I am about to buy a new laptop for mainly making music (and occasional other use) but I have difficulties in deciding a resolution. First I thought about full-HD (1920x1080) but now I have doubts that would VST plugins, and operating system components be to small to work with it (especially if you have a MIDI keyboard between you and the laptop. So that is why I am considering also 1600x900 or similar. So help me, what is your opinion...?

I picked resolutions for the poll that seems to cover the majority of laptops that are now sold in shops.

Edit: Just read, you gonna buy a laptop. Thought you were looking for a display.

Btw, i would recommend to buy a 17" laptop. GUI's nowadays are made for big resolution, so in order to see things, you got to have a larger display... and go Full HD, no doubt.

Meh... Running 2880x1800 on my laptop!

i hate the fact that i used to have a 15" 1400x1050 laptop five years ago and now unless you're getting yourself a laptop of enourmous size, you're getting this trendy "HD" glossy screen with 768 vertical pixels. even my phone has more. i really hated those widescreen laptops back when they first arrived, i still hate them now, after all these years. i just can't get used to it. 4:3 matte screens ftw.

so my advice is, the more the better

Check out the dot pitch - the smaller it is the smaller your GUIs etc will be.

When I was last looking for monitors, I made a few screenshots of plugins, DAW views (Arranger, Mixer etc) on my old PC and took them into the shop on a USB stick. I then persuaded the salesman to let me look at them on various monitors so that I could see how they looked - for clarity, size and colour quality. Subjective, yes, but it helped.

Join the club I hate them too , it is just rediculous that movies can define sizes for laptops that are mostly used for totally different tasks.

But what can you do really, almost every single laptop is 16:9 out there. I must say that the best display shape is definitely 16:10 in my opinion. It is a shame that nobody except for Apple does them (at least in affordable price range). 4:3 is not good, not at least in my opinion in a laptop.

It's not just movies... it's also games, and most program's GUI's are made for 16:9 display nowadays as well. And that's good as widescreen and bigger resolutions have many advantages to 4:3 or 5:4.

more space is better assuming you have good eyes..
1920 gives you more screen real estate than the others

i hate working on a 15" 1920 however but @ 52 my eyes are getting old..

Scott
ADK

I ended up buying 1600x900 and am very happy about that choice.

I tried 1920x1080 laptop display in store so that I took scaling off and it gets rediculously small. I really don't understand how anybody could work with 15-inch 1920 display judging on my test session.

And if you do scale everything bigger on a 1920 display what is the point of paying a large premium for 1920 display if the size of elements will be same than in smaller display (eg. 1600x900). And in addition the scaling will become to your external displays making stuff there too large.


Of course when OS supports different scaling factors on different displays then you could buy a 1920 display. I really wonder when it is going to happen (windows 9 perhaps, or is it already in windows 8...?)