Look familiar? They should be if you use a cell phone or an instant messenger
to exchange little tidbits of useless information. Modern users make little
smiley faces from characters, like this: :-) or ;-).From there the race was on to develop ways to draw more complex forms
and eventually to address the entire screen just like a television set. Today
a computer monitor offers a sharper, more stable, and generally superior
image than the family TV.By the late 1980s designers began to move away from AC-powered CRTs in
portable computers and started using small, thin, and low-power liquid crys-
tal display (LCD) screens that a battery could power. The first laptops used
small monochrome screens. The next step was a full-sized monochrome
(dark gray characters on a light green screen was state of the art), and even-
tually they reached the spectacular full-color widescreen LCDs in use today.Sizing Up the Screen ....................................................................................
A laptop LCD has two essential dimensions: its diagonal size, which is a
measure of its physical size, and its resolution, which tells you how many
individual dots the system is able to display on the screen. In general, bigger
is better.. .up to a point.The physical size of laptop LCDs has progressed from 9 or 10 inches (measured
from an upper corner to a lower corner) to widescreens as big as 17 inches.
The ultrawide screens are stunning to view and very useful on your desktop,
but you may find them to be hard to fit on an airline’s seatback tray.High resolution is a good thing to have at any size, but the larger the physical
screen size, the more important it is that the LCD be able to work with many
more dots.Resolution is measured in pixels,which is a concatenation of picture elements;
you can call them dots. A mid-range model like Toshiba’s Satellite offers a 15.4-
inch screen with 1,280×800 resolution. Apple’s impressive 17-inch PowerBook
G4 and Toshiba’s Qosmio G15 each support a resolution 1,440×900 pixels:
about 1.3 million individual dots.Unlike a computer monitor and its associated video display adapter(electronic
circuitry that converts 0s and 1s into information the monitor uses to create
an image), most LCDs can only work at one preset resolution as determined
by the actual number of pixels built in to the display. If it is important to work
at a nonstandard resolution, some displays work with specialized software
that can emulate other settings.Chapter 12: Seeing the Light: LCDs and Video 187