[PATCH 0/2] Support for high DPI outputs via scaling

[Alex Deucher]

On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 5:19 PM, Todd Showalter <todd at electronjump.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> wrote:
>
>> Also, I agree that you're going to have mixed setups.  Like you said, people
>> replace their laptops fairly frequently.  However, I have a monitor sitting
>> on my desk that I bought in 2004 and it's still working perfectly with no
>> dead pixels.  Even if I go out next year and buy an super hi-res laptop,
>> I'll still plug it into that monitor as an external.  I think we can expect
>> mixed setups for quite some time.
>
>     True; I guess my point there is that I'm betting that in the next
> year or so the CCFL on your LCD monitor will go, and you're going to
> be junking it.  It seems like the backlight on CCFL LCD monitors has a
> MTTF of around a decade, and aftermarket replacement of CCFLs is
> neither easy nor financially sensible from what I've seen.
>
>> Also, you have to remember what drives buying monitor A over monitor B.  A
>> lot of the reason to bump from 1280x1024 to 1600x1200 or 1920x1080 is screen
>> space.  You can put a lot more windows (and therefore get more work done) on
>> a 1920x1080 screen than on the old 1280x1024 screen.  With the bump to 4k,
>> you don't get a bump in space, just resolution.  Therefore, I don't know how
>> jumpy people are going to be to replace the 1920x1080 screen with one that's
>> more expensive but doesn't grant them extra room to work.  I don't think the
>> switch to 4k will be as rapid as you are suggesting.
>
>     What I think is going to happen is the TV makers will be pushing
> 4K for the "home theatre" market, and will hope to convince people
> with TVs to upgrade to 4K.  There's been a lot of noise over 4K this
> year, mostly because 3DTV has been dead in the water, TVs are becoming
> super cheap commodity items (the price of a big TV has come down by a
> literal order of magnitude in the past decade; I remember seeing 50"
> plasma TVs for $20K CDN, now I can have one for less than $2K CDN, and
> that doesn't even take a decade of inflation into account), and the
> manufacturers are desperate to find a way to convince people that
> their current TV is horribly obsolete and needs replacing.  It sounds
> like the push is going to be for 4K TVs paired with 4K-capable bluray.
>

Perhaps, but what's to say the 4k uptake will be any better than 3DTV?
 3DTV plus 3D bluray didn't take off, why would 4k Plus 4k bluray?
The real problem is lack of content accessibility.  There's no unified
interface to get to all the content users want to access.  Until that
changes, I don't see any big uptake in any new TV technology.

Alex