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Why did they make the Surface Book with a 3:2 aspect ratio and put 3000x2000 pixels on a 13" screen?

Anonymous
2016-04-05T14:07:02+00:00

I'm coming from an original Surface Pro that was great for everything... Office, Web Browsing, watching videos, older games, etc.

So I was really excited about the Surface Book and got one for my birthday. But I'm finding that it's awkward to use with anything other than Office and Web Browsing-type tasks that aren't graphically intensive due to the aspect ratio and resolution. I have the model with a GeForce in it, but it doesn't seem suitable for anything that Intel HD graphics couldn't handle. The resolution is very high, and the aspect ratio results in black bars with both 4:3 and 16:9 content/resolutions that most things are designed around. While it's a great machine, I have to scale Windows up to 250% in order to see what I'm doing on the screen, which effectively means I'm using it like a 1200x800 display. If I want to actually use the entire 3000x2000 resolution at 100% scaling, I have to hold it less than an inch from my face. So... what's the point of having such a high resolution on a 13" screen in the first place, if I'm just going to have to scale everything up so big that the higher resolution does no good? It just introduces additional graphics processing overhead that limits what I can do with the graphics hardware because it has to drive a higher resolution than necessary.

It also has 16GB of RAM and the fastest SSD I've ever seen. Again, I have no idea what to do with it... just open a few thousand tabs in Edge and Excel, I suppose? I feel like I have a $3000 netbook that's very, very comfortable to use and in no way limited from running any productivity application I can imagine, but which has a completely impractical design that wastes most of the potential of the hardware inside.

I know that I'm probably not the sort of user this is targeted at, but could someone tell me exactly what this is for? People keep saying that 3:2 and the huge resolution on a tiny screen are a selling point, but I'm just wondering what it was intended for. I'm personally probably going to end up using it when I don't want to be tempted to use YouTube or play games and need to focus on work, because this computer discourages both activities... and also, the pen is very useful for writing out Mathematical stuff, which is one of the few things I still did on paper. Also seems a little better than the Surface Pro's pen, which was already very good.

I feel like I must be missing something here, because if it were only good for the uses I'm thinking of, then it should only have 4-8GB of RAM and Intel HD Graphics... what's the point of putting a GeForce and 16GB into a machine like this? All that extra power won't put a dent in the 3000x2000 resolution, at least not enough to actually do 3D rendering of any kind. And the only thing I can think of to do with 16GB of RAM that doesn't involve graphical workloads would be running Virtual Machines, but that seems like a strange thing to do with a laptop.

Again, I'm not saying that there's no one out there that would use this, but I just want someone to tell me why anyone would want to use all this perfectly good hardware on a screen with a weird aspect ratio and a resolution that taxes the GPU so heavily you can't do much other than run 2D desktop apps. In my mind, it's a waste... sure, you can plug in an external monitor, but that sacrifices the portable nature of the machine. Is there a niche out there that likes this resolution and aspect ratio, and if so, why do they like wasting large resolutions on small screens and using awkward aspect ratios that no one else likes? What do they do that makes those things an advantage or selling point for them? People keep saying it or hinting at it as if I should just know what kind of person cares about those things, but I have no clue. I can't even imagine.

I wasn't sure whether to post this as a question or a discussion... I went with discussion because I don't actually need help and I'm happy with the device's operation. I'm just inquiring about why it was designed the way it was designed...

Surface | Surface Book | Display and screen

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-04-05T17:06:55+00:00

    Yeah, some applications have issues with Windows scaling anyway. Luckily, I found a registry hack somewhere that lets me set lower 3:2 resolutions. Now I'm using 1200x800... honestly looks about the same to me as 250% scaling, just very slightly blurrier. Also seems to improve performance.

    I do like the square aspect ratio, but it sacrifices compatibility for aesthetics now that everything is designed around 16:9. That's actually the reason I reluctantly stopped using my old 4:3 monitors a few years ago. Now I feel like I'm back in the same boat, tweaking and hacking things to make them work with unusual resolutions, struggling with those nasty black bars that so many applications "thoughtfully" use to maintain the aspect ratio.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-08-20T12:22:05+00:00

    Think of 3:2 as having more pixels at the top and bottom of the screen, where traditional PC laptops have plastic bezels.

    Yes, it has black bars for video playback at 4:3 and 16:9. But video playback is not the only thing that people do with their computers. Having more pixels vertically helps to see more content using Word, Excel, Visual Studio, and many other applications.

    This is how 13.5", 3.2 screen area compares to a 13.3", 16:10 screen (MacBook Pro):

            http://displaywars.com/13,3-inch-16x10-vs-13,5-inch-3x2

    and here is a comparison between 13.5" 3:2 and 13.3" 16:9 (Dell XPS 13):

            http://displaywars.com/13,3-inch-16x9-vs-13,5-inch-3x2

    As you can see, the Surface Book screen is taller than MBP 13 without losing any width, and taller than XPS13, with only a tiny reduction in screen width.

    In words of Linus Torvalds:

    “I don't understand why people complain about "black bars", when I can't see why it would be any different to have "no pixels at all", which is what the silly widescreen displays do.”

            https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dk1aiW4JjHd

    "In fact, if you have bad vision, sharp good high-quality fonts will help."

            https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/ByVPmsSeSEG

    10 people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2016-08-20T13:09:12+00:00
    • Viewing photos which tend to be between 4:3 and 3:2 native proportion is much better.
    • Viewing A4 or A3 documents is much better, with the screen being much closer to the A series 1.41:1 ratio than 16:9 is.
    • More lines of text are visible with less scrolling required
    • Using GPU demanding programmes like Autocad and Photoshop is better, giving a more usable editing space (16:9 requires far too much vertical scrolling).
    • using the device in portrait mode feels far more natural than 16:9

    I have the opposite opinion to the OP. Apart from viewing widescreen movies I can't think of any aspects where a 16:9 screen is better than a 3:2 one.

    Now, if only the software manufacturers would sort out their dpi scaling and Microsoft would actually make reliable and repairable hardware thar wasn't riddled with glitches and battery failure problems.

    7 people found this answer helpful.
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  4. Anonymous
    2016-04-05T18:50:12+00:00

    I do like using this thing for Office 365... probably the best machine for it I own. Totally agree on that point. This is the kind of answer I was looking for. Never would have considered stock trading... definitely need more vertical space there. I always preferred my old square monitors for stuff other than watching movies, but when so many applications started pushing 16:9, it became really hard to use any other kind of monitor when configuration settings went away and a lot of stuff started going "letterbox or nothing." I guess you use stuff that was programmed a little better than what I use.

    I didn't know 3:2 was used in photography. I always thought photography and the film industry liked 16:9 because of widescreen theater-type movies and photographers wanting to take wider shots for landscapes and such. Honestly, 16:9 isn't an aspect ratio I would have picked myself... I always liked my old 4:3 monitors, and even that one 5:4 monitor I had that time.

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-04-05T20:02:09+00:00

    JDAndrews,

    Yes, the 35 mm standard aspect ratio has been 3:2 for decades.  It's only recently that digital cameras started offering different aspect ratio choices.  Many folks choose 16:9 to display photos full screen on their phones and 16:9 ratio TV's.  If I choose anything other than 3:2 aspect ratio, my camera crops the image to fit and doesn't deliver as high resolution.  I only use 3:2 aspect ratio for my photography.

    With the proliferation of High Resolution monitors in the past few years it is nice to see that most of the better software has been updated to be resolution agnostic and is written to automatically scale to any resolution and aspect ratio.  If you run updated, quality software it is unnecessary to cripple your Surface Book resolution in order to run it. Absolutely everything I run scales to my incredibly sharp 3000 x 2000 Surface Book screen.  I wouldn't have it any other way.

    Gary in Atlanta

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