Retina and other high resolution displays - worth it?

[Abhinav Srivastava]

So I was reading about the MBPr and its unmatched resolution. One question comes to mind, as more pixels are crammed into say a 14" display, the size of any object would reduce.
A 1080p frame from a video would have the resolution of 1920 × 1080 as opposed to 2560x1600 of MBP.
To make full use of the real estate on the display, one would have to upscale. Would the quality (theoritically) suffer as a result of upscaling? Which display would fare better - 1920x1080 or 2560x1600?

[Bear Bibeault]

That's not quite the way it works. The system takes care of scaling things up (not sure of the exact details) and with so many fine pixels to work with, there's no blockiness. So things tend to look sharper, not always smaller. You can also change the apparent resolution.

If you have someplace you can go to see one in action, do so. The clarity is very very nice.

[William P O'Sullivan]

That all depends on the quality of the upscaler.

If you take a native say 32x32 icon and show in natively on say a 23" 2560x1600 monitor,
it will be tiny! As for HD video, 1080p that would be up to player I would think and not the OS.

WP

[Bear Bibeault]

William P O'Sullivan wrote:That all depends on the quality of the upscaler.

The OS X and iOS upscalers are excellent.

If you take a native say 32x32 icon and show in natively

The point is, unless specifically set up that way (which is not the default), it's not shown natively.

As for HD video, 1080p that would be up to player I would think and not the OS.

Incorrect. It's application independent.

[Bert Bates]

I'm still stuck on the original question...

Which display would fare better - 1920x1080 or 2560x1600?

Fare better in what way?

Crispness? photo quality? number of "usable" characters on a screen?...

[Pat Farrell]

Bert Bates wrote:Fare better in what way?

One thing we can know for sure, the performance of the graphics will be better at lower resolution. Assuming its the same graphics processor. More pixels means more data to process by the GPU.

I find it interesting that HDTV is now fairly low resolution for modern computers.