Widescreen laptops are dumb • Hacker News Board

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#171

Post by boomlinde » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 4:28 PM UTC

pfooti wrote: post #167

boomlinde wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using fractions to describe fractions sort of defeats the point, doesn't it? You confuse me.

Generally speaking (from a math education perspective), people are bad at denominators. If you really want to compare ratios, and have established in the writing decimals in the numerator to afford that (TFA used 19.5:9 to describe an iphone which is what started my rant) then you should use 14.4:9 instead of 16:10. People see the latter and think it is quite similar to 16:9 because the 16s are the same, and don't re…

I don't think 1.77 would make more intuitive sense to the average consumer of this type of product than 16:9, for the same reason that you don't typically write "add one unit of flour and 1.33 units of sugar" in a recipe.

Particularly for screens, which most people think of in terms of two dimensional surfaces, using simple fractions seems more obvious, and for ratios like 4:3 and 16:9, numbers are particularly useless because they can't be used to exactly describe the relationship.

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#172

Post by babygoat » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 2:00 PM UTC

pfooti wrote: post #167

boomlinde wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using fractions to describe fractions sort of defeats the point, doesn't it? You confuse me.

Generally speaking (from a math education perspective), people are bad at denominators. If you really want to compare ratios, and have established in the writing decimals in the numerator to afford that (TFA used 19.5:9 to describe an iphone which is what started my rant) then you should use 14.4:9 instead of 16:10. People see the latter and think it is quite similar to 16:9 because the 16s are the same, and don't re…

Denominators don't apply here. We're talking about ratios, not fractions.

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#173

Post by klodolph » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 7:36 PM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #144

klodolph wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “certain angle” applies mostly to TN monitors. VA monitors are much better at this, and IPS monitors can be viewed from almost any angly (the specs say 178° or something like that). IPS monitors are often more expensive, but I’m willing to pay.

You still run into problems with the pixel structure. The RGB components are lined up horizontally, and they become vertical when turned 90 degrees. Any tech that takes advantage of the layout, such as Microsoft's Cleartype, will fail miserably on a rotated display. I suppose that's why Apple thought it was so important to go to high DPI displays on the iPhone and iPad.

Cleartype accounts for monitor rotation (although admittedly, only as long as all your monitors are rotated the same way).