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Laptop screen
Laptop screens continue to get bigger. Today, even budget shoppers can afford the luxury of high-resolution color: notebooks with 14.1-inch and 15-inch screens now cost as little as $1200. Some notebook manufacturers are even offering laptops with 16- and 17-inch screens. The trade-off: frequent business fliers who prefer the more-compact notebook screen sizes of 12.1 and 13.3 inches may soon have only ultraportables to choose From.
Needless to say that there is hardly a computer application that doesn’t require you to look almost nonstop at your laptop screen. Listening to MP3s you may say, but beyond that, the display will play an integral role in most of your laptop computing. That means that, not only out of consideration for your eyes, you should seriously consider this topic.
The most obvious component of your noteboook screen is its physical size. These can be as small as 10.4 inches diagonally in an ultraportable, to 17.1 inches in a really big. In other words, the physical size of your display will be generally determined by the size category of laptop you choose to buy.
At a first glance, You might be inclined to look for the biggest possible laptop screen, but don’t be too enthusiastic about this approach.
More important than the physical size of the laptop screen is its resolution. In other words, the number of pixels that can be held at one time (Remember, a pixel is one "dot’s" worth of an image. Think of how your printer measures resolution in dots per inch. Your display uses pixels instead of dots).
But a higher resolution is not necessarily the best. It really depends on your own situation and preferences. You need to keep in mind that the higher the resolution, the smaller individual items on the display become. That’s because any given display element is sized in pixels.
For example, a standard Windows XP™ icon is 32 x 32 pixels. If you display that icon on an 800 x 600 display, it standards to reason it will appear larger than it does when it’s shown on a 1,024 x 768 display. In short, depending on your eyesight, a laptop screen display’s maximum resolution may produce visual elements that are too small for your comfort.
In any event, here are the common labels for various laptop screen resolutions and what they mean:
XGA– 1,024 x 768 pixels, the most common resolution for laptops.
SXGA– 1,400 x 1,050 pixels.
UXGA– 1,600 x 1,200 pixels.
Note that really big laptops and some larger standard laptops are also available with wide versions of each of these, as follows:
WXGA– 1,366 x 768 pixels WSXGA – 1,680 x 1,050 pixels WUXGA – 1,920 x 1,200 pixels.
Keep in mind that these are maximum resolutions. For example, if you buy a laptop screen with a UXGA-capable display and find it makes items on the display appear to small, you can always adjust the display to a lower resolution, typically as low as 800 x 600 if necessary.
As for display technology, virtually all laptop screen displays are active matrix (a.k.a., TFT). The key word here is virtually. If you shop for a used laptop, you may find some that use older LCD technology. Likewise, there’s no guarantee that is some little shop in a far corner of the planet, there isn’t somebody building a cheap laptop using LCD technology. The bottom line is that LCD is an inferior technology. Always make sure your laptop has a TFT display.
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