Re: If you were stuck on a desert island and had only ten fonts...
- From: real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rowland McDonnell)
- Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 06:22:54 +0100
Isaac J. <me3@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Unfortunately manufacturers
like to make bigger screens rather than high dpi smallish screens.
The pixel density increase over the last, say, 20 years has been
pathetic compared to other advances in computing.
Has it struck you that the pixel density increase has been bounded by
various factors?
For example, increasing traditional CRT pixel density beyond what we had
was clearly non-trivial.
And if you should happen to make yourself (say) a 600ppi 20 inch
widescreen LCD, where are you going to get the video card to drive it?
You'd need an awful lot of video RAM, wouldn't you?
Yes indeed. But a jump from, say, 72dpi to 100dpi over a 20+ year
period doesn't seem terribly impressive, does it?
<shrug> 72dpi was about the best on the market back when Macs came out
in 1984. Normal monitors used for lesser computers didn't hit 72dpi
until the 1990s, IIRC. Certainly, I met Windoze boxes in 1990/91 that
had horrible nasty fuzzy screens that their users considered normal and
completely acceptable but were in fact a lot fuzzier than the monitor I
used with my BBC Micro back in 1982... (it was black and white, mind
you - no colour screen, so high res was easy).
CRT resolution was up against a limit, obviously. Can't make it smaller
than the smallest you can make, sort of thing.
The world of monitors was CRT until maybe a decade back. Now, the
world's more or less gone over to LCDs.
But while it's not hard to increase the resolution of an LCD by
shrinking the pixels, making a big one with high contrast and lots of
pixels that all work /is/ hard.
They've optimized their processes for what we get. They're not
optimized for `lots more and smaller pixels over a big screen'. I
suspect that they can't make 'em to much higher resolution with yields
good enough for the resulting product to have a price that'd cause it to
be purchased in significant numbers.
(I don't doubt that they could start making (say) 300ppi LCDs soonish if
they wanted to - but I'd bet that the yields on the 30" widescreen
version would be infinitesimal. Think about it: a process with 1/3
smaller features and ten times the number of devices? If you got as
much as 1/30th of your previous yield, that'd be very good going, I
reckon)
Especially when
you compare that with the massive increases in video RAM over the
same time period, for example.
We've got much faster video circuitry now.
The 256KB VRAM fitted originally to my Performa 475 could be paired up
to 20MB system RAM and expanded up to 512KB (IIRC - I think I put 512KB
in it).
Now I've got 256MB VRAM (can go up to 512MB) and the potential for 16GB
system RAM (4G5).
VRAM (and system RAM) have increased by a factor or about a
thousand---if you wanted the same performance as you got from 256KB
VRAM, that'd let you use 30 times the linear resolution.
But that 256MB VRAM I've got is used for making things go faster.
600dpi is probably the unachievable ideal atm
???
Don't be daft - I'll not be content until they get up to 1200ppi. I
don't see why it shouldn't be possible. After all, they can get a lot
more than 1200 transistors along a linear inch in IC manufacture, can't
they?
(ppi, not dpi - one pixel is one set of RGB, made up of three dots. So
with a monitor or many multicolour printers, ppi is less than dpi. So
actually I'm asking for more like 3600 transistors per linear inch - but
that's 7 microns per transistor. They got 'em down to less than 0.1
micron minimum feature size some time ago, didn't they?)
- at least, not at a
cost that puts it within the reach of enough people.
The limiting factor, I reckon, is the video RAM needed. Increase the
linear resolution by a factor of about 10, that increases the VRAM
needed (to keep things working the same) by a hundred-fold.
*THAT* most likely makes it a bit too expensive any time soon,
especially when you factor in the need for a GPU (or GPU array) that
works a hundred times faster that what we have now.
And you need about a hundred times as much bandwidth from the video card
to the monitor, and some sort of increase in bandwidth from the host
computer to the video card, but probably not quite that much.
Give it another 20 years, though, and I think we might see something in
that line. That is not how I was thinking 20 years ago, mind - but now?
Hmm. I'm not so sure they'll not get decent display resolutions
eventually.
Realistically, I'd hope to see a ten fold increase in resolution inside
twenty years - increasing linear resolution to something like 300ppi.
That's be okay, with anti-aliasing (which I /still/ do not like at all
when applied to text as MacOS X does it on my monitors - but with a
300ppi display, it'd be a different matter).
Twenty years from now, I hope that there will be displays of around
3000ppi in specialised applications. Don't see why not---and that's the
sort of resolution which makes sense for looking at X-rays (etc).
But I'd hope
we could be a little more ambitious than 100dpi - the approximate
figure for the current ACDs.
I'm not sure what an ACD might be.
The higher the dpi, the more subtle the anti-aliasing you can use.
Even if not comparable with print quality, 150dpi-300dpi (random
figures) text can be made to look an awful lot better than what we
have now.
300dpi is nearly comparable to print quality, just about, especially if
you're using a medium that permits anti-aliasing.
144dpi looks surprisingly good from an Apple ImageWriter II.
Rowland.
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