Apparent resolution isn't that important to me. I would rather watch Fawlty Towers at 50p run through a decent deinterlacer and reasonably scaled to whatever my screen needs. I don't care for upsampling that tries to increase apparent sharpness or "recover/(re)invent" detail. Or at least I have not been more impressed than repulsed by it yet. I don't care for HDR or colorspace expansion that much either, as long as there is no visible color banding.

That being said, I will appreciate a well done 4k film scan that gets as much real detail as possible out of the medium. I also am not generally a fan of frame interpolation to increase perceived smoothness, so far.

DracoNihil wrote on 2024-05-10, 01:34:

I can't do multi monitor so the best option for me actually is 4K.

A single 3840x2160 monitor is literally 4 1920x1080 screens rolled into one. I have more than enough screen real-estate to keep a eye on my Twitch chat, OBS, the game I'm playing and whatever MIDI system I need to have in use.

There's some things I can play smoothly at 4K as well; as hilarious as that sounds coming from a Intel NUC user. UT2004 in particular is very amusing at 4K because the GUI scaling only works so far.

i suppose if the screen is large enough then it is essentially 4 screens, if split into 1080 quadrants, i hadnt thought of that - it would need to be a big screen though!

Here's what I think of display resolutions: the higher, the better. It's crazy how far PCs have not come in this area, especially when it comes to gaming. Back in 2002, people bought $400 video cards for 1080p. Now, they buy $400 video cards for... 1080p.
My Dell laptop's 1920×1200 display has spoiled me. There are a few newer laptops lying around that I'd be interested in using, but they all have 1080p screens.
I'm not a gamer, and my own standards for these applications vary a lot. I consider some games playable at 320×200 with single-digit framerates; in others, I want 1024×768 and more than 30 fps.
I don't care as much about video resolution – I watched movies and TV shows fine on a standard-definition CRT until 2022. I currently watch YouTube videos at 360p on my Pentium III build.
As far as screen size goes, I'm pretty flexible. I can switch to anything from a 15" laptop display to a 24" widescreen monitor without much issue. My 55" TV is too large for desktop use, though. It's a bit of a shame, since it uses an OLED panel and therefore has insanely good image quality. I also can't imagine doing any work or playing games on a mobile phone.

And real movies are 24fps!

gerry wrote on 2024-05-10, 09:23:

i suppose if the screen is large enough then it is essentially 4 screens, if split into 1080 quadrants, i hadnt thought of that - it would need to be a big screen though!

I've been doing exactly that from time to time on my 32" 4K screen. However, I find that typically splitting it into two 1920x2160 half-screens works better for me, especially while reading.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-05-10, 12:13:

Here's what I think of display resolutions: the higher, the better. It's crazy how far PCs have not come in this area, especially when it comes to gaming. Back in 2002, people bought $400 video cards for 1080p. Now, they buy $400 video cards for... 1080p.

Hm. I guess they've settled on 1080p, but use the increased computing power for the effects? Tessellation, trilinear filtering, water effects, raytracing etc.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-05-10, 12:13:

I consider some games playable at 320×200 with single-digit framerates;

320x200? That mode 13h horror? 🧛 Without a 14" CRT? I salute you, brave warrior! 😰

GemCookie wrote on 2024-05-10, 12:13:

in others, I want 1024×768 and more than 30 fps.

640x480 to me. It's both full VGA and NTSC resolution.
I wished most DOS games had proper VGA resolution.

800x600 is a nice extra, it's close to PAL. Or vice versa.
Some Super VGA titles exists, gratefully. I use that resolution whenever possible (SkyGlobe, Windows 3/95, JV-Fax, text-adventures+graphics).
21" monitors with 1600x1200 can display 800x600 nicely.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-05-10, 12:13:

Here's what I think of display resolutions: the higher, the better.

No way, higher resolution means small gui, is a problem dont find my 32px icons in the screen!

theelf wrote on 2024-05-11, 10:38:

No way, higher resolution means small gui, is a problem dont find my 32px icons in the screen!

That's what the icon size setting in the Control Panel is for! I just set it to 64 px, no problem.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-05-11, 15:50:

theelf wrote on 2024-05-11, 10:38:

No way, higher resolution means small gui, is a problem dont find my 32px icons in the screen!

That's what the icon size setting in the Control Panel is for! I just set it to 64 px, no problem.

Love use 32x32 icons, maybe someday i will found some bigger icons , but for now never found a complete pack of 64px or bigger icons like this. Even if i found, all software i use have 32px icons, some 48px but not very common

If you're specifically talking about modern stuff, I consider 1920x1080 to be the minimum, and I prefer either higher resolutions or a different aspect ratio to get more vertical height. For older stuff, I use whatever the hardware can handle reasonably well as long as it isn't 1366x768.

136(6)x768 is that nice resolution that you get with those older LCD TVs with VGA input. Why do you do not like it?

My short answer is, it's very low on my list of importance. As long whatever it is looks good to me, I'm fine with it.

I grew up in the 70's and 80's, so that should give you an idea on what I am happy to watch. I still own a lot on DVD, and some of it is just ripped from VHS, so 480P and up fits most of what I have.

Even on my modern computing hardware, I max out at 1080P, with no real desire to go beyond it. Performance in much more important to me.

My "retro" systems run at the native resolutions of the era when they were new. So 320 x 200 to 800x600 for most things. Some 1024x768 mixed in.

I always argue that a dvd movie displayed on a crt tv looks way beter than on any modern HD/4k panel. Hell, it even gives Bluray a run for its money!

For retro gaming, I really like the grungy look of 640x480 on my crt monitor, so that's the resolution I usually opt for. Plus it allows a more or less stable framerate in games like Max Payne or NFS3, both of which I've finished only recently.

And as for modern gaming, I upgraded from a 1080p 60hz to a 1440p 144hz monitor in autumn. I like the boost in sharpness in most games, however my RTX 4070ti can't always keep up with the framerates, especially in games such as Cyberpunk 2077 or RoboCop, where you have to resort to DLSS to hit over 60fps with ray tracing enabled.

I also have a plan to hook my modern rig to my crt monitor and try to play these games at their lowest supported resolutions one day, you know, for a laugh 😉

Cyberdyne wrote on 2024-05-12, 05:50:

136(6)x768 is that nice resolution that you get with those older LCD TVs with VGA input. Why do you do not like it?

When laptops switched from 16:10 aspect ratio displays to 16:9, 1366x768 became the only resolution choice on every laptop smaller than 17" except expensive workstation models. The problem is that almost all software and website developers had already been designing around higher resolutions (such as 1440x900 or even 1280x800) for years before that change happened. That resulted in stuff being cut off at the bottom of the screen because nobody checked to see if the program or website scaled properly at low resolutions (it was assumed that a display with only 768 rows was a 15" CRT or early LCD that was obsolete by 2009). Today, it's even worse, with some stuff not even displaying properly at 1600x900 while low-end laptops (and even some otherwise decent ones) still used 1366x768. Some software even opens partially off-screen (Malwarebytes) and/or with a default window size larger than the screen resolution (OBS - yes, someone will be running OBS because "amazing value gaming laptops" used that resolution up until recently when 16:10 made a comeback).

I guess you could argue that developers should have kept up with the most common resolutions so stuff would display properly on the worst hardware currently available (and even a few years older), but the lowest common hardware spec suddenly became significantly worse. It would have required a major redesign effort across the entire Internet and a large amount of existing software.

1366x768 might be an okay "retro" resolution as long as the monitor can display the correct aspect ratio. The display scaling on my old Toshiba laptop that taught me to hate 1366x768 would shrink 1024x768 horizontally. In that case, I would only buy a used monitor to stop rewarding the manufacturers of stuff that's e-waste straight from the factory.

I agree on one point 16:10 is like the golden aspect ratio. I have some newish LCD monitors in that ratio and i love them in DOS mode. 720x400 text mode is so pleasant to read there, and 320x200 games somehow also look natural. Maybe it is only me. And there was a good time period where smatphones were not so damn long and narrow.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-05-11, 08:43:

640x480 to me. It's both full VGA and NTSC resolution.

Digital NTSC is 704x480 or 720x480, it will not fit in a 640x480 resolution.

Analog NTSC usually is digitized to 704x480 too.

ZellSF wrote on 2024-05-13, 12:02:

Jo22 wrote on 2024-05-11, 08:43:

640x480 to me. It's both full VGA and NTSC resolution.

Digital NTSC is 704x480 or 720x480, it will not fit in a 640x480 resolution.

Analog NTSC usually is digitized to 704x480 too.

Hi, maybe yes, being from PAL land I do admit I not know much about Never Twice.. , err, NTSC. 😁

According to the internet, there's both a square-pixel and a rectangular-pixel resolution.

https://community.avid.com/forums/t/82978.aspx

But I'm just a layman here, I'm afraid.

What I think makes VGA and 640x480 special, though, is that it marked an turning point.

Up until VGA, computers graphics were always following TV standards, I believe.
Playing catching up, so to say.

VGA with its DE15 connector and 31KHz scan rate, however, was beginning to take the lead.

In the 90s, many game consoles and entertainment devices started to support VGA/640x80 resolution as an alternative to PAL/NTSC output (N64, PS1 or DreamCast come to mind).

There now was a market for Composite/S-video/RGB to VGA converters, also. And vice versa.
Things like the "Video Cheese".

Even electronic typewriters and other things like internet set-top bixes had adopted VGA at some point.

I was used to 1024x768 on my 17" CRT in 2003-2008, anything below that on GUI desktop looks really lame to me.
But at the moment the only 4:3 screen I own is 20" LCD and I have to use it on 800x600 because on 1600x1200 the picture gets unstable.

Also, I hate 5:4 squarish LCDs, they look really ugly.

For movies:
1080p >>>>>> 480p, not even a contest.
4K > 1080p, if your screen is big enough or you're close enough to it, the movie has enough detail to justify it, and you're willing to pay for it.
"8K": no one cares bro. Maybe useful for movie theaters with very, very large screens. Otherwise pure marketing gimmick since your eyes can't resolve that level of detail.

My biggest pet peeve with screen resolution in the computer realm is that EVERYTHING is now 16:9 ratio. That's fine for movies, but for me it's very bad for computer stuff. I grew up on 4:3 from the '70s - the 2000s. I got used to it for computer work, games, etc. I'd really like if we could get an *inexpensive* LED / OLED monitor in that aspect ratio. I still have a couple of decent 21" CRT monitors, but I'm not sure how much longer they'll last. And, they literally gobble power. Something like 160 - 200 watts, whereas a good 27" LED / OLED consumes less than 1/10th of that. With power so damned expensive now, due to greed, we NEED to conserve power in our computer / screen time. And running a 21" CRT is very expensive now. My power rate is now 77 cents per kilowatt hour, 4 times what is was 5-6 years ago.

I'd love, love if we had a newish laptop that had a 4:3 display (either 1024x768 or 1600x1200 native display) which could be used bare metal with SBEMU / VSBHDA for a real DOS gaming experience. And as an emulator panacea, 99% of the classic consoles and arcade cabinets used 4:3 ratio. I think there's demand for this. No, I'm not talking about a $3000 laptop, but a $300 laptop system which would be GREAT for all the DOS and retro stuff. Not overpowered, but still 10x faster than what I used in the '90s. It would max out the "modern" DOS experience for sure.

As for films, I think 1920x1080 is just fine. What matters much, much more is the manner in which the content has been encoded and / or tinkered with. The trends of edge enhancement / tealification / improper color timing and bastardizing a vintage film to look like a modern film make any increase in resolution over DVD worse than useless. We've seen this so often with "modern" 4k films, most recently in the abmoninable "restorations" of Cameron's ALIENS, ABYSS, and TRUE LIES, which look much worse at 4k resolution than the editions of 25 years ago due to the removal of all film grain, "AI tinkering" and teal "modern" color timing. For shame...