New 720p monitors. Good or Bad idea?

[BarackOBatman]

Anyone else think it would be a good idea for display manufacturers to come out with new production 1280x720 19" or 18" (or other lower res) gaming monitors? I think there is a potential new, untapped market of low-budget oriented gamers running low end GPUs such as integrated Vega graphics that could really take advantage of such a product until low-budget midrange GPUs are a commonly available product again. A 18" 720p monitor for example has identical pixel density (and therefore equal image quality at the same viewing distance) to a 27" 1920x1080 monitor, and would be a pretty ok compromise in my opinion. Yeah 18" is kinda small, but it's considerably bigger than most laptops. These new displays could have new features like 90 or 120hz refresh rate, adaptive refresh rate, ips panels, improved contrast and improved peak brightness versus currently available lower end monitors. The closest thing I can currently find that kind of fits this idea is a 2021 TN 1600x900 20" 75hz adaptive refresh model from Spectre with a pretty undesirable stand that sits way too low to the desk on its own.

 

Thoughts?

[vstherock]

I agree, would also be a great portable screen for steam deck / other portable PC

[porina]

If you want a low cost panel that is easy to drive with low end GPUs, not sure it makes sense to start jacking up the Hz and other cost adding features to the wish list. New but basic 1080p displays are already really cheap. The material cost is only one part of that, and the non-material scaling costs remain pretty similar. Kinda like fast food sizes, going up in size generally gets you more than the cost change. The effort of making the display will start to dominate. I'm not sure there is much room to produce smaller but higher quality display, if that is the goal here?

 

A possible way might be to see what other smaller than monitor displays are in use, and try to take advantage of the same production lines. I'm not sure what that might be though. The sizes would be above that of tablets, and tablets would tend to be much higher resolution anyway. Laptop displays might be the nearest, but again you're going to be looking at 1080p minimum at 17". I can't but help think large low res displays will be too niche and end up uneconomic to make.

 

If you can't afford those, the only way to go down is looking at ex-corporate LCDs that are like 5-10 years old, which are pretty worthless now.

 

And finally, there's always the software solution to render low and display high(er). For generic solutions we only have NIS on team green right now, but RSR is in the pipeline for team red.

[tim0901]

Laptop displays are expensive - they make up a significant percentage of the cost of a laptop. Laptop displays strapped to a laptop battery (which is what all portable monitors are, hence they're mostly 15.6") are even more expensive. Now ask what you expect to happen to the price when you use a custom size and resolution panel?

 

For the low-budget gamers that would be interested in such a product, the price would either be completely out of reach, or the product would barely be an upgrade on the display they already have. They would almost certainly be better off just buying a better laptop. If you don't need the portability, just go buy a Generic McGee^TM monitor off of ebay. 20" monitors are dirt cheap these days.

[Needfuldoer]

Yech, no. I have an old utility laptop at work with a 1366x768 display, and even that starts feeling cramped.

 

If anything, run a 1440p monitor at 720p, it's half the native resolution so it shouldn't look too soft and interpolated.

[KingTdiGGiTTy]

14 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

Laptop displays are expensive

Not really, you can buy a new one straight from factory for under $50. Unless you're shopping for really weird or cheap laptops that doesn't make up much of the cost.

 

1 hour ago, BarackOBatman said:

new production 1280x720 19" or 18"

if you're desperate enough that you'd settle for that. Just buy a small 720p TV.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, BarackOBatman said:

Anyone else think it would be a good idea for display manufacturers to come out with new production 1280x720 19" or 18" (or other lower res) gaming monitors?

You're never going to see 720p monitors again, at least not in screens larger than 12". Existing 12" laptops are 1440x900 or 1920x1080, and there's absolutely no reason to produce 720p monitors when the demand is for 1080p or 2160p.

 

Basically how things have evolved in monitor tech. 720p only existed because it was a HDTV standard for 60p back in an era when 1080i was the alternative, and there's still quite a bit of installed 1080p30/1080i60 infrastructure out there. We've since migrated to 1080p60/72/90/144/240, etc and the same for 2160p. There is no demand for 720p by anyone. They'll end up more expensive than 1080p screens.

 

In about 5 years from now, you won't be able to buy 1080p TV's, and likely monitors, because advances in AI upscaling will make it so that the only monitors worth producing are 4K, and STB/GPU's will do AI upscaling, or integer scaling only. No more "vaseline smeared camera" experiences, only sharp. No more reasons to keep producing 1080p screens when they could move their entire production stack over to 4K.

 

In fact, I'd place money on some more backlash coming to "SmartTV"'s, and some vendors (eg Samsung) giving up, and just letting you plug a smartphone into the screen that turns the smartphone into a SmartTV rather than producing two separate platforms.

[Deadpool2onBlu-Ray]

16 hours ago, BarackOBatman said:

Anyone else think it would be a good idea for display manufacturers to come out with new production 1280x720 19" or 18" (or other lower res) gaming monitors? I think there is a potential new, untapped market of low-budget oriented gamers running low end GPUs such as integrated Vega graphics that could really take advantage of such a product until low-budget midrange GPUs are a commonly available product again. A 18" 720p monitor for example has identical pixel density (and therefore equal image quality at the same viewing distance) to a 27" 1920x1080 monitor, and would be a pretty ok compromise in my opinion. Yeah 18" is kinda small, but it's considerably bigger than most laptops. These new displays could have new features like 90 or 120hz refresh rate, adaptive refresh rate, ips panels, improved contrast and improved peak brightness versus currently available lower end monitors. The closest thing I can currently find that kind of fits this idea is a 2021 TN 1600x900 20" 75hz adaptive refresh model from Spectre with a pretty undesirable stand that sits way too low to the desk on its own.

 

Thoughts?

No offense, I think that is the stupidest idea on here I have heard in a long time. You can get a 1080p 24 inch monitor even new for like 80 bucks. You could probably get a 1080p, 60hz, 24 inch monitor for like 20 bucks. We are so beyond 720p it is ridiculous. If you have a not so powerful pc, just run games in windowed mode etc. Why would you want to use such a small low res screen when you are not gaming? It is not like the computer couldn't handle that resolution at general computing tasks.