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Comment by jmccree | Hacker News Reader

With the new resolutions being pumped out on laptops, (2,880 x 1,620 for 15" Thinkpad W series) it was inevitable desktop monitors would have to catch up.

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A friend of mine had a retina-quality screen on his laptop in 2003. I think it was a ThinkPad with a 2048 x 1536 screen. Of course, at the time there wasn't a concept of resolution-independent scaling, so it didn't look as nice as today's retina displays.

specs: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:R50p

edit for context: bsimpson's comment originally said "I think it was a Thinkpad with a 1080p monitor"

Minor niggles:

1. 1080p would have been rare in 2003, considering 16:10 was the usual widescreen format at the time[0].

2. In order for a 1080p to be "retina" (by Apple's standards, not true retina[1]), at the typical 20" viewing distance of a laptop, it would have to be only a 9" screen. I don't think they ever made a 9" Thinkpad, but I could be wrong.

More comparative info on the Retina Display wiki page[2].

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widescreen#Transition_to_widesc...

[1]: http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_4_ShootOut.htm#Retina

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_Display#Retina_Display_m...

I looked it up, and it was 2048 x 1536, which is retina at 20", according to isthisretina.com.

Ah nice, that must have cost a pretty penny to get that screen. I still wonder if that's not quite retina though. For better or for worse, Apple coined the phrase, and I'd tend to peg off of that to make 220ppi @ 20" the lower bound for retina-quality. Maybe 200ppi. 170ppi @ 20" is quite a step down from that.

That's 4:3, not even close to the 16:9 aspect ratio that 1080p implies... and you edited your post to take that out. Okay then!

It wasn't my laptop, so I didn't know the details. I just remembered it being around 2000px. My original reply was meant to be a "hey, so I did some research and edited the post." Sorry for any confusion.

No worries! I just put some context in my reply so that it made sense, not as a comment on your edits.

could laptop graphics cards handle that type of resolution back then?

Back then almost all UI rendering was software based. The graphics card just needed a large enough frame buffer.

The lack of fancy compositing and animation effects gave these high resolutions devices comparable performance to their standard resolution counterparts.

1600x1200 was commonplace as early as 2001 (in a Dell Inspiron 8000, I believe).

I feel obliged to mention that I have an i8k and it's still working beautifully.

It was a lot easier back when all you cared about was the 2D performance of basic shapes (lines, circles, fills), and the animation for moving a window was just an outline.

Back when there were CRTs, people were regularly running 2048x1536 on Windows 98 era hardware.

2,880 x 1,620 for 15" Thinkpad W series

I wanted to get some info on this, and found this:

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/w-series/w540/

but also http://blog.laptopmag.com/lenovo-thinkpad-w540

edit: Oh shit. Looks like they're stuff a numpad on the thing.

http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/Lenovo-Announces-Thin...

WTF.

I'm super worried, as I am full on addicted to ThinkPad keyboard/hardware. I used an external usb thinkpad keyboard with a work provided macbook pro, and using same usb thinkpad keyboard plugged into my actual thinkpad to type this reply. I can't live with out my trackpoint (little red dot/nipple for you non-TPers out there). I'm really worried about the direction Lenovo is heading, but so far they have been atleast semi-cautious with the T/W series thinkpads.

I've thought about doing the same. I have a trackpoint USB keyboard for my home PC, which is nice because it matches the keyboard on my laptop.

I figure that worst case if I end up with a new laptop without the trackpoint I'd just grab another Thinkpad USB keyboard and plop it over the top.

Back when "laptop" meant "can carry short distances in a shoulder bag" I work mainly on home-built desktop machines. That meant I got the screen rez I liked, the keyboard I liked, the graphics card, etc.

I keep hoping for the day when portable components are such that I can just use the CPU in my phone (or some other) with the screen and keyboard of my choice.

As it is one has to make a list of what things you can or cannot live without and see what compromises you need to accept in a laptop.

Note that this is still not even close to the pixel density on the Thinkpad you described. The 32" Dell monitor has 140DPI, 2880x1620 has 220DPI, which is a huge difference (compare today's high resolution desktop displays with a MBP's Retina display).

For my personal use, I prefer my laptop to have a higher dpi due to the distances involved. My current 15" thinkpad 1080p display is already straining my eyesight when I use it as a 2nd monitor on my desk, but is very nice when working directly on the laptop. So I'm still excited about this.

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