DVCS (was Re: Moving to D)

[retard]

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 23:47:09 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> Bumping up to a higher resolution can be good when dealing with images,
> or whenever you're doing anything that could use more screen real-estate
> at the cost of smaller UI elements. And CRTs are more likely to go up to
> really high resolutions than non-CRTs. For instance, 1600x1200 is common
> on even the low-end CRT monitors (and that was true even *before*
> televisions started going HD - which is *still* lower-rez than
> 1600x1200).

The standard resolution for new flat panels has been 1920x1080 or 
1920x1200 for a long time now. The panel size has slowly improved from 
12-14" to 21.5" and 24", the price has gone down to about $110-120. Many 
of the applications have been tuned for 1080p.

When I abandoned CRTs, the most common size was 17" or 19". Those 
monitors indeed supported resolutions up to 1600x1200 or more. However 
the best resolution was about 1024x768 or 1280x1024 for 17" monitors and 
1280x1024 or a step up for 19" monitors. I also had one 22" or 23" Sony 
monitor which had the optimal resolution of 1600x1200 or at most one step 
bigger. It's much less than what the low-end models offer now.

It's hard to believe you're using anything larger than 1920x1200 because 
the legacy graphics cards don't support very high resolutions, especially 
via DVI. For example I recently noticed a top of the line Geforce 6 card 
only supports resolutions up to 2048x1536 @ 85 Hz. Guess how it works 
with a 30" Cinema display HD @ 2560x1600. Another thing is subpixel 
antialiasing. You can't really do it without a TFT panel and digital 
video output.

> Yea, you can get super high resolution non-CRTs, but they're much more
> expensive. And even then, you lose the ability to do any real desktop
> work at a more typical resolution. Which is bad because for many things
> I do want to limit my resolution so the UI isn't overly-small. And yea,
> there are certian things you can do to scale up the UI, but I've never
> seen an OS, Win/Lin/Mac, that actually handled that sort of thing
> reasonably well. So CRTs give you all that flexibility at a sensible
> price.

You mean DPI settings?

> Also, it can be good when mirroring the display to TV-out or, better
> yet, using the "cinema mode" where any video-playback is sent fullscreen
> to the TV (which I'll often do), because those things tend to not work
> very well when the monitor isn't reduced to the same resolution as the
> TV.

But my TV happily accepts 1920x1080? Sending the same digital signal to 
both works fine here. YMMV

>> OTOH when he has a good CRT (high resolution, good refresh rate) there
>> may be little reason to replace it, as long as it's working.. apart
>> from the high power consumption and the size maybe.
>>
>>
> I've actually compared the rated power consumpsion between CRTs and LCDs
> of similar size and was actually surprised to find that there was
> little, if any, real difference at all on the sets I compared.

How much do the CRTs consume power? The max power consumption for LED 
powered panels has gone down considerably and you never use their max 
brightness. Typical power consumption of a modern 21.5" panel might stay 
between 20 and 30 Watts when you're just typing text.