Display resolution standards

[4] Since most screens have a landscape format to accommodate the human field of view, the first number for the width (in columns) is larger than the second for the height (in lines), and this conventionally holds true for handheld devices that are predominatly or even exclusively used in portrait orientation.

However, around the year 2005, home entertainment displays (i.e., TV sets) gradually moved from 16:10 to the 16:9 aspect ratio, for further improvement of viewing widescreen movies.

In response to usability flaws of now common 16:9 displays in office/professional applications,[citation needed] Microsoft and Huawei started to offer notebooks with a 3:2 aspect ratio.

Mobile phones including the Jolla, Sony Xperia C, HTC Sensation, Motorola Droid RAZR, LG Optimus L9, Microsoft Lumia 535, and Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini have displays with the qHD resolution, as does the PlayStation Vita portable game system.

Although the number of pixels is the same for 1080p and 1080i, the effective resolution is somewhat lower for the interlaced format, as it is necessary to use some vertical low-pass filtering to reduce temporal artifacts such as interline twitter.

[52][53] Newer timing controllers became available in 2014, and after mid-2014 new 4K monitors such as the Asus PB287Q no longer rely on MST tiling technique to achieve 4K at 60 Hz,[54] instead, using the standard SST (Single-Stream Transport) approach.

[51][59] The resolution 5120 × 2160 is equivalent to 4K UHD (3840 × 2160) extended in width by one third, giving it a 64:27 aspect ratio (2.370 or 21.3:9, commonly marketed as simply "21:9") and 11,059,200 total pixels.

[77] The name comes from having a quarter of the 640 × 480 maximum resolution of the original IBM Video Graphics Array display technology, which became a de facto industry standard in the late 1980s.

Examples of devices that use HVGA include the Apple iPhone (1st generation through 3GS), iPod Touch (1st Generation through 3rd), BlackBerry Bold 9000, HTC Dream, Hero, Wildfire S, LG GW620 Eve, MyTouch 3G Slide, Nokia 6260 Slide, Palm Pre, Samsung M900 Moment, Sony Ericsson Xperia X8, mini, mini pro, active and live and the Sony PlayStation Portable.

[citation needed] It was a common resolution among LCD projectors and later portable and hand-held internet-enabled devices (such as MID and Netbooks) as it is capable of rendering websites designed for an 800 wide window in full page-width.

Examples of hand-held internet devices, without phone capability, with this resolution include: Spice stellar nhance mi-435, ASUS Eee PC 700 series, Dell XCD35, Nokia 770, N800, and N810.

854 × 480 is approximately the 16:9 aspect ratio of anamorphically "un-squeezed" NTSC DVD widescreen video and is considered a "safe" resolution that does not crop any of the image.

Although digital broadcast content in former PAL/SECAM regions has 576 active lines, several mobile TV sets with a DVB-T2 tuner use the 600-line variant with a diameter of 7, 9 or 10 inches (18 to 26 cm).

Examples of devices that use DVGA include the Meizu MX mobile phone and the Apple iPhone 4 and 4S with the iPod Touch 4, where the screen is called the "Retina Display".

In Microsoft Windows operating system specifically, the larger taskbar of Windows 7 occupies an additional 16-pixel lines by default, which may compromise the usability of programs that already demanded a full 1024 × 768 (instead of, e.g. 800 × 600) unless it is specifically set to use small icons; an "oddball" 784-line resolution would compensate for this, but 1280 × 800 has a simpler aspect and also gives the slight bonus of 16 more usable lines.

The 6-pixel reduction also means each line's width is divisible by 8 pixels, simplifying numerous routines used in both computer and broadcast/theatrical video processing, which operate on 8-pixel blocks.

[124][125][103][75] This was once particularly popular for laptop screens, usually with a diagonal screen size of between 12 and 15 inches, as it provided a useful compromise between 4:3 XGA and 16:9 WXGA, with improved resolution in both dimensions vs. the old standard (especially useful in portrait mode, or for displaying two standard pages of text side by side), a perceptibly "wider" appearance and the ability to display 720p HD video "native" with only very thin letterbox borders (usable for on-screen playback controls) and no stretching.

Additionally, it required only 1000 KB (just under 1 MB) of memory per 8-bit channel; thus, a typical double-buffered 32-bit color screen could fit within 8 MB, limiting everyday demands on the complexity (and cost, energy use) of integrated graphics chipsets and their shared use of typically sparse system memory (generally allocated to the video system in relatively large blocks), at least when only the internal display was in use (external monitors generally being supported in "extended desktop" mode to at least 1600 × 1200 resolution).

16:10 (or 8:5) is itself a rather "classic" computer aspect ratio, harking back to early 320 × 200 modes (and their derivatives) as seen in the Commodore 64, IBM CGA card and others.

As of February 2024, the market availability of panels with 1280 × 800 native resolution had been generally relegated to handheld gaming computers [original research?]

A standard 4:3 monitor using this resolution will have rectangular rather than square pixels, meaning that unless the software compensates for this the picture will be distorted, causing circles to appear elliptical.

Some TFT displays do not allow a user to disable this, and will prevent the upper and lower portions of the screen from being used forcing a "letterbox" format when set to a 4:3 ratio.

[citation needed] QXGA (for Quad-XGA or Quad Extended Graphics Array) is a display resolution of 2048 × 1536 pixels with a 4:3 aspect ratio as XGA.

[136][137] In 2010, WQXGA made its debut in a handful of home theater projectors targeted at the Constant Height Screen application market.

As of 2016, LG Display make a 10-bit 30-inch AH-IPS panel, with wide color gamut, used in monitors from Dell, NEC, HP, Lenovo and Iiyama.

Grayscale monitors with a 2560 × 2048 resolution, primarily for medical use, are available from Planar Systems (Dome E5), Eizo (Radiforce G51), Barco (Nio 5, MP), WIDE (IF2105MP), IDTech (IAQS80F), and possibly others.

[115] WQSXGA (Wide Quad Super Extended Graphics Array) describes a display standard that can support a resolution up to 3200 × 2048 pixels, assuming a 25:16 (1.5625:1) aspect ratio.

[citation needed] QUXGA[84][75] (Quad Ultra Extended Graphics Array) describes a display standard that can support a resolution up to 3200 × 2400 pixels, assuming a 4:3 aspect ratio.

WQUXGA[117][116][75] (Wide Quad Ultra Extended Graphics Array) describes a display standard that supports a resolution of 3840 × 2400 pixels, which provides a 16:10 aspect ratio.

Subsequent Apple smartphones and phablets stayed with that aspect ratio but increased screen size slightly with approximately constant pixel density.