News - Samsung’s Series 9 Ultrabook range joined by a full HD model

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The 13.3-inch model's screen resolution is boosted from 1600x900 to 1920x1080 pixels.

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Honestly, I'm not sure that the pixel density matters in this context unless the machine's being used for detailed image or video editing. Anything else (office apps and so forth) aren't going to benefit from massivekly high resolutions on quite small screens. The higher resolution screens are going to have to be doing a lot of scaling to make them, or any other content, or even the GUI, usable, I'd have thought.

Absolutely, running older windows programs on these ultra high res displays is going to be a horrible experience. There's got to be an opening for an app which can upscale older programs more effectively than Windows 8. Even the windows 8 metro interface scales badly ....Microsoft are you listening?!

cptwhite_uk. Not sure what you mean by scaling in metro as bad? If you change the DPI to that of the display it scales quite well I've found?

As for apps, it really does depend, you can set it per process (which I do) but some are much worse than others.

nichomach, I strongly disagree with the pixel densisty as a 'better' for image editing, it depends what kind! If your doing photography a lot of the higher density screens have naff colours, in fact the first batch of rettina MBPs I used all had horrific colour rendition, the most recent one I was using (Oct last year) was better, but still behind their previous models.

However high res is loverly for working with text documents or programming!

I bet they bundle it with a ton of crapware. From the laptops I've seen recently Samsung seem particularly bad for this.

The_Animus. Yeah I take your point, metro scaling is acceptable. I guess what I'd like to see though is the experience dictated also by the physical size of the device and not just the resolution, maybe even the type of device so the OS can understand how far away the screen will be viewed. So a metro standard tile scales well. I realise the answer is subjective so a sliding adjustment like a vector based graphic and text would allow would be preferable. I'm not sure of the full answer, but the current method seems crude and "make do" it could be implemented so much better if they applied greater thought to it.

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Originally Posted by Animus404

I bet they bundle it with a ton of crapware. From the laptops I've seen recently Samsung seem particularly bad for this.

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... which is exactly why when I got my 900x4c (ie the 15" model) I wiped it, cleared the 15+gb 'Recovery' partition and then installed a fresh copy of W7. Took me ages to find the Product Key, they'd stuck it on the charger. Major WTF moment.

I guess it's only a matter of time before an 'E' flavour of the 900x4 comes out? I'm pretty happy with my x4, feel the x3 would have just compromised on screen real-estate without being much more portable - considering I take it to/from work and my bag is noticeably heavier when I stick a 500ml bottle of water in there, its hardly breaking my back. Only complaint is the SSD drive (maybe combined with the i5?) does not like disk-based multitasking. Next upgrade is a 256gb+ mSATA SSD...

yawn. At a thousand odd quid I want more than x1080, which is yesterday's resolution.

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Originally Posted by bobharvey

yawn. At a thousand odd quid I want more than x1080, which is yesterday's resolution.

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Tell that to almost every other laptop manufacturer, who in the main persist with x768 panels, not only for 13" but also 15" screens?

I'll not complain at 1080p for the moment, at either 13" or 15". That's not to say I wouldn't go for higher res panels - but on an ultraportable laptop, the screen real estate offered by 1080p is what attracts me to it, rather than higher pixel density per se. Thus, higher resolutions than 1080p (hell 1080p is questionable, 900p is likely sufficient) are of secondary importance to me over other things like battery life, which are inevitably shortened by having to power higher res displays.

I'll save the 300+ DPIs for my 'plug into a wall' laptop :)

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Originally Posted by cptwhite_uk

I realise the answer is subjective so a sliding adjustment like a vector based graphic and text would allow would be preferable. I'm not sure of the full answer, but the current method seems crude and "make do" it could be implemented so much better if they applied greater thought to it.

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This is a bit of an odd one.

Microsoft some 6 years ago released a technolgy for making 'desktop' windows style apps called WPF. They sold the product badly, promoting features that frankly don't matter at all for most applications, plenty of developers hated it, in the company I was working for at the time I coined the phrase learning asymptote for describing it. I will say it's the best UI technology ever designed in a purest manner.

However most of the devs are useless, many fort with the concept of not having pixels, people complained of fuzzy text (just google WPF fuzzy text) because they had badly tuned cleartype (a font make pretty technology in windows). People complained about fuzzy bitmaps, because they where using fuzzy DPI dependant bitmaps.

Now this technology is the Gingerhaired Freckled Welsh Barstard Step-Child of Microsoft. Apparently all people want now is HTML5. This is the dumbest thing. People don't buy windows for IE10. No one has said Hmm we'd better deploy windows on our systems so we can use HTML5. But none the less Microsoft have snapped defeat from the jaws of victory and pressed ahead with this. WPF is been left on life support.

Most developers who aren't very good, and who are very vocal dislike WPF. A classic example is here. The developer has completely missed the point of the merrit of a declaritive language. Then you have control vendors. Microsoft had something amazing, it was VisualBasic 3. It was astounding the value you could add to a small company with just a few days work. Sure the code was utter dog poo, it probably would never survive another dev working on it, but boy howdy did you knock up a complex app quick.

Microsoft had this OLE technology, which still doesn't have a good competitor in any of the other OSes. It allowed you to run a full blown Excel sheet inside a word document. But wait, you could just drag and drop in VB and have an excel instance in your application..... Which you could then talk too. Amazing!

But it was also open to 3rd parties to make "Vendor Controls" these things where often esoteric, but really handy things. Your client wants a "Dashboard" like a car, which reads data from some industrial thing over RS232, then displays a screen full of anaoluge style gauges, sure just drop on a control for that, write some simple but messy VB code behind and you've got the project done in a day. This RAD (Rapid Application Development) was a boom, sure the things where messy, un-tested and often very fugly, but they worked, and they cost penuts to develop. This in turn drove the demand for 3rd party vendor controls. In VB6 it was an amazing effort to make a combo box (like the one you see when you press Win+R, with all the run commands listed) that say had an Icon in it. No problem, buy a vendor control.

Companies like Infragistics became (and still appear to be) very profitable of the back of this, due to the inflexability of making a windows application.

WPF throught that out of the water. It's incredibly easy to have images in your combo box, and buttons, and well anything, you can simply put anything inside anything. Awesome. It also allowed you to style things. Before many corperate apps spent money on branding, making the buttons not look like the Windows 95 style etc. This ment buying vendor controls. In WPF you didn't need to, ever!

This ment that people like infragistics are a cancer on WPF, they don't understand it, they don't want to, its against their core business model. If you've got a complex UI application which has maybe 50 screens, and uses 700 text boxes, you can't easily remove infragistics from the code base, your going to paying a license for it, for pretty much ever. So they tried the same old crap with WPF.

Microsoft in almost tacit acknowledgement of this, failed to make certain useful controls, such as a PivotTable. But the morons at Infragistics just made a horrific one. It's speed is matched only by a steam locomotive proppelled purely by a sparrows fart. The un-doing was the flexability of WPF. It made it soo easy to put 'elements' such as images or buttons everywhere, that people did. All of a sudden they created screens with maybe 28,000+ of them, and wounder why it runs slowly.

The fact it was such a big change in programing methodology really hurt people who weren't pollygots, those for whom have been working in the industry for 5+ years in the same technology, doing the same stuff day in day out, don't want to learn something new. Their only tool is a hammer, every problem a nail. The technology didn't work with them.

But the real problem is WPF is so damned un-finished. So much is lacking. So many performance optomisations should be done by it, but currently aren't.

But it does do DPI perfectly

But... Despite having this brilliant DPI independant system, programmers ignored it. Wrote it as if it was the 90s technology, complaining about ideas like having to put a straight line with width 1 on an x/y of 0.5 (because otherwise the line is only half rendering on a pixel). Rather than learning about the pixel mapping technology, they just shunned it all together.

The main reason is cost, there is no business demand for it. Apple have a unique posistion in that if you want to run OS X you've got to buy their kit, and if you want security updates, you'd better be running the latest version of it too.... Which might not run on your old hardware, so you'd better buy new ones. As a result a large portion of their user base went to insainly high DPI screens. This ment Adobe and the like had to adapt. However despite the advanced notice and the like it still took them ages, Lightroom didn't even get it until end of last year.

Microsoft have this terrible chicken and egg situation. Hardware partners won't be rushing to have high DPI screens until software supports it. Software partners won't be wasting the money on such things until there is a demand for it.

However it will happen, it will gradually slide up and become more important. We won't see mad jump in DPI like the apple branded retina, but tbh, the first batch of them had awful colour rendition, and the Dec 12 model I was using the other night was still poor. So I don't think that is a bad thing. Apple choose their silly DPIs (hi iPad) not because they are the perfect sweetspot, but because of limitations in their own software and APIs on iOS.

I have 1900x1200 on 15" and it's awful. It really strains my eyes.
On the other hand, the same 1900x1200 on 24" are great.

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Originally Posted by bdaniel7

I have 1900x1200 on 15" and it's awful. It really strains my eyes.
On the other hand, the same 1900x1200 on 24" are great.

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Horses for courses. I wouldn't want lower than my current 1920x1080 15" laptop screen.