Comment by mrbungie
14 hours ago
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.
I believe there are a lot of people using 1080p monitors because they bought it a while ago and they're still working fine. There's also a lot of lower-end 1080p monitors still being sold today.
> One is hard-put to buy a developer-power laptop with a sub-2K display these days, even in the Windows world
I personally see a lot of 1080p screens on new gaming laptops too. Lots of people get those for work from what I see with my peers. When I sold my RTX 3060 laptop with a 1080p screen, most buyers wanted it for professional work, according to them.
> I'm honestly not sure where all these hackernews commenters with low-dpi displays are coming from
If anything, this is exactly the place where I'd expect a bunch of people to be rocking an older Thinkpad. :)
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If you have 20/20 vision, a 27" display at 1440p (~110 DPI) has a visual acuity distance of 79cm - ie, if you are sat 79cm or further away from the screen, humans are not capable of resolving any extra detail from a higher resolution. High refresh rate 1440p IPS screens are very widely available at good prices, so it isn't that crazy that people choose them.
Phone and laptop have higher DPI screens of course, but I'm not close enough to my desktop monitor for a higher DPI to matter.
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Absolutely everyone in my company uses 1080p monitors unless they got their own. That’s just “normal“.
It’s horrible.
Retina still isn't available for large monitors like 38" and above.