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Comment by hop | Hacker News Reader

It will be nice when the technology advances to make full size computer screens with >300dpi screens like the iPhone4. Pixels and heavy font tricks will likely be a relic of the past.

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While there is a clear trend towards high-resolution screens (for example see [1] below), higher PPI requires more power, and so should not ideally be used for all applications.

[1] http://pinoytutorial.com/techtorial/sharp-85-inch-direct-vie...

Until someone patents "High-Resolution Rendering of Scalable Fonts Via Hint Removal."

Well, now they can't!

If only that were true.

Actually we were there several years ago -- do a search on the IBM T221 monitor. I think they were about $15,000 or so, and they only made them for a couple of years. I imagine it's pretty awkward to use one in Windows, since so many UI elements don't scale in any sensible way.

I found one on ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-T221-WQUXGA-Display-not-NEC-PA241W-A...

Currently $1,700 to buy it now. 203 dpi. You need Windows 7, Linux, or OSX. I don't believe Windows XP and earlier are capable of scaling properly.

Clearly resolution independent windowing & UI widgets are also a prerequisite, and as this would likely require most existing applications to be extensively modified I don't see either Apple or Microsoft rushing to get it done.

According to a Wikipedia article[1] Microsoft did a good job when it comes to resolution independence, and Apple also makes progress on that front.

"Microsoft Windows has supported DPI aware programs since Windows Vista and allows user specified DPI settings for the windowing interface. [...] The Windows Presentation Foundation from Microsoft, and consequently, WPF applications, are also designed to be resolution-independent."

"Apple has included some support for resolution independence in recent versions of Mac OS X, which can be demonstrated with the developer tools Quartz Debug, which includes a feature which allows the user to scale the interface."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independence

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