On 07/03/2012 19:36, Warp wrote:
>    It's a common phenomenon that things like hard drive sizes, RAM sizes
> and processor speeds tend to grow at a superlinear rate over time in
> home computers. (I won't say "exponential" because someone recently
> complained about that, and I don't have hard data to back up that claim.)
> Very typically, for example, each new hard drive one buys tends to be
> larger than the combined sizes of all hard drives that person has bought
> in the past. (I'm of course talking about the average computer user rather
> than those who buy hard drives like candy, eg. because they need them for
> multimedia projects or something.)
>
>    Monitor screen sizes do not seem to follow this trend, however, and
> seem to grow a lot more linearly.

I wouldn't have expected the physical diagonal size to increase 
exponentially for obvious reasons, but you might have expected 
resolution to do so (if you assume "pixel rate" or something could 
double every 18 months, then the "dpi" should double every 3 years).

The main problem is that Windows doesn't work nicely with higher 
resolutions.  I had about 140ppi on my old laptop and even then the 
standard windows GUI was getting too small to read.  I experimented with 
the higher dpi settings but lots of software didn't play nicely (missing 
icons etc.) so in the end I just turned the screen resolution down.

Once a new version of Windows (and 3rd party software) is available with 
proper support for higher resolutions, then I believe you will see the 
drive for higher resolutions start for windows machines (not just 
monitors, but graphics cards, display interfaces etc).  Then a 22" 
300ppi (5760x3240) display will be quite standard, and children will 
laugh when told about the days when you could actually see the 
individual pixels on a screen and the text was all a bit blocky or 
blurry depending what setting you used.

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