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Metric display resolutions should be invented.

Have you ever wondered why dumb aspect ratios like 16:9 were invented?

Why 1.7777777777777777777777777777:1 (aka 16:9) is good?

Why our screen resolutions are a confusing number like 2160, 1440, 5120, 1080, 7680, etc...?

 

Well, many decades ago, since different places all over the world were using different aspect ratios like 2.2:1 and 1.66:1 and 1.33:1 and other stuff, 16:9 turned out to be the average of all those.

Then a bunch of people chose to standardize everything to 16:9 and made up 1920x1080.

 

Well, I would like to say that these arbitrarily chosen resolutions and aspect ratios are horrible, just like the imperial system.

There is literally no logical reason why there should be 12 inches in a foot, and 3 feet in a yard, and 1760 yards in a mile.

There is also no logical reason why there should be 1080 pixels in a screen, or why it should be 1.7777777777 times wider than it is high.

Or why 21:9 is more special than 20:9 and 22:9.

 

 

 

A metric display system would improve everyone's experience with computers.

Displays would have resolutions such as 2000x1000, or 4000x2000, or 5000x2000 for ultrawide, etc...

Aspect ratios would actually make sense, 2:1, twice as wide as it is high.

You would be able to easily divide a screen into regions, and know that half of your screen is 500px, or a quarter is 250px.

Coding programs and web sites would make far more sense, 10% of a screen 1000px tall is 100px.

12% of a screen 1000px tall would be 120px.

 

EVERYTHING WOULD BE MORE EFFICIENT!

 

Obviously switching from 16:9 1920x1080 to 2:1 2000x1000 would be difficult, just like switching from imperial to metric measurements, but it would be a huge improvement to everyone in the world.

The difference is also not that large between 16:9 and 2:1, just about 10%. This would mean living with tiny black bars when watching 16:9 content, which is not that bad.

Cinema cameras already record at resolutions like 8000x4000 or other "metric" resolutions, so switching to 2:1 would just require rendering the final content at a 2:1 resolution.

 

Fight the resolutions being imposed on us. Embrace the metric system!!:)

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3 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Cinema cameras already record at resolutions like 8000x4000 or other "metric" resolutions,

No they don't

 

 

For a computer, a base 10 system won't be any better,.

 

This really won't help people, and i like my 16:10 and 3:4. I see no reason to change it.

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Coding programs and web sites would make far more sense,

Except it won't help at all. What if its not full screen?

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While I agree that the metric system is better, I really don't think a change like this could help anyone.

There are so many different resolutions that we should be glad at least some of them are "standard" and easy to find content for.

 

Also, most people consider 16:9 screens not high enough and say that 16:10 is a huge difference. I don't think you could convince them to switch to 2:1.

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5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

No they don't

 

  • Sequences from newer films are scanned at 2,000, 4,000, or even 8,000 columns, called 2K, 4K, and 8K, for quality visual-effects editing on computers.
  • IMAX, including IMAX HD and OMNIMAX: approximately 10,000×7,000 (7,000 lines) resolution. It is about 70 Mpix, which is currently highest-resolution single-sensor digital cinema camera (as of January 2012).[citation needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_resolution

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2 minutes ago, DJ46 said:

While I agree that the metric system is better, I really don't think a change like this could help anyone.

There are so many different resolutions that we should be glad at least some of them are "standard" and easy to find content for.

 

Also, most people consider 16:9 screens not high enough and say that 16:10 is a huge difference. I don't think you could convince them to switch to 2:1.

Then you can get 1:1 screens or put 2:1 vertically.

 

Also it makes no sense to say "16:9 is not high enough"

IT IS AN ASPECT RATIO

You can always make it higher, it can go as high as you want......

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2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

But 2k is 1080x2160 

Huh?

The ability to google properly is a skill of its own. 

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6 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Then you can get 1:1 screens or put 2:1 vertically.

 

Also it makes no sense to say "16:9 is not high enough"

IT IS AN ASPECT RATIO

You can always make it higher, it can go as high as you want......

I know it's an aspect ratio, I'm talking about the resolution most people use - 1920x1080. At that resolution, a lot of people think you don't get enough vertical pixels to comfortably do a lot of tasks. That's why 1920x1200 became so popular. You're trying to replace it with 2000X1000 - even less vertical space.

 

Also - get real. How is it easier to recommend to basic PC users to get more than one screen or to use their screen sideways? How will they watch landscape videos? You're trying to change a whole market, not just the enthusiast part.

 

And frankly, my 16:9 screen is getting annoying pretty fast. If I use it in portrait, there is clearly not enough width, and if I use it in landspace, I can see barely anything without scrolling.

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Many personal computers introduced in the late 1970s and the 1980s were designed to use television receivers as their display devices, making the resolutions dependent on the television standards in use, including PAL and NTSC. Picture sizes were usually limited to ensure the visibility of all the pixels in the major television standards and the broad range of television sets with varying amounts of over scan. The actual drawable picture area was, therefore, somewhat smaller than the whole screen, and was usually surrounded by a static-colored border (see image to right). Also, the interlace scanning was usually omitted in order to provide more stability to the picture, effectively halving the vertical resolution in progress. 160 × 200, 320 × 200 and 640 × 200 on NTSC were relatively common resolutions in the era (224, 240 or 256 scanlines were also common). In the IBM PC world, these resolutions came to be used by 16-color EGA video cards.

And since computer scientists like to keep things easy, most of the standards we have today are simply multiples of those standards. This is why we use those.

 

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5 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Also it makes no sense to say "16:9 is not high enough"

IT IS AN ASPECT RATIO

You can always make it higher, it can go as high as you want......

I entirely get the 16:9 doesn't feel tall enough thing, depending on what you are doing of course. If you run something full screen, a bit more vertical space can be nice. I'm running a 21:9 monitor at the moment on my main system and for a lot of things it is easier to treat it as two half monitors. My work monitors are 16:10, and my old desktop monitor before the UW was also 16:10. It is just nicer for document type work than 16:9.

 

Actually, does anyone really cares what the actual pixel number is? Well, for gaming I can understand as there is a tradeoff between resolution and framerate, but for desktop uses, it largely doesn't matter what the exact number is assuming there are some minimal quantity. Desktop OSes aren't quite as polished as mobile yet when it comes to ppi scaling, but a user shouldn't need to think too much about this. Going to rounder numbers... would just replace one arbitrary set with another differently chosen arbitrary set.

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2:1 is not inherently better in this respect than 16:9... you can have resolutions that "make sense" with 16:9 as well, for example 1600x900. We could standardize to that if we wanted to. The question is... why? 1920x1080 was a good compromise between crispness and data rates for quite some time, I'm pretty sure it wasn't chosen at random. For programming it makes 0 difference, a good interface should work with ratios rather than magical numbers. Besides, with 2:1 you have just as much potential for "weird" numbers appearing. What if I made a 1522x761 display? That's still 2:1, but it's hardly practical...

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It's a neat idea, don't get me wrong, but just seems like at this point in the game it wouldn't make any sense to implement. 

"Better to be bad at video games than mad at video games" - BadAtVideogamesMan

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There is nothing metric, or non-metric, about resolutions. Using the metric system doesn't mean you cannot have 1080 meters or 1440 kilograms. There is no conversion to make that can be base 10, or base anything (other than pixels adding up to megapixels, etc, although no one know what mega or giga means anymore since HDDs and especially SSDs started to randomize their stated capacity).

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17 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

There is nothing metric, or non-metric, about resolutions. Using the metric system doesn't mean you cannot have 1080 meters or 1440 kilograms. 

It doesn't, and OP didn't say anything about that, but as I understand, the idea is so you won't end up with a resolution like @AluminiumTech has.

 

display.PNG

 

I mean, what in the gods name is that?

The ability to google properly is a skill of its own. 

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  1. Computers don't care about what's efficient to humans. And neither do programmers.
    1. Ironically some of the US measurement system is more efficient for computers to calculate because it's base 2.
  2. A lot of computer resolutions were derived based on memory requirements. For example, the 720p resolution most displays use (1366x768 or some such) almost fills up 1MiB, as in 1048576 bytes. Most other older resolutions were based on something divisible by 8 or 4 because well, there are 8-bits in a byte. And in fact, almost all resolutions are divisible by 8 or 4 because you can optimize your memory usage this way.

EDIT: 1366x768 is 1,049,088 pixels so it's slightly larger than 1MiB if each pixel were a byte. Either way.

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2 hours ago, DJ46 said:

I know it's an aspect ratio, I'm talking about the resolution most people use - 1920x1080. At that resolution, a lot of people think you don't get enough vertical pixels to comfortably do a lot of tasks. That's why 1920x1200 became so popular. You're trying to replace it with 2000X1000 - even less vertical space.

 

Also - get real. How is it easier to recommend to basic PC users to get more than one screen or to use their screen sideways? How will they watch landscape videos? You're trying to change a whole market, not just the enthusiast part.

 

And frankly, my 16:9 screen is getting annoying pretty fast. If I use it in portrait, there is clearly not enough width, and if I use it in landspace, I can see barely anything without scrolling.

I don't think you realize how many programmers use their screens in portrait mode.

Anyway, you say 16:9 landscape is not enough height, but putting it vertical is not wide enough, so it sounds to me like you need a 2000x2000 1:1 monitor!

 

57 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:
  1. Computers don't care about what's efficient to humans. And neither do programmers.
    1. Ironically some of the US measurement system is more efficient for computers to calculate because it's base 2.
  2. A lot of computer resolutions were derived based on memory requirements. For example, the 720p resolution most displays use (1366x768 or some such) almost fills up 1MiB, as in 1048576 bytes. Most other older resolutions were based on something divisible by 8 or 4 because well, there are 8-bits in a byte. And in fact, almost all resolutions are divisible by 8 or 4 because you can optimize your memory usage this way.

EDIT: 1366x768 is 1,049,088 pixels so it's slightly larger than 1MiB if each pixel were a byte. Either way.

How does that make any sense? Pixels don't use one byte each. 32 bit colour is 4 bytes. then there's 4:4:4 and other types of compression.

I think it's just a coincidence that 1366x768 turns out to be close to 1MiB, because 1080p, 2160, etc don't.

 

 

51 minutes ago, Prysin said:

@Enderman

you having a brainfart today? You know that no matter how much you push, how much you rile people up over this, nothing is going to change?

This is just a thought, I know it won't change anything, stop killing all the fun.

Some day the US will switch from imperial to metric, there is hope.

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1 hour ago, Sauron said:

2:1 is not inherently better in this respect than 16:9... you can have resolutions that "make sense" with 16:9 as well, for example 1600x900. We could standardize to that if we wanted to. The question is... why? 1920x1080 was a good compromise between crispness and data rates for quite some time, I'm pretty sure it wasn't chosen at random. For programming it makes 0 difference, a good interface should work with ratios rather than magical numbers. Besides, with 2:1 you have just as much potential for "weird" numbers appearing. What if I made a 1522x761 display? That's still 2:1, but it's hardly practical...

With 2:1 you would still make displays that actually use clean numbers like  2000x1000 or 4000x2000. Nobody uses 720p displays these days so a 1500x750 would just be unnecessary.

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22 minutes ago, Enderman said:

I don't think you realize how many programmers use their screens in portrait mode.

Anyway, you say 16:9 landscape is not enough height, but putting it vertical is not wide enough, so it sounds to me like you need a 2000x2000 1:1 monitor!

 

How does that make any sense? Pixels don't use one byte each. 32 bit colour is 4 bytes. then there's 4:4:4 and other types of compression.

I think it's just a coincidence that 1366x768 turns out to be close to 1MiB, because 1080p, 2160, etc don't.

 

 

This is just a thought, I know it won't change anything, stop killing all the fun.

Some day the US will switch from imperial to metric, there is hope.

the US wont change from Imperial to metric before it loses its independence and "world superpower" status.

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Just now, Prysin said:

the US wont change from Imperial to metric before it loses its independence and "world superpower" status.

It will happen some day, so the probability of displays using resolutions in multiples of 1000 is still possible :)

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1 minute ago, Enderman said:

It will happen some day, so the probability of displays using resolutions in multiples of 1000 is still possible :)

neither you, nor i, nor our direct offspring will ever live to see that day.

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1 minute ago, Prysin said:

neither you, nor i, nor our direct offspring will ever live to see that day.

With the two potatoes that are about to become president, I wouldn't be so sure about that.

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