Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

I think it's pretty safe to say that this is Microsoft going all in on the consumer market.

1. Video doesn't really show anything but it is admittedly well made. 2. You have to actually download the tech specs. 3. The tech specs have little meaning. (At first glance what is ClearType HD Display, some sort of Retina?)

It's like they took the apple philosophy even further.

Not sure how I feel about this but I guess now finally all the windows people have what the metro really is made for.

Oh and a little detail.

2100 Likes so far and not a single tweet (which obviously can't be true for reasons I am not yet aware of.)

View on HN

>some sort of Retina?

The power of Apple's marketing cannot be overstated here. You're referring to a Microsoft screen by an Apple trademark.

Heh yeah well. First mover advantage I guess.

And apple of course had it right. If you want to bring something new to the table, call it something new. Don't mix unrelated terms in a monster called ClearType HD Display.

Something new, and meaningful too. Retina is a specific reference to the limits of the human eye, it tells you pretty directly what DPI a display should have at a given viewing distance.

What other terms are there to use appart from specifics like resolution of DPI. There was HD and Full HD, but what does it make these new screens?

Just like how we used to call our computers IBM PC compatible.

I think the best part about all the people making the comment about "Microsoft trying to copy Apple's Retina" is that Microsoft's "ClearType" has been around for so, so many years longer (I remember seeing it in Windows XP, but it may have even come in before that).

Microsoft has been using the name ClearType for years, but for something completely different: subpixel hinted font rendering. This "ClearType display" has nothing to do with that, besides the name.

From what I've read, this is just their continual expansion of ClearType (which was not intended to be synonymous with subpixel font rendering, but rather a larger framework for which the subpixel font rendering was merely a component).

I believe the 2100 likes is due to the fact that they basically took over the URL (http://www.microsoft.com/surface) from the Surface computing platform that they had been working on with Samsung, and the likes are probably residual (Facebook likes are linked to a URL)

Since there's a ClearType HD and ClearType Full HD, it's safe to assume that the ClearType Full HD is 1920x1080 (16:9 screen).

Probably the ClearType HD is only 1366x768?

> At first glance what is ClearType HD Display, some sort of Retina?

They say "ClearType HD display" and "ClearType Full HD display". I'd take this to mean 720p and 1080p respectively, so a bit of a way off "retina" in the iPad context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com