What is native?

October 20, 2006 3:59 PM

Help me clear up my misconception about display resolution: I always understood it that on the same 15" screen that if you went to a higher resolution, it would pack more pixels into that same 15" space. But resolution appears to be length of number of pixels x width of number of pixels. So is a 1080 hdtv always going to be bigger than a 720 hdtv? What am I missing?
posted by baking soda to technology (11 comments total)

So is a 1080 hdtv always going to be bigger than a 720 hdtv?

If this is true it's certainly not because of any limitations due to pixel size/resolution.

For instance, the apple 30" display is smaller than many (maybe all?) 1080p tvs, but does a higher resolution.
posted by juv3nal at 4:08 PM on October 20, 2006

The size of a pixel, can vary.
posted by 31d1 at 4:08 PM on October 20, 2006

So for a big screen tv it may not have a crazy resolution count ie. 1920x1080 because if it isnt an HDTV then chances are the pixels are rather large and the resolution is only something like 1024x768?
posted by baking soda at 4:30 PM on October 20, 2006

There's a thing called Native Resolution, other resolutions are Logical resolutions. This isn't always the same. More Info.
posted by blue_beetle at 4:35 PM on October 20, 2006

So for a big screen tv it may not have a crazy resolution count ie. 1920x1080 because if it isnt an HDTV then chances are the pixels are rather large and the resolution is only something like 1024x768?

Yes. (Except that if it's not an HDTV, the resolution is even lower than 1024x768).
posted by martinrebas at 4:41 PM on October 20, 2006

There's a thing called Native Resolution, other resolutions are Logical resolutions. This isn't always the same. More Info.
posted by blue_beetle at 6:35 PM CST on October 20 [+fave] [!]

This is not true with CRT displays
posted by cellphone at 4:50 PM on October 20, 2006

So say I wanted to get a laptop that I could theoretically use to watch full HD content (1080p). Say I got the 17 inch macbook pro which is 1680x1050. Is that going to distort something since it's 30 pixels off? Is that a progressive scan monitor? Do I have to be an engineer just to get 1080p content to show up on my screen properly without being downscaled or upconverted etc etc?
posted by baking soda at 4:59 PM on October 20, 2006

Not sure if the laptop example is just an example or your actual goal. If so, you are going to run into some issues. For one, you don't mention how you are going to get that "full HD content" into the computer... No HD-DVD or Blu-ray option on that puppy. Also not clear if the hard drive would be fast enough to play uncompressed HD video that got converted to a file. Finally, the HD spec actually requires a minimum size of the display (50 inches, I believe) before it can be called HD, so in a pure semantic way, you can never watch HD on any laptop.
posted by mzurer at 5:09 PM on October 20, 2006

Say I got the 17 inch macbook pro which is 1680x1050.

- 1080p HD content is generally 1920 pixels wide. To watch it without distortion (or cutting off the edges), it would have to be scaled to 1680x945, maintaining the 16:9 aspect ratio.
- All computer monitors are progressive.
- You can watch movies without distortion or scaling by selecting the "100%" or "Actual size" option from the menu. If the movie is larger (in pixels) than the screen, some of it will obviously be chopped off.
- Scaling is not the end of the world.
posted by cillit bang at 5:25 PM on October 20, 2006

Correction: scaling is not the end of the world when talking about watching video. But this is not true when talking about general use of a LCD for a computer.

Put it this way: when you are dealing with a LCD, you have a fixed number of pixels. It is X by Y pixels, and that's that, there is no way to change it. So you want your desktop to be X by Y pixels when using that LCD. If you set your desktop size to be smaller then it will either use less of the screen (with empty black borders) or it will have to scale the desktop image, and scaling for general computer desktop use (i.e. not video) looks like total ass. So that is why everyone hammers this concept of native resolution into your head.

But you can normally scale video (i.e. movies and TV, not your Windows desktop GUI) just fine, so it's no problem if e.g. a 1280x720 source gets scaled up to 1680x945 (which would be the case of fullscreen playback of 720p if your LCD was 1680 pixels wide.)
posted by Rhomboid at 6:30 PM on October 20, 2006

What makes it even more fun, is that TV-pixels are rarely quadratic, but some form of elongated, but that is for another discussion :-)
posted by KimG at 3:03 PM on October 21, 2006