LCD monitor questions

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 02:56:04PM -0400, Taavi Burns wrote:
> On CRTs, yes.  I think that they did 1280x1024 because on some
> monitors it
> just doesn't "look right".  Might have to do with standard monitor sizes
> and the dot pitch (so phosphors were not lined up nicely, causing
> moire patterns
> or some silly thing like that)

Well the Mac always used 1152x864 and 1280x960 to keep things
consistent.  Someone in the PC world must have thought 1280x1024 was a
nice size (it does give a nice power of 2 height, which probably uses
the memory a bit more efficiently, although 1152x864 was a better use
when packed into 1M ram for 8bit or 2M ram for 16bit colour).  I guess
in 4M 1280x1024 nicely worked out with 4k per row.  A bit of gain in
screen space at the expense of messing up the aspect ratio I suppose.

> But if it's displaying perfectly square pixels, do you really care
> what the shape
>  of the screen is enough to not want to use some pixels?  Stick your
> XMMS playlist
> in the extra space if you don't want to use it for webbrowsing, or
> something. ;)

Well there have been applications (NT4's OpenGL implementation for
example) where the aspect ratio had to be 4:3 or it didn't work right.
Bad coding certainly, but it has happened.  I want a 1600x1200 screen if
I could just afford one. :)  Or 2048x1536 could be nice.

Lennart Sorensen
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