How does one describe resolution in layman terms?

Azureth

Azureth

Supreme [H]ardness
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Feb 29, 2008
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My friend wants a new monitor and asked me about them, and I tried to explain what it means by different resolutions but I couldn't think of anything past "It just makes it look better":p when I switched to different resolutions on my monitor to show him he just said "But it makes everything smaller, how is that better?". I need some help!
 
You could show him images and how the image should appear clearer and cleaner at different resolutions. Could talk about how at a larger resolution you have more work space. Just a few quick points.
 
It is annoying how people use the "everything is smaller oh noes!!!" argument. I used to set every monitor I saw to its proper resolution whenever I was at a friends house or something but people just complained:/
 
Heh, I remember when I changed the res on my friends city of heroes game, when I started it up he was like "wth? all the buttons are too small to press!"
 
It's sharper, clearer, less fuzzy, lets you see more at once, like the difference between standard TV and HDTV. It's much more obvious when you are using it yourself, not looking over someone's shoulder. It may be though that they do know what they are talking about but can't see well.
 
Think of it as more space to put stuff. Resolution is just horizontal pixels by vertical pixels 1680x1050 for example.

lets say a website is 700 pixels wide. at 800x600 that website will take up almost the entire screen (width), on a 1680x1050 screen you could fit 2 of that same website side by side and still have 280 pixels left on the left or right (nice for a buddy list ;) )

Basically the higher the resolution the more stuff you can fit on one screen
 
Draw a circle using square dots, now draw another next to it using double the amount of dots but half the size, and so on....get it?

In layman's terms, higher res means more pixels, which means more pixels per image, which means sharper image.
 
mike42 said:
It's sharper, clearer, less fuzzy, lets you see more at once, like the difference between standard TV and HDTV. It's much more obvious when you are using it yourself, not looking over someone's shoulder. It may be though that they do know what they are talking about but can't see well.
Click to expand...

Hey; my vision sucks and I can tell the difference.

The problem here is not just resolution, but the fact that most if not all operating systems use fixed fonts and bitmaps. If you think about it we should be able to run our monitors at max resolution, and scale everything else as needed. Vista was suposidly going to do this, until MS found out how much work it would be. So then they came up with yet another half baked scailing mode. I think OSX got close with postscript rendering, but I have not worked with it enough to know how they handle fonts. Postscript supports bitmaps so there could be problems there too.

The idea of drawing a circle with squares or a fixed number of dots is good, or get some graph paper and draw letters by filling in the squars.

This is a big issue when doing any kind of graphics work.

Dave
 
just say more real estate and compare the resolutions then take the difference and say this is how much you would be missing.
 
"if you have one image made up of 100 pixels, its not going to have as much detail as one that has 200 pixels, the higher your resolution, the clearer and better images become because you have more pixels"


something like that.
 
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