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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched to the 3000x2000 Surface Book. Worrying about capacity being "wasted" is nonsense - how would it be better to not have that capacity? Some software looks bad, but I'm sure that'll be fixed as time goes by. Games look great, text looks even better, particularly if you read a lot.

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I also have a Surface Book. The display is stunning when viewing photos and I have no issues browsing the web but I find using IntelliJ a bit difficult at the default 200% scaling. It's all a bit small and adjusting the font sizes is not as easy as it sounds (you get big fonts but everything else remains small). I also tried increasing the OS scaling to 225% or 250% but that introduced other issues (like when watching fullscreen videos you get a border).

I found I adjusted quickly to how Eclipse looks on it FWIW. The icons come out undersized but everything else works correctly, and I've grown to like the result - it feels like more space for the actual code.

I'll take back my previous comment. I just now attempted to customize the two font settings in IntelliJ and wow... it looks absolutely amazing. I changed the editor font to Consolas and increased the size a tad.

When I first got my SB I remember attempting this but I encountered odd glitches like fonts overlapping in the Project view.

Cost of display scanout in terms of power? When nothing's moving, more pixels = higher bandwidth requirements, and the thing has to be clocked higher. (I guess it runs constantly. The new non-scanned LCDs will help I suppose.) You also need more RAM, and that needs refreshing. And any time anything is moving, there's 4x as many bytes being shuffled about, and they have to be shuffled about 4x as quickly, because the display area is the same.

I think at least part of the implied tradeoff is resolution vs. battery life. More pixels == more GPU computation == more power required.

AIUI the backlight dominates the power consumption, so more pixels at the same physical size makes very little difference.

But sure, that's a lot more concrete. So are you unhappy with the battery life on this device? Does the laptop the grandparent was talking about have worse battery life than comparable models? Certainly I'm very happy with the battery life of my Surface Book (which is a lot better than that of the laptop it replace), so to my mind it's not a problem in practice.

more pixels requires more light, even on the same size display... So a 4K display the same size as a 1080p display will require 2-3x the light behind the display... I don't recall the exact amount extra, but it's not insignificant.. let alone the processing power to push those extra pixels.

>more pixels requires more light

[citation needed]?

More pixels means more circuitry in front of the backlight blocking light.

But to what degree? Blocking 2% vs. 1% of the light probably isn't noticeable; blocking 50% vs. 25% probably is. This might also be something that improves over time as process improvements reduce the overhead.

Potentially a lot. The iPad 3 requires 2.5x more backlight power (7 watts) for the same brightness than the iPad 2.

Thanks for quantifying that - the difference is 4.2 watts, which is huge. I wonder if the LED backlighting is getting any more efficient?

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