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Comment by me551ah | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about how many people actually have laptops with resolutions higher than 1080p and use them without display scaling.

People buy a high resolution laptop and turn the scaling on 200%, effectively nullifying the benefits of a high resolution display.

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I'm sorry but you don't know what you're talking about.

Using a hi-dpi display at native res on a 15'' screen is a recipe to kill your eyes, whereas scaling to 200% gives you butter-smooth text that relaxes them. That is the benefit.

When I was young, I was all for keeping text small and stuff ing as much info on the screen as I could. Nowadays, I just struggle to work on any native-res screen: unscaled low-dpi looks like crap, unscaled hi-dpi is tiring. My world changed with the 2012 retina MBP and I simply cannot go back.

There is scaling like just making every pixel a 2x2 pixel area on the screen, but there is also scaling that increase the resolution. I think me551ah was talking about the former kind, which also seems useless to me, just buy a 1080p display. the second kind though makes everything nicer.

Fractional scaling is stupid. 150% × 4K = 1440p so just buy 1440p screen but 150% on 4K will mean misaligned pixel grid. If you need more real estate and want HiDPI then you need 5K display, not 4K. 5K is 1440p@2.

Fractional scaling should be under seven “Are you sure? What you’re doing is stupid.” pop-ups. Instead at least Windows 10 actually makes 150% the default. Boggles my mind.

Here’s a good article series on this topic by Elementary OS dev:

https://medium.com/elementaryos/what-is-hidpi-and-why-does-i...

https://medium.com/elementaryos/top-3-misconceptions-about-h...

There are non English computer users benefit greatly from high DPI displays, especially oriental characters; and there are a lot of us.

With scaling you still get smooth fonts and crisp images (if available at higher resolutions than "screen pixels"), the benefit of a high resolution display really isn't to fit more stuff on the screen anymore (especially on 12-14").

It seems, after reading all of these comments that the ONLY significant improvement of highdpi is Font Rendering. I am a 3d artist and do not run HiDPI as it is a waste for my user case. I can see how most people don't do artwork and prefer the font rendering of HiDPI. Please don't think we all want nice font rendering, sometimes we need that 100% scaling.

> People buy a high resolution laptop and turn the scaling on 200%, effectively nullifying the benefits of a high resolution display.

The benefit is the higher resolution itself. Scaling doesn’t change the resolution. You still get the benefit.

200% scaling is the intended use case.

E.g. for text:

https://www.eizoglobal.com/library/basics/pixel_density_4k/t...

A high resolution display is useful for more than just seeing additional things on the screen at once.

I'd say that scaling up is exactly the benefit of a HiDPI display; if you don't you keep the same crappy low resulution rendering, only in smaller size!

The image is crisper to me, than for a regular non-scaled display.

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