exactly what you'd want to see. We'd be much better off if PC makers were targeting a common—and relatively high—pixel density, or something close to it, instead of the same resolution regardless of display size.

That need is especially strongly felt since Windows 8's support for high-PPI displays is pretty limited and seems to target ultra-dense panels almost exclusively. Sadly, Win8 doesn't offer the sort of flexibility and near-independence from display PPI that Apple built into OS X to support its Retina MacBooks. That failure will be compounded if 1080p becomes the de facto standard and PPI is dictated on a sliding scale by display size, as it has been during the 1366x768 years.

Yes, price constraints will play a factor in these things, as they always do. Still, ultimately, it only makes sense for larger systems to adopt higher resolution displays, since larger systems and enclosures tend to offer larger thermal envelopes and more room for GPU power under the hood. We'd sure like to see PC makers operate with an awareness that 1080p in an 11.6" tablet is nice but in a 15.6" laptop is an iffy compromise. If they simply settle on 1080p and go back to sleep for three or four more years, they're likely to see laptop sales continue to decline as cheaper laptops and tablets with higher PPIs soak up consumers' dollars instead.
Click to expand...

It is noted that the larger than 15.6" laptops had moved on to improved resolutions, then also the increase in price.
 
ponder said:
In this day & age where tablets & phones are coming out with hi-res displays in small sizes one would expect every single laptop to at least have a FullHD display but no most still seems to have 1368x768 res displays. Things have not really changed much on this front.
Click to expand...

I asked this question a while ago.

My phone has a full HD display, but my laptop is still stuck at 1366X768. :(

Guess Intel graphics was just not up to the task, but with the new Iris graphics, hopefully it will get much better.
 
Fulcrum29 said:
It is noted that the larger than 15.6" laptops had moved on to improved resolutions, then also the increase in price.
Click to expand...

I don't mind to pay a little bit extra, because a notebook you'll use often and it's not like you buy a new one every day.
 
My Dell has had 1080p since 2012 when I bought it, but overall very happy with this laptop and probably will keep it far past the normal three years I keep a laptop.
 
kingrob said:
Guess Intel graphics was just not up to the task, but with the new Iris graphics, hopefully it will get much better.
Click to expand...

Intel gfx is fine for driving displays with 1920x1080 res and has been since a long time ago for normal desktop usage & multimedia, not gaming though.

I can plug an old laptop from 2005 into a fullhd display and it works fine at that res while running the built in panel at the same time.
 
Last edited:
cerebus said:
Things have changed a lot. Laptops are coming out with 3 and 4k displays. The problem is twofold:
Click to expand...

Yes those are out there but not the norm and usually only found on top end models.

You walk into any shop and you would be lucky to find a fullhd laptop. Just sad really.
 
Look at the speed of laptops and the processors. The technology is very old. All laptops are far underpowered to equivalent specked desktops. Yes they are mobile and compact. and draw less power. Laptops are just not up to standard. 10K for a performance desktop and 30K for the same performance wise specked laptop.
 
It's why, despite numerous requests to replace it, I've hung on to my oldish Latitude E6500 here in the office because it offers a WUXGA resolution (1920x1200), and is the only one in my department that does. I dunno how the others here cope with 1366x768 on a 15" :sick:

Ironically, the only devices that have higher resolution displays than mine are the two rMBP's used by our CEOs.

However, to perhaps try to answer the question- cerebrus basically nailed the main reason. Cost. Cheap TN panels go a long way in keeping BOMs down on laptops. Most users don't complain because of the low prices that low-end laptops command these days.
 
And now Toshiba offers a full HD display on a cheap $200 Chromebook, but not on cheap Windows laptops.

I don't understand.
 
kingrob said:
And now Toshiba offers a full HD display on a cheap $200 Chromebook, but not on cheap Windows laptops.

I don't understand.
Click to expand...

Read this:

http://techreport.com/blog/25797/high-ppi-support-in-windows-8-1-still-not-so-great

High-PPI support in Windows 8.1: still not so great
by Cyril Kowaliski — 8:25 PM on December 19, 2013
Displays with high pixel densities are pretty much standard in tablets, and we're all waiting for them to become standard in notebooks. Take a trip to your local Best Buy, though, and chances are a majority of systems in the laptop aisle will have 1366x768 panels—even large notebooks that really have no business with a display resolution that low.

It's a sad state of affairs. If Google can serve up two megapixels in a $229 tablet, then why can't PC makers do the same in $800 ultrabooks? Why isn't 1080p the new standard by now? And why aren't truly high-PPI screens (think 2560x1440 or more) widely available for those who don't mind paying a premium?

I'm sure costs and margins partly explain why PC makers continue to ride the 1366x768 gravy train. As I discovered recently, however, there's another, even more infuriating hurdle on the path to high-PPI nirvana.

You see, high-PPI support in Windows still kinda sucks.

zenbook-prime.jpg

Behold exhibit A: the Zenbook Prime UX31A from Asus. This is an Ivy Bridge-powered ultrabook with a 13.3", 1920x1080 IPS panel. It's already more than a year old, and there's nothing all that remarkable about it. Last month, I dug it out from my pile of review samples, loaded it up with Windows 8.1, and took it to AMD's APU13 conference in San Jose, California. There, I used it as my primary computer for about four days.

Windows 8.1 did a great job of recognizing the Zenbook Prime's display as a high-PPI one, and it scaled the user interface accordingly right away. Default applications like the File Explorer looked crisp and clean, with readable text and correctly sized widgets. I couldn't really fault Microsoft there; they clearly seemed to have done their part.

Things got ugly once I started installing third-party apps, though. Here's what Google Chrome looked like at the default scaling setting:

hippifail4-chrometext.png

Total blurry mess. For reference, here's Chrome next to a File Explorer window that's scaled properly. Note the difference in font sharpness:

hippifail1-chromemenu.png

It's not just Chrome's user interface that was scaled up and blurred. The whole application was blurred—even web pages. I tried switching to the Chrome beta channel, even toggling an obscure high-PPI switch in the hidden "chrome://flags" settings to enable high-PPI support, but nothing helped. The beta looked no better, and the obscure toggle ("HiDPI Support," in case you're wondering) just made everything broken and ugly.

I encountered the same blurriness in other third-party apps: iTunes, 7-Zip, and Sublime Text 2, my favorite text editor. They all scaled up to the right size, but without making proper use of the extra pixels available. The result was invariably atrocious. Looking at blurred fonts all day is a recipe for headaches.

Now, a few third-party applications did handle themselves better. Here's Firefox, for instance:

hippifail2-ffmenu.png

Mozilla's browser at least understood that it was running on a high-PPI system, and it scaled page contents and UI fonts sans blur. As you can see above, however, the UI widgets didn't quite look right. The icons were blurry, and the Firefox menu was full of giant black arrows for some reason. Don't get me wrong; this was still worlds better than Chrome. But it was hardly the kind of experience you'd expect from a premium ultrabook with a fancy screen.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have apps like Photoshop that pretty much ignore Windows' PPI settings altogether. Here's Photoshop CS6 and Word running side by side; Word scales correctly, while Photoshop doesn't:

hippifail3-photoshop.png

I couldn't track down a fix for Adobe's negligence. I did, however, find out how to get rid of the blur in apps like Chrome: right click on the application shortcut, go to Properties, find the compatibility settings tab, and tick "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings." Boom! All better. Except, not really. Ticking that checkbox means UI widgets stay the same size at any scaling level, and fonts may or may not scale up as needed. In Chrome's case, that means tiny buttons, big text labels, and illegibly small fonts on web pages. You have to raise Chrome's default page zoom to 125% in order to make the web readable.

There is a simpler alternative to enabling that compatibility setting for half your apps. In Windows' Display control panel, ticking "Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays" will restore the legacy scaling from previous Windows releases. That means no blur, but also no improvement over the per-app compatibility setting. Fonts and UI widgets are still sized inconsistently, and in apps like Chrome and Sublime Text, you still have to scale page or document contents manually.

So, yeah. Running Windows on a notebook with a high-PPI screen is an exercise in frustration right now. With the Zenbook Prime, I sometimes wished that I had a 1366x768 screen—not because I didn't enjoy the extra pixel density in software that supported it, but because I just wanted everything else to look right. And no matter how much I tinkered, some things never did look quite right.

Now, can you imagine a technically illiterate user grappling with these same problems? Yikes. No wonder HP, Dell, & co. aren't tripping over themselves to sell you high-PPI notebooks. The software support just isn't mature enough yet.

If PC makers aren't going to take the first step, then Microsoft needs to reach out to developers and make sure Windows software is ready for high-PPI screens. We're not talking about cleaning the Augean stables here. Apple has already pulled off something quite similar. There was a rough transition period after Retina MacBooks came out a couple of years back, but high-PPI support in OS X and Mac software has improved dramatically since then. Today, laptops like the $1,299 MacBook Pro with Retina display are very compelling, partly because they offer a high-PPI experience that Windows just can't match.

Microsoft, I know you're all about tablets right now—but if you want to make Windows notebooks sexy again (and goodness knows they need it), then fixing high-PPI support should be high on your list of priorities. If this doesn't get done, my next laptop might just have an Apple logo on it.
Click to expand...
 
ponder said:
In this day & age where tablets & phones are coming out with hi-res displays in small sizes one would expect every single laptop to at least have a FullHD display but no most still seems to have 1368x768 res displays. Things have not really changed much on this front.
Click to expand...

Becuase it only needs to be 720p to be able to put the "HD" sticker on the box.
 
It hasn't been a cost issue for years now. It's now mostly that vendors avoiding putting in High-DPI panels because of Windows scaling issues. Its much more difficult to make a 5" 1080p panel than it is to make a 15.6" 1080p panel, but they do it in higher volume because more people buy phones with some regularity and there are no scaling issues with Android, Windows Phone or what have you.
 
Last edited:
Lupus said:
My Dell has had 1080p since 2012 when I bought it, but overall very happy with this laptop and probably will keep it far past the normal three years I keep a laptop.
Click to expand...

My Dell had 1920x1200 in 2006, although it was an extra cost item. Pity you don't get the x1200 displays anymore.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X