56 PCWorld NOVEMBER 2020REVIEWS MICROSOFT SURFACE LAPTOP GO
IS THE SURFACE LAPTOP
GO’S 1024P DISPLAY
WORTH IT?
In our original report on the Surface Laptop
Go (go.pcworld.com/mlgo), we
immediately noted that its display
resolution fell beneath the 1080p
threshold that we consider acceptable for
laptops with 14-inch or wider displays. The
Laptop Go’s screen is a little smaller than
that, so we wondered whether its
resolution of 1536x1024 (148 ppi) would
appear deficient to the naked eye.
The answer is yes...and no. Working on
a 720p laptop is an unquestionably poor
experience, but 1536x1024 (1,572,864
total pixels) is closer to 1920x1080
(2,073,600 pixels) than 1280x720
(921,600 pixels). Consider, too, that the
Surface Laptop Go’s pixels-per-inch count
is comparable to that of a budget 15-inch
1080p notebook, such as an Asus
VivoBook (go.pcworld.com/vibk).
In this section you’ll see photos of the
Surface Laptop Go’s display, captured with
the Samsung Galaxy S20+ camera in its
4:3 64MP mode. The images were
captured at a distance of five inches, far
less than a typical viewing distance of
about two feet. Because of the different
display sizes and scaling settings, the
portion of the screen the camera captured
doesn’t match up perfectly. Still, this
should help provide some insight as toWe shot high-resolution photos at a fixed distance
of five inches of the Surface Laptop Go to offer some
evidence of how its display compares visually.
(Ignore the color anomalies and moire, as they don’t
show up in the real world.) We’ve used Microsoft’s
recommended scaling settings—100 percent.Microsoft’s 10.5-inch Surface Go 2 (go.pcworld.com/
sgo2) at the default resolution of 1800 x 1200, at 150
percent scaling.