Ask Slashdot: Portable High-Resolution External Displays? 141
First time accepted submitter paragonc writes "I am a software engineer who works remotely. I'm amazingly lucky to live in Austin, Texas where I have access to multiple high quality co-working facilities within biking distance. While these places are great for networking and establishing a rhythm to daily life, not having a permanent desk forces me to pack my gear in and out each day. This means i pack light. My current Go Bag includes a 13.3 inch MacBook pro, and an iPad running avatron Air Display. This has worked well, but i'm sorely missing having a real high resolution external monitor. I've looked at a few of the USB powered external displays, but the resolution seems to only hit 1366 X 768. I'd be curious if slashdotters have any tricks up their sleeves on how to implement a high resolution portable external displays."
Re:Depends. (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF is a 'real high resolution' monitor for you and what do you consider 'portable'.
While he should have been more explicit, it is obvious that what he wants is more vertical lines of text on screen and more characters per line. High resolution displays like retina screens are great for images and crisper text, but they don't actually help fit more text on a screen. The new MacBook Pro Retina may have 2880 x 1800 resolution, but for software enginers it isn't much better than a 1440x900 screen because it doesn't fit more text (at a readable size) than this smaller resolution.
For someone like myself who is used to working on either two 27" 2560 x 1440 monitors at work or a 30" 2560x1600 + 24" 1920x1200 monitor at home, the removal of the macbook pro 17" laptop left a big hole in the marketplace for 'high text density' laptops. If someons starts making a 1920x1200 laptop again along with a 1200 vertical resolution portable external monitor, they would have my business.
Since I won't need a new laptop for a couple years, I am really hoping that a 17" Retina display laptop comes out by 2015. That would be essentially the same thing as the old 17" macbook.