Are laptop display resolutions deliberately kept low to boost battery performance?

tigerstyle · 27 Oct 2012 at 10:08

In an underhand fashion? I'm sure there is some conspiracy here, sure you can get 1080p screens, but they are the exception rather than the norm I consider them, well what should be the norm!

Rather than extra battery development, you just ship units with 768p screens instead - wow 6 hours battery life etc etc....

olivier renault · 27 Oct 2012 at 13:50

It's more expensive. It's usually a cost cutting measure. That and crap glossy displays.

Some ultraportables have 1080p on 13'' displays, and even IPS panels, and still have good battery life (UX31A). Batteries life is also another area where you can save costs quite drastically, so both usually work in tandem towards the quality and cost of a laptop.

Secondly, on small panels (13'', 14''), you need good quality to bump up the resolution, else you end up with a blurry bleeding mess. And some people don't like 1080p on small screens due to everything being smaller and harder to read, even on good screens (again UX31A, Sony Vaio, Macbooks).

I agree laptop screen is one area that is often disappointing. They are getting much more efficient and versatile, but displays still suck. Viewing angles, glossy screens (usually to sharpen the picture and blacks on poor quality displays), resolution, contrast... Kinda puts me off the cheap end of the scale. That, and non-backlit keyboards.

Andrew Moore · 27 Oct 2012 at 13:53

A laptop screen in none 3d mode (which 99% of the time it is in) will make near zero difference to the battery span of a laptop.

Over 6 hours you may see an improvement of 5minutes by making the switch.

DrBombcrater · 27 Oct 2012 at 18:22

tigerstyle said:
Rather than extra battery development, you just ship units with 768p screens instead - wow 6 hours battery life etc etc....

1080p screens do draw a little more power than 768 ones due to needing a more powerful backlight to reach the same brightness level, but it's not going to affect battery life much at all - maybe 10 minutes or so on a decent laptop.

I have no idea what kind of reasoning laptop manufacturers use to justify fitting 768 screens. It's not cost, the difference between a naff 768 screen and a 1080p one is actually quite small.

Saundie · 27 Oct 2012 at 18:56

DrBombcrater said:
I have no idea what kind of reasoning laptop manufacturers use to justify fitting 768 screens. It's not cost, the difference between a naff 768 screen and a 1080p one is actually quite small.

Their reasoning is quite simple; they can charge us more money for "premium" products. The fact that they've been able to get away with selling us these glossy 1366 x 768 TN paneled monstrosities for so long doesn't help matters. Unfortunately it'll continue for as long as they can get away with it

tigerstyle · 28 Oct 2012 at 01:44

it makes me die inside

My other thought was that a 1080p screen needs more gfx 'ooomph' behind it, but with modern CPUs they don't really. Onboard is A OK these days.

GTRacer · 28 Oct 2012 at 02:11

It's an extreme case, but the retina 13" MBP has to power 4x as many pixels as the non-retina MBP, as a result of this much of the space gained by dropping the optical drive has been taken up by the new battery in order for the laptop to hit 7 hours. However, I do think that in most cases it's just cost cutting, there can't be much of difference in power consumption between a 1280*800 and 1920*1200, you could probably make that up by chucking an SSD instead of a mechanical in there. Hopefully Apple's recent push towards high DPI screens begins to spread, I love how compatible apps like Premiere Pro scale the UI so it's readable but don't scale the content so you can fit everything in on the screen quite comfortably.

Meaker · 28 Oct 2012 at 02:36

It's all the cost, the number of customers who buy the machine because it costs less is greater than the number who would buy it due to the larger resolution.

Muel · 28 Oct 2012 at 08:11

I actually prefer the 768 screens, wierdly. 1080 on a 15 or 17" panel makes the text too small to read! For gaming, I just don't care. 768 is easily high enough for the stuff I play, and requires less GPU power to run games at the native resolution.

Amp34 · 28 Oct 2012 at 10:15

768 is a pain in the ****.... You need at least 800px vertically to be any good (but then I'm not a fan of 16x9 on computers). While 1080p/1200 is nice I do think the sweet spot in 11/13" laptops/tablets is around 1440/1600x900. You get enough vertical resolution to show most of the page but at the same time you're not increasing the cost or need that much extra power to drive it. the 2560x1600 on the new MBP is a cross between a marketing exercise and a limitation of OSX, not much more, however I wouldn't say no if all devices had screens of that resolution, especially if you could actually use it natively at that resolution *cough* Apple *cough*.