Understand the laptop screen

Beside some sound related applications, like listening music, you look at your display almost all the time. Either you write a document, you send an email, you watch a movie or play a game, you have to look at the screen.

Actually most of the people associate the display with the computer. As a funny thing, I saw once a a persona that just couldn’t understand that actually the computer, the main part, it is under the desk, in that square box and not on the desk…that was only the display! Imagine that it was really hard to understand. Well…

So, the display is one of the most important parts of your computer, it is the way any application communicates with the user.

One of the most important feature of a display it is it’s size. The size ranges from 10.4 inches, up to 17.1 inches in really big laptops , see “Available types of laptops and notebook computers on the market”

The size of a display comes hand in hand with the size of the laptop itself and probably the size of the display constrains the size of a laptop. Actually I am sure that computers will be way smaller if the engineers wouldn’t have had the need of also providing a display of a reasonable size…

I bet you are tempted to search for the largest screen available, but always pay attention to the fact that marketing strategies may fool you. There is not a big difference between 15 inches screen ad 15.1 inches screen, is it?

An other very important feature of a laptop display, and not only of a laptop display actually, but of any computer display, is the resolution. It is not necessarily the largest resolution that is the best. No. Think of the fact that your laptop uses a TFT display and that a TFT display has a “native“ resolution, one that works best with your display. You should always think about that when buying a laptop, and actually any TFT for any computer.

Ask your laptop vendor which is the resolution where your laptop operates right. Let’s say that your laptop works best in 800x600 , then this is the resolution to use. It will probably make your text looks blurry if you use an other resolution as 1024x768 or an other one.

On the other hand, one of the most popular resolution for laptop computers is 1024x768.

There are also other resolutions, less common for laptops: 1,400 x 1,050, 1,600 x 1,200, 1280x1024, etc.

Some laptops promote some really cool graphic cards, but don’t be fooled by this, you actually don’t need a large graphic card on your laptop, you will not play games, probably. Well, if you run graphic applications on your computer, if you are a graphic artist, them you will probably need it but then, once again, you will probably don’t need it on your laptop but on your graphic station…