Comment by stephenr
14 hours ago
Conversely if you only use a ~110 DPI display you won't know how bad it looks on a ~220 DPI display.
The solution here is wide device testing, not artificially limiting individual developers to the lowest common denominator of shitty displays.
Yeah sure, as long as you have a lot of resources for testing widely.
Still, if you were to make an analogy you should target for a few devices that represent the "average", just as its done for (most) pop music production.
> if you were to make an analogy you should target for a few devices that represent the "average"
For Macs, 220DPI absolutely is the average.
Sure, but Macs are around 10% of general desktop computing. To a first approximation, they don't count. User communities vary widely. If you target macs, then a high DPI screen is a must for testing. Otherwise, I dunno; ~ 100 DPI screens are way less expensive than ~ 200 DPI screens, so I'd expect that installed base is significantly higher for standard DPI. But there's probably enough high DPI users that it's worth giving it a look.
To address a question elsewhere, personally, I don't see the benefit to pushing 4x the pixels when ~ 100 DPI works fine for me. My eyes aren't what they were 20 years ago, and it's just extra expense at every level.
I'm honestly not sure where all these hackernews commenters with low-dpi displays are coming from - my former employers equipped all the software engineers with dual-4K displays nearly a decade ago.
One is hard-put to buy a developer-power laptop with a sub-2K display these days, even in the Windows world, and >2K displays have been cheap on desktop for a really long time.
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I can’t tell you how often I see this. Brand new designs or logos in 2024 or 2025 that look abysmal on a retina monitor because no one bothered to check.
Stands out like a sore thumb.