We wrote a white paper a while back about monitor resolution and its impact on the design process. In the process we came to realize how little we actually understood about what monitor resolution actually is! Several hours of research later, we were able to confidently say:

“[I]ncreasing a monitor’s resolution effectively shrinks the pixels, or “zooms out” from the displayed image. The result is a smaller image and more physical space on the screen to display additional information. So, practically speaking, the higher a monitor’s resolution, the more a person can actually see on the screen.”

As an aside, we have seen (and occasionally noted here in CoFactors) a resurgence of interest in this topic as it relates to the dicey decision of a target screen width for new site designs. Maybe we were ahead of our time?

But, back to the topic of this post… Someone over at Gizmodo asked the innocent, but quite valid, question of whether a 30″ flat panel TV displaying 1080 vertical lines of resolution actually has smaller pixels than a 50″ unit with the same resolution. If the answer is yes (which it is), then a larger display might appear less sharp than a smaller display of the same resolution? We know, “appearance of sharpness” gets into a whole host of other issues such as viewing distance, display technology, etc… Many of these are covered in the comments to the Gizomodo post. But the reason I thought it was interesting is that the issue matches my own experience comparing the picture quality of different flat panels in the store. Have you ever marvelled at the sharpness of a little 20″ table-top LCD an wondered why you never see the same sharpness in the larger models? I guess this is the reason…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 2:37 pm and is filed under General, Screen Resolution.