Objective Screen Resolution Comparison

[lfeagan]

Hello All ,
I got to thinking earlier today about how I might create something that would help users decide on a monitor. So, after about three hours of trying various things and working on formatting I came up with this. Please leave constructive comments that provide suggestions on how to resolve any issues you might have with it. I know it is not ideal, but hopefully it will provide a reference guide to helping people see what "feels comfortable".

Take it easy

-Lance

http://www.vectorcomputing.net/Upload/I ... risons.pdf

Oh yeah, one last note, to get a good feel for how it looks it helps a LOT to print out the pages. I know...I hate to waste the trees to. But, you just really can't get a good feel for all the detail that is there when viewing on your monitor. And, in case anyone asks, I used LyX for LaTeX generation and dvipdfm to build my pdf files. All images were originally png files, which I can post if anyone really wants the raw images.

[Kenn]

Nice work Lance!

My only suggestion is to use something less abstract than a random circuit printout for the image, since it's very hard for people to relate to that when trying to visualize the differences between the images. I'd try something people are familiar with - a checkerboard pattern, some block text, or even web page printouts. That would give people a better sense of how much smaller text will be (and thus how difficult to read) as you up the resolution.

Thinking about it some more, maybe a series of images with different subject matter would work best...some illustrating the relative densities between the sizes, and others showing the effect on a given display size:

http://www.pbase.com/kenn/image/37491661
http://www.pbase.com/kenn/image/37491445

Of course with better examples that show the effect of increasing real estate and pixel densities...

[doylnea]

http://www.pbase.com/kenn/image/37491661

First year law student?

[Kenn]

http://www.pbase.com/kenn/image/37491661

First year law student?

lol

[pointfielder]

great job lance. thanks for your hard work!

one suggestion following up on Kenn's email: one of the things
you could compare is actual screen shots of the windows desktop
or the linux desktop for the resolutions that you have in your PDF doc.

[lfeagan]

I hear ya, here is my rationale for not using screenshots of desktops. Those images were all generated by setting up the image parameters to exactly match the screen resolution/dpi/size parameters. Then I scaled them down by 1/2. Of course, I also made sure that when I made the images I made them with a pattern enough larger than it when scaled down it would give the appropriate feel. As such, text or other things don't really fit into my schema of things. I wanted to do two things at once: 1) show the relative sizes of an entire display as far as how much area there is and 2) give a feel for the size of things you would need to be comfortable with viewing at the screens native resolution.

Note how when you look at two different sizes of something with the same resolution you can tell that there is the same amount of information there. But, when you look at two different resolutions of the same size, you can see how much smaller thigns gets, but also how much more there is.

I would really like to do what you all suggested and have some sort of text comparison. I have tried working with that and just haven't found anything that worked well enough to give a good comparison yet. I don't want to use screen shots of a desktop because, as I said, then it halves the size of what you are viewing. Also, I built this into a PDF that was intented to be printed on full 8.5" x 11" sheets of paper with the hope of avoiding any monitor dependencies that viewing them on screen might have. This is a somewhat tricky problem to come up with a good solution that does everything with. I appreciate the feedback.

About the circuit pattern. I chose this after a lot of trying various things. I just found that it gave a good feel for how much stuff is there. I tried out various resolutions on my CRT monitor and then compared how I felt about them vs how I felt about the corresponding circuit pattern and I felt that the circuit sizings I ended up with had a strong correlation between seeing things at a certain size on both. When I see the 14" @ 1024x768 circuit and compared it to my desktop at that same resolution, they both felt big and looked big. The 1400x1050 was smaller, but still nice. The 1600x1200 seemed small on both, just as it should be. What I should do is get some users who barely don't have good enough vision to stand the 15" 1600x1200 IBM display but do like the 1400x1050 15" and ask them how the corresponding images "feel" to them. If they think that the 1400x1050 feels nice and the 1600x1200 feels small or is hard for them to resolve details easily, then I think that would be a good test of the images working well.

I do see the point though about the circuits in that they are a bit abstract. About the checkerboard: I tried out a checker board. I found that the human mind fills in too many things automatically, thus making even ones that are tiny not feel so bad. Regular patterns allow the mind to interpolate things that the eyes can resolve differentiations between. As such, regular patterns are something I shied away from after trying a few out. In the same sense, I worry that text would have the same issue. In fact, I know it would. Serif fonts use subtle visual cues to help us read text more easily than with sans-serif fonts. This is the same thing.

[lfeagan]

Just wanted to add one more thing, thanks for the reviews. My ideal vision would be something that we could display on the screens of all these notebooks at once and take a photograph of all of them from the same angle, distance, etc, so that the photos were extremely consistent. Then we would need to find some monitor-independent way of distrubuting the set of photos. I don't have a lineup of every available screen to do this with and would really need to think long and hard about exactly what to show on the screen to make a good comparison. I think the best way to get around the monitor-dependence issues is by making it something that is to be printed in a standardized way. And, that is why I built these images specifically for printing. But, the issue there is that I can't show a full-screen. I have to cut down the size of the image so that it can fit on a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I am totally open to ideas from somone who has a background in generating images for these types of comparisons.

[Kenn]

Here's an idea: Make it PDF/print-dependent, and just print out an 8x11 1:1 crop of a site or text document that everyone can replicate. With any print resolution 300dpi or higher, you really don't need to scale down by 0.5x to fit it onto a viewable screen. Of course you can't get 14" or 15" to fit onto an 8.5x11 page, but there's certainly enough space to get a webpage screencap with enough images/text for people to make a comparison.

In the end, there's no perfect substitute for viewing in person...maybe we should petition Lenovo to open up a few Thinkpad Stores" across the country!

Oh, and for the text, you're right on regarding serif fonts, but I think it's a bit tangential, because the fact is 99.99% of people trying to decide between screens here are concerned about text size/readability, so it sounds like a natural thing to use to help them tell the difference!