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Resolution independence?
- Thread starter DotCom2
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Do iMacs have Retina?I'm pretty certain Apple abandoned the resolution independence idea in favour of Retina displays.
Do iMacs have Retina?
Not yet, but Apple is clearly moving all the Mac lines to Retina displays and they've dropped all development of resolution independence. Retina displays with scaling options is the solution they've settled on.
Oh GREAT! Guess I'm not getting an iMac now then!
Going to have to wait for the Retina iMac whenever that is!
Oh GREAT! Guess I'm not getting an iMac now then!
Going to have to wait for the Retina iMac whenever that is!
Yeah, it's a shame. Resolution independence would've been a very cool feature, but it seems too complicated to implement.
I wonder how Microsoft was able to do it?Yeah, it's a shame. Resolution independence would've been a very cool feature, but it seems too complicated to implement.
Oh well, thanks for your help.
What do you mean in particular by resolution independence? Apple has its own solution (aka, retina mode), which is a little bit of a hack, but works really well (at any rate better than Window's lazy implementation). In case you are looking for a PPI slider, like in Windows, there is nothing like that in OS X. The PPI factor on OS X is either 1.0 (normal mode) or 2.0 (retina mode). Apple has been experimenting with sliding PPI, but ultimately decided against it.
Nope, that was something we all hoped we'd see several versions ago, since there's nothing appearing, I'd say its all but dead.
I may not come over to the Mac side now. Long time PC user here wanting to switch but I need to be able to see what I'm doing. Aging eyes and I use my computer a lot for both work and play.
Modern retina Macs support five predetermined DPI levels which should be more than enough for all reasonable purpose. I don't understand what you are complaining about.
I may not come over to the Mac side now. Long time PC user here wanting to switch but I need to be able to see what I'm doing. Aging eyes and I use my computer a lot for both work and play.
The 15" rMBP plus big text is really good for that.
The current iMac is not retina.
I will have to wait now and see what If ever, comes available.
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I am only interested in an iMac.
Even on a non-retina mac you can use apps like switchresX to use several "retina" resolutions, which is almost equivalent to resolution independence.
For instance, my friend found that icons and text on his 27" iMac were too small at native resolution and lower resolutions make things blurry. So we used switchResX set it to an equivalent 1920*1080 resolution (3840*2160 scaled down to fullHD), which looks very good. No blurring whatsoever in the interface (except of course for bitmaps that were not updated for 2X displays).
For instance, my friend found that icons and text on his 27" iMac were too small at native resolution and lower resolutions make things blurry. So we used switchResX set it to an equivalent 1920*1080 resolution (3840*2160 scaled down to fullHD), which looks very good. No blurring whatsoever in the interface (except of course for bitmaps that were not updated for 2X displays).
This is not scaling, you are just reducing the screen res by half which means that you can't use native res anymore in any app till you change it back. So you might as well just use fhd monitor.
No, this means that you are drawing a full HD desktop to a 2560x1440 display with sub pixel accuracy. The quality will be better than using a native full HD display of the same size.
This is not true. Apps like Photoshop, FCPX for example will still show pictures/videos in native resolution instead of scaled resolution. The app needs to be adapted for retina macs though to do this.
Well probably Apple or the devs came up with some kind of workaround on selected apps, but unless you take a screenshot (full screen) and the saved picture is in your native resolution, you are running it at FHD. It's similiar like having UHD TV and using it with FHD media player.
PS. I'am not an windows fanboy, but what's wrong with windows DPI scalling? It doesn't look blurry on any predefined settings (the steps are in 25% I believe) and the LCD resolution remains native at all times regardless of effective UI resolution.
Pretty much all modern apps will show images at native resolution. The few that don't need to be updated. This is needed for retina macs too so that is why most apps are already doing the right thing.
Can you prove that by sharing a screenshot which would have a settings window in it showing that the UI is currently scaled to FHD HiDPi?
The properties of the picture will show if it's native resolution or not.
I honestly have no idea what you mean by this. Retina rendering is essentially a simple super-sampling anti-aliasing technique, where the samples are actually backed by physical pixels.
Windows offers different programming APIs to create user interfaces and not all of them have good support for resolution independence (and if I remember correctly, the classical GDI does not even support it). Besides, making a program that plays well with DPI scaling involves some work on Windows and most programmers won't care about that aspect.
Apple's implementation makes it practically trivial to make high-quality retina-aware apps. Only very few apps need to be fixed (usually these are apps that do some sort of specialised custom drawing).
Here you go...a screenshot from Photoshop on a rMBP set at a scaled Resolution of 1680x1050.
As you can see the image is shown at 100% and the size is shown in the info window. 2000x1500 is the size of the image and thus it is shown in Native Resolution otherwise this would not be possible.
Sometimes it pays to believe people who have an idea what they are talking about!!
There are two possibilities why Photoshop behaves like this:
a) it does it on purpose to make better use of the resolution
b) it is one of the very rare applications that use custom view drawing and is thus not aware of the special treatment of HiDPI mode
Since Photoshop has been updated with retina support, I am fairly sure its a). Apple Preview can do both (either use physical pixels or logical pixels to show image data), this is controlled by a preference setting. I do not know whether Photoshop has such a setting.
At any rate, normal applications (that display image using the common methods) will scale them up in the HiDPI mode (if there is no appropriate HiDPI image available).