I haven't owned a smartphone with a screen resolution that low, in over 10 years.
I think it's an amazing feat of marketing, by display companies, that people still put up with such low resolutions.
Of course 16:19 pushed down display costs leading to the demise of 1920x1200 which is unforgivable ;-)
Those 120 pixels were sorely missed.
You know... as you age, you really can't read all those tiny characters anyway.
If something needed to be rendered in some particular way, it should have been a PDF. For everything else there’s vim.
> I haven't owned a smartphone with a screen resolution that low
Smartphone in italics, because smartphones are known for their low pixel densities, right? What?
Did you own a smartphone at all in the past 10 years? Just double checking.
> I think it's an amazing feat of marketing, by display companies, that people still put up with such low resolutions.
And how did you reach that conclusion? Did you somehow miss display companies selling and pushing 1440p and 4K monitors left and right for more than a handful of years at this point, and yet the Steam Hardware Survey still bringing out 1080p monitors as the king month to month?
Sometimes I really do wonder if I live in a different world to others.
No, it was limited by the bandwidth of the beam driving system, which the manufactures, obviously, tried to maximize. This limit is what set the shadow mask and RGB sub pixels/strip widths. The electron beam couldn't make different color, different colored phosphor patches were used.
But, since bandwidth is mostly resolution * refresh, you could trade between the two: more refresh, less resolution. More resolution, less refresh. Early on, you had to download a "driver" for the monitor, which had a list of the supported resolutions and refresh rates. There was eventually a protocol made to query the supported resolutions, straight from the monitor. But, you could also just make your own list (still can) and do funky resolutions and refresh rates, as long as the drive circuit could accommodate.
This monitor could do something like 75Hz at 800x600, and I think < 60 at 1080p.
> This monitor could do something like 75Hz at 800x600, and I think < 60 at 1080p.
Assuming both modes were meant with 24-bit color ("true color"), that'd mean 17.36 Hz tops then for the FHD mode, ignoring video timing requirements. I don't think you were using that monitor at 17 Hz.
Even if you fell back to 16 bit color, that's still at most 26 Hz, which is miserable enough on a modern sample-and-hold style display, let alone on a strobed one from back in the day. And that is to say nothing of the mouse input feel.
Because that thing could only do the BIOS text modes, and standard VGA at 640x480 at 60 or 70Hz. Anything else just showed OUT OF SYNC on the OSD, and then switched off.
Except when you fed it 800x600@160Hz, 1024x768@144Hz, 1280@120Hz and 1600x1200@70 to 80Hz, or anything weird in between.
I could easily do that under XFree86 or early X.ORG. A gamer under DOS/Windows rather not, not even with Scitech Display Doctor, because most games at that time used the hardware directly, with only a few standard options to chose from.
OUT-OF-SYNC zing
Was nice for viewing 2 DIN-A4 side by side in original size :-)
Fortunately a Matrox I had could drive that, as could a later Voodoo3 which also had excellent RAMDACs and X support.
Was a bit surprised by that double A4 thing btw, but I did the math and it checks out - paper is just surprisingly small compared to desktop displays. Both size and resolution wise (1612×1209 would have put you right up to 96 ppi, with regular 1600×1200 being pretty close too). It's kind of ironic even, the typical 1080p 24" 60 Hz LCD spec that's been with us for decades since just barely fits an A4 height wise, and has a slightly lower ppi. Does have some extra space for sidebars at least, I guess.
[0] Update: ah right, it wasn't a pixel clock limit being ran to the limit there, but the horizontal frequency.
Did care about 1600x1200 at then 75Hz mostly. All that other stuff was just for demonstration purposes for other people coming by, or watching videos fullscreen in PAL.
It seemed to be really made for that resolution at a reasonable frequency, with the BIOS & VGA thing just implemented to be able to see start up, changing settings, and all the rest just a 'side-effect'.
No, literally, on the roadside, out for trash. Disposing of CRT has always been expensive since they can't fit in the trash and taking them to the dump has a fee for the all the lead. At the transition to LCD, they were all over the place, along with projection TVs. There was also a lot of churn when "slimmer" versions came out, that mostly halved the depth required. Again, it was literally 50lbs, and about 2ft in depth. It took up my whole desk. It was worthless to most anyone.
> Smartphone in italics, because smartphones are known for their low pixel densities, right? What?
Over 10 years ago I had an iPhone 6 plus, with 1080p resolution. All my phones after have been higher. Their pixel densities (DPI) are actually pretty great, but since they're small, their pixel counts are on the lower side. There's nothing different about smartphone displays. The display manufacturers use the same process for all of them, with the same densities.
Stereo audio is still fine even though 5.1 exists
300 dpi printers are still useable even though 2400 dpi printers exist
double-glass windows are still fine even though triple-glass windows exist
2-wheel drive cars are still fine even though 4-wheel drive cars exist
Just because something new appears on the market that new thing does not need to take over from all predecessors when those predecessors are good enough for the intended purpose, especially not when the new thing comes with its costs - power use and higher demands on GPUs in case of display with higher resolutions than really needed.
Fire is fine, even though ovens exist.
We're animals, that are perfectly fine living naked in the wild (some still do today). It's all complete excess. Feel free to abandon the progression of tech, but, I challenge you to use a modern panel for a couple months, then try to go back to 1080p. It's like the console players who claimed 30fps was serviceable, fine. Sure, but nobody wants to go back to 30fps after they've used 60hz, or 144hz, for a non-negligible amount of time.
I also use a 1080p from time to time, it's servicable, but it's not comfortable, and it provides a far far inferior experience.
That's something that OSX doesn't even have now.