Lora Heiny asks “What display resolution do you prefer?”  Well, it certainly depends on a number of things.  First of all, it’s not so much the resolution as it is the DPI (dots per inch) that people care about.   All other things being equal, I, and I suspect most people, would love as much screen space as possible and the appropriate DPI to match.

I used to have an Inspiron 9100, which had a resolution of 1900×1200 on a 15.4″ widescreen display.  I now use a Toshiba M200 with a resolution of 1400×1050 on a 12.1″ standard aspect ratio display.  For many people, at these resolutions the DPI (dots per inch) is too high and the text is uncomfortably tiny, but for my personal preferences, the DPI on these screens is close to ideal.

For a desktop, get me biggest display possible at the appropriate DPI.  This 30″ LCD from Dell looks nice.  It runs at 2560×1600.

If we’re talking about tablets, then I’d probably have to say that a 12.1″ screen at 1400×1050 is about right.  This balances practical issues of portability with resolution quite nicely for me.

Moving forward, there’s going to be a tricky transition where screens become very high resolution and the OS starts using those extra pixels to render fonts and images with more detail instead of packing more information into the same space. At that point, the answer to this question will change. =)