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Comment by petecox | Hacker News Reader

I would suggest that the biggest group to mourn CRT technology would be our feline overlords. I had several cats that used to perch themselves atop a screen, trying to capture my attention and keeping warm but blocking an air vent in the process.

The switch to DVB-T from PAL saw us recycle our last CRT telly. I threw out my Trinitron computer monitor some years earlier. Its sharpness had deteriorated over time. Text became too fuzzy, perhaps something to do with electrons mentioned in the article.

I miss the vertical pixels - 1600x1200 was a standard but LCDs embraced 1080 panels from the Blu-ray craze. Luckily I have a 1024*1280 LCD (rotated) for A4 documents.

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> I miss the vertical pixels

This HD craze (especially for notebook displays) was one of the worst mistakes in recent computer history!

If I use a computer for reading and writing then I need a lot of vertical space and pixels! I don't care about the width at all!

I own a bunch of old IBM/Lenovo notebooks and I am convinced that a 14" display with a 4:3 aspect ratio (for example 1400 x 1050) is still the best type of display for a portable developers notebook.

Newer Microsoft Surface devices go for a 3:2 aspect ratio but if I would design such a device I would make the screen even more square.

Agreed about the "HD craze", especially because of the following facts:

- "HD" in the context of laptop screens means "1366x768", which is unusable. It's funny that "high definition" means "the lowest resolution available on a PC". It makes explaining to family members which monitor is right for them very hard, because of course "HD" must be a good thing, right?

- Most entry level laptops come with said resolution (this may be starting to change in the past few years).

- Businesses, even software development companies, have a hard time understanding that higher resolution monitors are not for gaming or watching movies, but for actual work. In fact, they are more useful for working, because for watching movies a standard "HD" monitor is enough.

> 1366x768

There should be a special place in hell reserved for companies who still produce that garbage. This resolution was already too low 10 years but nowadays is not not usable at all.

> "HD" in the context of laptop screens means "1366x768", which is unusable. It's funny that "high definition" means "the lowest resolution available on a PC".

Unmodified HD (without “full”) generally means 720p for other screens, that's not a “laptop screen” specific quirk. (Well, I guess it is, in that 720p is 1280×720, but you aren't complaining that 1366×768 is a higher resolution than it should be for the bare “HD” label.)

(Also, 1366x768 is not “unusable”, and I say that as someone who was habituated to a 1600×1200 desktop display for years before starting to use 1366×768 laptops a lot in parallel with it.)

You're right, unmodified HD is 720p for all screens (you have to admit it's funny "HD" means "low res"). It's just that I first encountered this annoying resolution in entry-level laptops. Even more irritating, if you wanted higher res you had to buy a "gaming" laptop, which is ridiculous since for gaming a 720p screen is more than enough.

I'm glad you don't consider it unusable for work, but you're in the minority[1]. The resolution sucks and there's no excuse for it. You can barely work with an IDE and it forces you to use an external monitor -- and I say this as someone who finds the Jeff Atwood "I can't work without 3 external monitors" kind of snobbery irritating.

[1] Likewise, there always used to be someone who didn't mind flickery low refresh rates in CRT monitors. Their opinion can be ignored since pretty much everyone else cares, even when they don't know what's happening and they just know their eyes and head hurt after a while.

IMO the problem is not the resolution itself, but the fact that it is the same for all screen sizes. 1366x768 is too high for an 11" screen but too low for a 15" one; 16x9 ratiio also is bad. The only company that understands it right is Apple: the DPI is about same across all of the non-Retina laptops, yet the resolution varies.

Well, if you use a 2-in-1 convertible notebook, you can simply use it in portrait mode :)

> If I use a computer for reading and writing then I need a lot of vertical space and pixels! I don't care about the width at all!

So, get a good rotatable VESA mount and use your widescreen monitor in portrait; more vertical space per $ than any other monitor if you “don’t care about width at all.”

> I own a bunch of old IBM/Lenovo notebooks and I am convinced that a 14" display with a 4:3 aspect ratio (for example 1400 x 1050) is still the best type of display for a portable developers notebook.

I don't find the keyboard on anything short of a 15” widescreen to be good (probably take a 17” 4:3), and keyboard is pretty important to me for coding.

Vote with your wallet. 16:10 1920x1200 displays exist and they are often better than the 1080p displays, the reason being/was that since the screen size is much bigger (16:10 vs. 16:9) they can't compete on price so they have to compete with quality instead.

But nowadays they are starting to fetch a premium just because of low demand. The 30" 2560x1600 displays are quite expensive and there is nothing in between 24" and 30" if you want 16:10.

> "1600x1200 was a standard "

Man, I really miss my Dell UltraSharp 1600x1200 monitor. I loaned it to a friend whose only monitor had died and he couldn't afford a replacement right away. It had been driven by my Mac mini which had fallen out of use anyway so I didn't miss it at the time. When I finally got it back from him, he neglected to tell me his son had hit it with a toy and damaged the LCD near the top. It was unusable.

I think I'd almost prefer a 4:3 beast like that instead of my 1080p screen today; about the only thing that would suffer would be games optimized for widescreen. First person shooters in particular would probably be claustrophobic without the extra peripheral vision a wide ratio provides.

Some friends you have there..

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