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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's Surface Pro has a 10" 1920x1080 IPS LCD panel (208 DPI), running on Ivy Bridge. There's no reason anyone else couldn't do the same.

Edit: Guess what Toshiba just announced? 2560x1440 touchscreen panel in an ultrabook: http://us.toshiba.com/kira

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The problem are legacy apps. The Surface Pro is at 1.6X, so things begin to look small unless the app can be upscaled either by expanding the pixels (in which case, 1.6x is extremely inconvenient as not being a power of 2) or have the resolution natively baked into the app (not many yet).

2X (as in the Toshiba) is much easier to upscale transparently (2x being a power of 2), but its not really valuable until apps start supporting that resolution natively.

Edit: as pointed out below, N just has to be an integer, not a power of 2.

Magnification factors don't have to be a power of two to work well, they just have to be integers. 3x scaling doesn't introduce any aliasing.

Edit: yes you are right.

I was more concerned with 1.6, 1.8, 1.4. Definitely, as long as N is an integer, scaling will work correctly.

I've got a Surface Pro and I actually run the Win32/Desktop release of Chrome without scaling.

What legacy app do you think won't work well? I'll be glad to try it out. Everything I've thrown at it so far has worked great. Even the desktop apps work well with touch or the pen.

Visual Studio :)

Visual Studio (2012) is one of the first things I installed and it works great.

Some other desktop apps I have installed: VLC Media Player, Notepad++ and Balsamiq Mockups. All work well but you are forced to use the pen (or type cover/touchpad) at times to grab little drag handles (if you're trying just to use touch).

Does Visual Studio upscale automatically according to your DPI setting or do you have to fiddle with the font settings? Also, is it possible to increase the font size for the menu fonts?

I'm genuinely curious.

I didn't change any settings in Visual Studio after installing on my Surface Pro and everything looks fine to me. I'm embarrassed to admit that I really haven't peeked into what's going on with the DPI settings (because how it came out of the box has been perfectly fine for 99% of what I've been running on it), but I believe it's set at 150% DPI and VS respects that throughout.

Nice! I've been wanting to know if Visual studio was resolution independent or not. Being implemented in WPF, this was always a possibility, but I could find no evidence on the web.

Like people mention above, the hardware isn't the only impediment; Apple's control is what helps them a lot with this. Desktop Windows' support for DPI scaling is anemic at best, and this is only partially fixed in Windows 8 by having ad-hoc dimensions per-device, or on PCs just "big" vs. "really big" mode.

it's not the only the DPI, it's also the aspect ratio... 16:9 sucks for everything except watching movies.

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