QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 (was something about yummy CPU-GPU combos!)

[Jamie Allsop]

Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
>
>> even widescreen VGA, like the PSP?).
>>
>> Stroller.
>>     
>
> it will be better - of course. what' i'm baffled about is why all of a sudden
> here a lot of "excellent vision gifted" people turn up, whereas in real life i
> never see them... :)
>
>   

Ok, time to clear up an obvious and totally incorrect assumption, higher 
resolution does not mean small fonts that are hard to read. It means 
that you have clearer, sharper fonts at the dpi you find comfortable 
reading at. In other words a VGA screen is just better, better for 
people with good eyesight and _much_ better for people with poor 
eyesight. I'd always go for a higher resolution every time.

Now some of you people out there may run windows on your desktop and 
only being able to reasonably change dpi between two settings (maybe 
this is different in Vista) means that a high resolution often does mean 
small fonts on the screen, some can't go to 120 dpi because maybe the 
apps they use don't support (yes that used to be quite common). On Linux 
this is not a problem as dpi is entirely variable and changing it 
doesn't break applications.  In that case the dpi is a simple personal 
preference and on higher res screens everything is sharper and easier to 
to read, reducing eye strain and so on.

For a small device where we will be trying to read things that are 
already small due to physical screen size a high res is a must to make 
that as comfortable as possible. VGA  will produce a much better user 
experience than QVGA and be a lot easier on everyone's eyes.

To summarise we have 3 orthogonal concerns:

1. Screen dimensions - fixed by manufacturer, relates to device target users
2. Screen resolution - fixed by manufacturer, higher is better for all 
tasks that require screen reading, for movies it really doesn't matter 
so much
3. DPI - user specified to reach a compromise between readability and 
effective use of screen real estate.

Any, that's my take on things, I vote VGA ;-)

Jamie