How Big Is Yours?
Have you ever been looking at your phone and noticed that there's no home button? Or have you touched the screen and felt that it was a little too small for your fingers to do anything with? Maybe you've heard about how screens are getting bigger and bigger, but what size is 'big' in current screens? This article will answer all these questions and more.
In most cases, if a computer monitor is less than 30 inches wide, or TVs under 55 inches, then they're considered 'small'. If either of these requirements are not met, then we'll consider the computer or TV 'big'. In the world of computers however, anything over 27 inches in width counts as big. Anything larger than that is usually considered a TV.
In cell phone screens, however, it's bigger the better. Anything under 4 inches is considered small – that's what old phones look like. Any modern iPhone will be at least 4 inches or larger. This is why they call it the iPhone 5 – because of its size, not necessarily an actual model number or anything. 5 inches and up are considered big in phones. In fact, most of them are in the 6 to 7 inch range and growing year by year.
In the world of smartwatches, the most popular size of smartphone watch is about 1.5 to 2 inches long. It 's considered big, but on a small wrist, it may look disproportionately large.
Other than size however, there's screen resolution. The higher the screen resolution on a screen, the better quality it is and more expensive it is to manufacture. There are 2 main terms used for screen resolution – pixel density and DPI or Dots Per Inch. Pixel density refers to the amount of pixels in an inch – for example, a 1080p display has a higher pixel density than a 720p display (146 vs 86). A higher pixel density gives a sharper image and allows for more objects to be displayed on-screen at once. The DPI is the amount of pixels that can be seen by a human being. For example, Apple's iPhone 3GS has a DPI of 132, while the iPhone 5S only has a DPI of 326.
To summarize – big computers are over 27 inches and small ones are under; big phones are usually 5 inches or larger and small phones are usually 2 to 4 inches; most smartwatches have screens around 1.5 to 2 inches in length. The size of your screen may also affect your purchase decision when it comes time to upgrade, so keep that in mind.
By Hana K, High School Student [Edited by Nick DePetrillo]
Source: http://www.theverge.com/2013/2...
Title: Screen Size and Resolution – The Truth About It
Although the debate over smartphone screen sizes has, at times, been more confusing than enlightening, all truth is ultimately revealed in the naked light of day. Fortunately for us all, there are some relatively simple formulas we can use to gauge screen size accurately. To do this, we shall proceed on three levels: tl;dr (here), straight from the horse's mouth (plural), and an elaborate mathematical demonstration of how total computer sales equates to screen widths in inches.
tl;dr (here)
TL;DR stands for "Too Long, Didn't Read". It is commonly used on reddit to condense the most relevant points of a lengthy post. Here is the tl;dr version of this article:
TL;DR – As of 2015, all mobile phones have screen sizes at least 4 inches. Mobile phones with screen sizes over 5 inches are referred to as phablets, and mobile phones with screen sizes 5 inches or under are considered smartphones. Phablets usually have QHD or higher resolutions, and smartphones usually have HD or lower resolutions.
Straight from the horse's mouth (plural)
"I am counting everything I own that is a computer, so it's all the same to me." –When asking someone if they own a tablet or a phone.
Are we out of computers yet? No, I'm still counting them. And talking about them, and comparing them, and drawing lines on graphs to show how they're different in size and price. So there is still some talk left in this article after all. The very beginning (the very first page) gives an overview of what you might want to know about computer screen sizes and how they relate to one another. The rest of the article also introduces us to new computer terminology and explains how to calculate screen size.
An easy way to start talking about computer screen sizes is by comparing different types of computers and the different sizes that they can have. Here we have a PC, a Mac, an iPad, and an iPhone:
A PC like this one is available with "thinner" laptops that are under 13 inches in width (or less than 18 cm or 7 inches). A Mac has bigger screens than iPhones, and MacBook Airs have even bigger screens. But regardless of which computer you're using, all computers still tend to be around 12 inches wide or higher when closed fully.
The screens on iPads are around 9 inches, and the newer iPhones are just under 4 inches – not that much smaller than a typical smart phone screen. This is where it gets interesting. What does it mean for a screen to be "4 inches"? How many pixels is that? Let's take a moment to consider how we might measure the size of a computer screen. Imagine that you want to measure the width of your monitor at home (which you probably do). You might hold it up to a wall and take your best guess, or you might get someone to measure the distance from the top of the screen to its bottom corner. Represent this as a line on a graph that has infinite vertices, like this one:
You can measure more than one computer screen at once by putting them side-by-side and comparing their measurements. Here is what you might see when you do this with two computer screens:
Now that we have two screens close together, let's see how many are in each quadrant:
We see that there are four screens across and only three down. There are five screens total, and they are all larger than the two monitors that were measured separately. The word "quadrant" is often used when talking about computer screens. It means four screens across and three down – or, in other words, four monitors with three monitors on every side of them:
We need to use a different method to find out which quadrant a screen is in. If you know that a quadrant is a rectangle then you can transform the graph into one by projecting each vertex onto the line connecting its finial to the other vertex on the opposite side of the line.
Conclusion:
If there are three monitors, then all screens are in the first quadrant.
If there are four monitors, then some of them are in the second quadrant.
If there are five monitors, then two of them are in the third quadrant. And so on.
Now that we know how to find out which quadrant a screen is in (using four vertices), we can plot them onto a graph and understand what that means:
The graph above shows all of the 4x3 computer screens that I own (as of February 2015).