Laptop shopping

[johnridley]

I'm having the same problem with laptops that I do with conventional monitors; nobody makes anything with decent resolution anymore. I can buy a $500 laptop with everything including screen size totally adequate, but the resolution is a pathetic 1366 x 768. What the heck?

Even if I go to a $1000 laptop it's still only edging up to the 1600 x 900 range, still not great and then I would have to get a 17" or larger screen to get that. I do NOT want that big of a screen.

10 years ago I bought a Dell laptop with a 15" screen that had 1600 x 1200 display. I was chatting with a Dell salesperson 2 days ago and he said they do not have a laptop with that much resolution for any price with any sized screen.

I do not understand. Does nobody do detail work anymore? Even with desktop monitors I would have to go to a 22" screen to get what I would consider reasonable resolution; it's the reason I still have a CRT monitor on my desk at work (1600 x 1200) though that thing is flaking out; I've had to apply percussive maintenance on it twice in the last week to get it to run, and as the problem sounds like discharging in the high voltage section, I suspect that once there's any degree of dampness in the air this spring it will go down for the final count, and I'll probably have to buy my own monitor at work to get anything vaguely acceptable. All they stock there is 1280 x 1024 crapo LCD monitors.

Comments

[billroper]

I think the problem is simply that the "cheap" LCDs with good resolution run up to HDTV resolutions and no further. There are great economies of scale there, but apparently not for higher resolutions.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yes, as soon as LCD TVs became the norm and the production lines went over to them, HDTV resolutions became as high as anyone went.

It used to be that you could pay another $100 and get higher resolution, but no more. The only way to get even halfway decent resolution is to buy a gaming laptop, and they're big money, like $1200 and up, and it's not worth bumping from $500 and going from a 5 pound to an 11 pound notebook, and from something carryable to something that needs a rollie bag to carry, to get reasonable resolution.

[traveller42.livejournal.com]

It is worse than that.

There are resolutions that I can't find in a flat panel display at any price. (Even a few that are available in laptop displays)

The marketing droids I talk to say nobody wants those resolutions.

[qnofhrt.livejournal.com]

Does nobody do detail work anymore?

Apparently not. My laptop says the resolution is 1280 x 800. My eyes say that's just fine.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

See my 2nd response below on the reason for resolution.

At work, I need to display a whole lot of windows at once. Even at 1600 x 1200 I have windows typically 4 or 5 deep, 2 across and 3 down.

[tlunquist.livejournal.com]

A MacBook Air wil give you 1366x768 on an 11 inch screen for 2.3 pounds and $1000. I've never had any trouble seeing what I needed to see at that resolution, but maybe my standards are lower (or maybe my eyesight is better :-) ).

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

$1000 is insanely overpriced for those specs. That kind of pixel density is what I'm looking for, but what I want is to show more on the screen at once. I'd like that kind of pixel density in a 15.4" screen, which would give more like a 2000 x 1200 display.

1366 x 768 seems to be the default resolution these days. You get it on everything from any company from 11 up to about 15.4 inches. You have to get into the realm of gaming laptops for $800 to $1200 to get higher resolution, but there's no way I'm paying $1000 for a laptop.

I don't really care what the thing weighs.

[tlunquist.livejournal.com]

I only mentioned the weight factor because you mentioned it in your reply to Roper. And the Mac premium is not one everyone is willing to pay; understood. At 13 inches on the MacBook Air, the price goes up, as does the resolution - to 1440x900. Their 17-inch pro, at 6.6 pounds, does 1920x1200, but that one is well beyond your price point.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Well, if I was willing to carry a 17" laptop, I could get the same specs as a Macbook Pro for half that money. One machine I was considering for about 10 seconds this morning was about that (quad core i7, 17", 1920 x something, 8GB RAM) at $1000 on sale.

I dunno, if I could find a 17" laptop without all the other bells and whistles, I might think about it since I really don't intend to use it to any great extent as a portable machine, I just want to lug it around sometimes. I'm even seriously considering using my netbook and just carrying around an LCD monitor, since I really just need to use it at people's houses and there's power there.

But it seems that in order to get a 17" screen on a laptop, you also automatically get 4x the computer I actually need too, and you pay for it.

I really don't give a darn what the thing weighs. It could be made of lead for all I care.

But it seems silly to buy a Mac just to format the hard drive and install Windows, which is about what I'd do if I was given one. I'd buy one if they were the same price or cheaper but I'd just run Windows on it. As I've said many times, the OS is simply a platform to run apps, and the apps I need to run are Windows apps. Many have Mac versions, but some do not have any equivalent at all, and I do not like dual boot; if I can do 100% of what I need to do in one OS then I run that OS, and Windows is the only OS that meets that criteria.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I suppose I did mention weight above, but it's really not a significant factor. I actually don't think anyone makes a 12 pound notebook anyway, not anymore, except I've seen some laptops on shelves that I assume are some kind of joke. They claim that they're intended to be graphics development stations or something, they have 19" monitors, etc.

Really it's about size more than weight.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

The problem is that I'm trying to identify faces on group photos. I've tried reducing the size of the Picasa window down to 1366 x 768, and it definitely makes it harder to work with than it is at 1680 x 1050 or even 1280 x 1024. If the lines are not there, you just can't display it well enough to make the faces properly recognizable regardless of the size of the screen.

I think I'm going to have to settle for 1366 x 768, it's just not worth it for me to go higher. My netbook would probably be good enough with a bigger screen; for working at my mom's house I may just lug a monitor with me. Total cost for the 10" netbook AND the 1680 x 1050 monitor is about $360.