(Ohio Scientific Challenger 4P MF, 1979. oldcomputers.net)
When computers looked like this, you could hook it up to your television, which provided typical resolutions of 160×200, 320×200 and 640×200 (Wikipedia).
(IBM P-series Trinitron monitor.)
When more people bought computers, and demanded to do more on them without eye strain, televisions spawned high resolution, professional computer monitors.
(Early CRT HD TV. New Gadget.)
Higher definition televisions then appeared as the content production and distribution processes caught up with the high resolution tubes.
(Samsung 24” LCD monitor.)
Then came LCD computer monitors. They offered resolutions that quickly exceeded that of high-definition televisions; a 24” monitor like the one shown above would provide a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels.
So far, this is echoing the earlier pattern.
But now, we see something really odd.
(Ad on lasoo.com.au)
Computer monitors are now all sold as “full HD”. This sounds great to the uninitiated, but what this actually means is that a computer monitor now only offers the same resolution as a similarly sized HD television, not more as before. A 24” monitor now comes with only 1920x1080 pixels.
Will we now start to see television resolutions limiting that of computer monitors? Maybe that's not a bad idea given this recent development from Sharp.
(Apple's 2012 "new" iPad.)
The high resolution display in the "new" iPad - and Apple's explicit comparison (using the image shown above) with lower-resolution HD TVs is a hopeful sign that high resolution displays are once again about to come back to work computers.
