Laptop Resolution

[flankmen]

I'm in the market for a laptop, and am hoping that the VV community could share some opinions on the importance of resolution. My needs for the machine are very minimal, and I'm attempting to stay in the sub-$1000 range of bargain laptops.

My needs:
Email/browsing/MS Office
Light gaming (nothing overly graphics intensive)
Standard multimedia (watching DVDs, music, light photo editing)

While a couple of the models that I've considered (example 1, example 2) have dedicated graphics, none venture outside of the very basic laptop resolutions (1280X800 on 15.4", 1366X768 for the wider 16"). I run fairly high resolution at home (1600X1200 on 21") and at work (1280X1024 on 19"), and am wondering if I'd be kicking myself later as I scroll my life away.

I realize that mileage may vary, but if anyone has been in a similar situation and has any thoughts to share I'd certainly be interested.

[miir]

Not quite sure what you're asking...

The physical size of the LCD is usually the determining factor of native resolution.

You'll never see a 16" LCD with a native resolution of 1920X1200 because normal sized text would be way too fucking tiny to read... but there's nothing preventing you from hooking up an external 24" LCD and running it at it's native resolution. Even the shittiest onboard video these days can push a 1920X1200 2d desktop.

[Animalor]

Any laptop that can run games some games will run anything else you need regarding web/e-mail etc.

Just make sure you have a semi-decent ATI or Nvidia video chipset and 2gb or ram or so.

There are some laptops out there that can push crazy resolution on a 15-17" panel. I've seen some go to 1650*1050 on the panel. Incredibly small and nigh-unreadable.

[miir]

There are some laptops out there that can push crazy resolution on a 15-17" panel. I've seen some go to 1650*1050 on the panel. Incredibly small and nigh-unreadable.

Even a top of the line 15.4 XPS runs a native resolution of 1280x800.
Most 16/17" screens are going to give you a native resolution of 1368x768/1440x900 but you'll find the occasional oddball Viao that will have native HD (1920x1080) on a 16" screen which is completely impractical for everyday use (but looks kinda nice for watching blu-ray)... but I doubt anyone can actually tell the difference between 720 and 1080 on a 16.4 screen.

[Winnow]

go 1440x900 minimum, and 1920x1080 if you can.

Video isn't going to look any different but you'll sure notice the extra scrolling if you go any lower than that. It's a pain in the ass to use a track pad compared to mouse to do anything quickly. The more real estate (resolution) on a laptop screen the better if it's going to be used as a primary computer. (unless your eyes are bad as 1920 on a 17" screen is tiny)

[Xatrei]

My previous laptop is 6 or 7 years old now, and I held out replacing it for so long because I don't really need a beefy laptop anymore and I really liked the big display, relative to most current laptops. It has a much bigger display, 15.5" 1400 x 1050 non-widescreen (top of the line at the time), than my new machine. In November, I bought a new laptop with a 14" 1280x800 widescreen display (Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz with 4 GB RAM and 320 GB HDD). I was really concerned about losing 250 vertical pixels way more than the 120 I lost on the horizontal. It took a bit of adjustment, but now that I'm used to it I actually like the smaller size of my laptop. It's significantly smaller and lighter, and I like that a lot more than lugging around my antique HP.

I don't use the laptop for gaming, but I did load EQ & EQ2 on it just to see how it handled them, and it could play those just fine (the old one could play EQ ok with the settings turned down, and it could load EQ2 but was unplayably slow). This is the one place where I really feel the smaller display, though. All of my chat windows and other UI stuff get kind of crowded in an 800 pixel tall display.

[Animalor]

Take a look at these. HP's High Performance Business line.

15.4" screens with 1650*1050 native.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/ca/en/sm ... 82310.html

They also have a few units in the balanced performance section that push this resolution

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/ca/en/sm ... 56066.html

[Canelek]

My 15.4" ASUS notebook runs at 1650x1050 native. That seems to be the best bet. 17"+ notebooks are just too bulky, imo.