The Tech Report were excited by the arrival of the new ASUS Zenbook Prime with its 1920×1080 13.3" IPS display but when they they used it under Win7 they ran into some problems. As the text at this resolution is absolutely tiny on a 13.3" screen it is zoomed to 125% which is about right for text on the desktop, the third party applications however did not necessarily look right and when they fired up IE9 it got much worse, as you can see below. As there is a new almost finished version of Windows 8 available, which touts its ability to handle high pixel per inch screens, they loaded that OS onto the Zenbook in the hopes of improving the look of the web. Read their disappointing results from using Win8 and IE10 on small screen with a big resolution.
"We've taken Windows 8 for a spin on Asus' new Zenbook Prime in order to get a feel for the new OS's PPI scaling capabilities. As we found, Windows 8's suitability for systems with high-PPI screens may have been exaggerated."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Western Digital adds 4TB offering to hard drive line @ The Inquirer
- Google spikes old MS file formats @ The Register
- Intel Haswell processor design may cause motherboard players to exit market @ DigiTimes
- New critical Java flaw claimed @ The Register
- Tri-mounted monitors using strut channeling (no welding) @ Hack a Day
- Laser power system keeps UAVs flying indefinitely @ Hack a Day
- Trinity interview with AMD VP Leslie Sobon @ Kitguru
- Samsung slaps swift patch over phone-wiping Galaxy S III vuln @ The Register
- Intel’s Clover Trail is a bloated nightmare @ SemiAccurate
- Win a MDSSD TweakTown Chris Ramseyer Signature Edition by SuperSSpeed 128GB SLC SSD @ SSD Review
the issue with using
the issue with using 1920×1080 on such a small screen is that images not being rendered properly when you set everything to a 125% so images become blurry.
A proper up scaling is CPU and GPU intensive as instead of the low resource consuming nearest neighbor up scaling, you need some really complex interpolation (common in PC games) if you want things to scale properly.
Apple has a better way of doing this this, simply get a very high res display and run it a half resolution and let the display just double everything, this requires very litle additional CPU power (if any since simple processign like that can be done within the display it’s self. This simply gives you twice as many pixels to render the same content thus making things look smoother.
when you get to situations when a detail requires a half pixel, then you begin to enter the realm of advanced post processing which windows 7 and 8 just doesn’t do.
if they want good results they need to use a 2560x display then run it at 1280x resolution for normal use and and have it auto switch to full resolution when full screen video is playing using some of th epopular players (with the option to specify which apps run the display at full resolution (a player like vlc will do the proper interpolation of the video by default)