Screen resolution maths

Which monitor has which resolution? How large will windows and text appear on it and what aspect ratio is that at all? Would you know? You can compute it here.

Screen resolutions keep increasing with the spreading of tablets and smartphones. Often with operating systems like Android, text and images are scaled appropriately and thus appear sharper not smaller. But on notebooks and PCs, mostly Windows applications are used and they take the same number of pixels everywhere. As these are getting smaller, text is also displayed smaller. That leads to an optimal viewing distance that is often shorter for notebooks.

Computation

Enter the number of pixels and the screen diagonal in inches:

by pixels at inch   My screen   As comparison below

  (Computes the data and updates the comparison view)

The screen has the following specifications:

Diagonal	Size	Pixel density	Pixel pitch	Aspect ratio

Visual comparison

Optionally enter data for a second screen to compare its size:

by pixels at inch   Compare absolute size   Clear

Common sizes

More information

Note: All screen diagonals refer to the visible display area. For flat screens (LCD, OLED, Plasma) this is the panel size; tube monitors (CRT) are larger than their visible display area!

A more complete list of common abbreviations with a comparison chart are available at Martin Vogel’s EDV-Lexikon. There is also a table of sizes and a comprehensive comparison chart in Wikipedia.

Calculation of the recommended viewing distance from [PDF]: Font height between 22 and 31 arc minutes. I know that this doesn’t quite work out for a regular Windows desktop. It doesn’t apply to TVs either.

screenresolution.xls36.0 KiBExcel worksheet for offline calculations

You can determine the printing resolution of images with the application AspectRatio.

Statistic data

• Created on 2007-07-16, updated on 2014-01-20.