LCDs don't have variable resolution | Hacker News Reader

LCDs don't have variable resolution

social.treehouse.systems

20 pointschmaynard18 comments

I like that, "Changing the resolution works consistently but is boring, why do people do that when scalers work 90% of the time for apps I use?"

Methinks I'll keep forcing 720p to spare my terrible eyes the trouble.

The problem isn't the screen resolution but operating systems and apps that don't handle scale and layout to usable physical dimensions. Windows is/was notoriously bad at scaling high resolution user interfaces properly.

I really really resisted things like AMD's FSR which are dynamic resolution rendering systems, upscaled with extra tricks to native.

But I got Warhammer 40k: darktide, and it savaged my old rx580 & I gave it a go. I'm surprised how pleasant and workable it is. It's way beyond boring up scaling, uses extra hints, but fundamentally it's a big extra-hinted upscaler, and I'm shocked how OK the experience is, how not bad it looks.

CRTs had a shadowmask / specific phosphor placement, right? sure, you could run whatever resolution, but is that not kinda using a mechanical upscaler?

Not really. The perforations on the shadowmask (or aperture grille in later displays) were significantly smaller than the electron beam -- a single pixel would always consist of multiple phosphors of each color. There was never any expectation that pixels on the display would line up with the phosphors.

Reading your comment and the parent comment sent me on a Wikipedia journey. I cannot believe that it wasn’t until today that I understood that the shadow mask/aperture grille worked by exploiting the different angle that each colour’s electron beam would hit the back of it. That’s wild and answers a question I didn’t even know I had, despite having lived a significant portion of my life with CRT displays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron#Trinitron

Mitsubishi Diamondtron and FD Trinitron were arguably the pinnacle of CRT development.

A good CRT was arguably the pinnacle of monitors/TV in general.

If the function of a monitor is to accurately represent an image then LCD was a total failure. I never seen an LCD screen that could accurately represent even a single color, let alone a whole image full of them. Filling the whole screen with a color like #FF7D00 always results in strong gradients, especially around the corners.

Sometimes I think we were all fooled by marketing into thinking that HD resolution was the only thing that mattered just because LCD screens were less expense for companies to make/ship/stock when really we were giving up accurate color representation, faster response times, better viewing angles, zero motion blur, and extremely flexible resolution/refresh rates. I also resent the loss of the degauss button, which was way more fun/satisfying than it had any right to be, but maybe that's just me.

There's a feeling that I've held for a good while now that the overwhelming success of 'HD' as an advertising term slowed display advancements by like a decade. I don't think CRTs had a future regardless, but almost all display development seemed to halt in favor of producing 720p/1080p displays and bringing down their prices.

I take it you have never seen an OLED display?

Which is not an LCD so I guess the point still stand

I don't see crt as pinnacle vs oled for any metric other than scaling for very low resolution retro games

Unrelated to the article: on mobile, the article scrolls while the side bar is fixed, even if you tap+drag on the side bar. What CSS is being used here? `fixed` or `pointer-events` or something?

It's just a position:fixed sidebar and header. The root element is still the scroll container so you can drag anywhere.

So what about X11 on Asahi? No scaling on user's choice of WM even if they need it for accessibility needs? But hey, no legacy cruft...

Seems like you didn't understand what the post was about. You can have arbitrary framebuffer sizes without ever touching the display mode, and with plane scaling in display controllers there's no performance impact whatsoever.

You can scale all you want. The point was only about where in the stack it happens.

We used to do it with a Freznel lens out in the air in front of the tv, and we don't do it that way any more either.

You could make a cup of coffee by first boiling some water, and then keeping it hot while you grow and harvest the coffee, and eventually finally combine the water with the grounds. If someone comes along and says that is a terrible way to get the job done, they are not saying you can't have hot water or coffee.

In Xorg, I think you can scale the whole desktop without changing the display mode with xrandr --scale

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