Why do monitor resolutions only coming in multiples of 360? 360/720/1080/1440 etc
In: Technology
So what would 480p be? or 240p? My laptop has 1366 x 768
The thing is
1. They dont. There are dozens of resolutions that exist
2. The ones that you are speaking about are actually a multiple of 9. The widescreen aspect ratio is 16:9 .
Except they don’t. Monitors come in all sorts of resolutions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution#/media/File%3AVector_Video_Standards8.svg
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As already stated, they don’t, and it’s multiples of 9. But the most common resolution humans take, when given the choice, is 16:9.
It probably has something to do with the golden ratio; we tend to really like things that appeal to it.
but 16/9 is 1.77… – there is clearly a better option available if we want to follow the golden ratio (1.618). 16:10 was actually a very popular aspect ratio up until 2011 or so – when the online gaming platform “steam” offered data suggesting that the most popular resolution at the time, 1680×1050; appealing to 16:10 standards.
so now that we established that the goal was, more or less, 1.618; why was 16:9 chosen?
Wikipedia states that Samsung’s office in South Africa produced the explanation that it was simply more cost effective to manufacture 1920×1080 monitors, rather than 1920×1200. These monitors were advertised using the 1920 number – the layman would have no clue that they are being shorted of their 230,400 pixels required to reach their, subconsciously, favourite number.
The way manufacturing works, it becomes cheaper the more you do it and the more you sell, due to savings in processes discovered after initial production lines are launched. This allowed a snowball effect to begin – the more cost effective monitors were 1920×1080, people bought those, this created incentive to make the manufacturing process even cheaper and so on and so forth.
Before 1080p, 16:9 was actually not that popular. Services like YouTube probably only included support for smaller scale 16:9 monitors, like 360p ones, for more effective scaling to 1080p ones with slow internet, and for the fact that it was really really close to 1680×1050. It was a forward-thinking move on their part – and it payed off.
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