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Comment by left-struck

4 months ago

“So, we have five or six extremely high-resolution monitors that have better color and picture quality.“ I would love to know what qualifies as extremely high resolution for computer monitors circa 1995

I remember those monitors, but I forget what resolution they were. For what it's worth, Toy Story was rendered at 1536 x 922. I believe they re-rendered the whole thing from the RIB files for the bluray release.

  • Yes, there have been a couple re-render the whole thing. There was a good write up somewhere that I cannot find now where there was a discussion of keeping RenderMan bug compatible with the original or not. They also upped the shading rate and a few other quality knobs.

I dunno if it was manufactured as early as 1995 (though it couldn't have been more than four years later, absolute max) but some time around 2002 I picked up a pair of used 19" (IIRC) IBM flat-screen (that is, the screen itself was flat, not flat-panel) CRT monitors in a flea market that had both more total pixels and greater pixel density than any screen in my house until I started picking up devices with Apple Retina displays. I believe the short side of the 4x3 on that thing maxed out at 1920.

My boring, 17" consumer Trinitron monitor in 1995 could do 1600x1200 IIRC.

Max resolution and pixel density (plus, for a long time, color gamut, contrast/depth-of-black, latency, et c) on typical monitors took a huge dive when LCDs replaced CRTs. "High res" in 1995 would probably qualify as fairly high-res today, too, if not quite top-of-the-heap. Only expensive, relatively recent displays in the consumer space really beat those '90s CRTs overall to a degree where it's not at least a close call (though they may still be a little worse in some ways)

I think it’s important to remember it’s not just the quantity of pixels but the quality of them that makes the difference between consumer and professional equipment