One of the longstanding gripes of ‘serious’ users of gadgets the world over has been how the high definition display revolution bypassed laptops and arrived straight on smartphones, not the screen that people spend most of their working hours staring at.
So, while most phones priced Rs 25,000 and above now come with QHD displays, even premium laptops that cost thrice as much still come with HD or Full HD screens. For the uninitiated, QHD refers to a display with 4 mln dots on it, while HD screens have 1 mln and FHD displays 2 mln. 4K displays have 8 mln.
In case you are wondering why this matters, the answer is simple — the more the number of pixels, the higher the ‘clarity’ and crispness of the screen.
If there are more pixels on the screen, their size is smaller and it becomes more difficult to see them. After a point, they become too small to be seen by naked eye and the display is then called a retina screen. Images on such screens appear more realistic, like a printed photograph.
Coming back to Lenovo’s new Yoga 900 laptop, the device has a 13.3-inch display with a resolution of 3200 pixels by 1800 pixels. In other words, there are a total of 5.76 mln dots on the screen. If you some more calculations, you can figure out that each inch of the Yoga 900’s display contains 276 dots.
Now, let us see if that is enough to ‘beat’ the human eye.
The eye’s resolution varies with distance. Theoretically, at a distance of 1 inch, it has a resolution of 5256 dots per inch. To get the resolution at any point further away, you can divide this number by the distance in inches.
Since a laptop display is usually located at a distance of around 18-20 inches from the eye, the human eye’s capacity at a distance of 19 inches is 5256/19, or 276 pixels per inch — the same that Yoga 900 offers.
What this means is that the Yoga 900 has been designed to ensure a retina experience at under normal usage, making it the first laptop in India to offer this facility.
Other specifications of the laptop, which has been priced at a jaw-dropping Rs 1.22 lakh, include a sixth-generation Core-i7 processor running at 2.5 GHz, 512 GB of solid-state memory, 8 GB of 1.6 GHz DDR3 RAM.
Battery is 66 watt hour.
A typical, old-generation laptop consumes about 25 watts, but the power consumption of the Yoga 900 can apparently be brought down to around 8.5 watts by turning off the WiFi and reducing the display brightness to indoor use levels. As a result, battery life is up to 9 hours (66 divided by 8.5).
Normal usage (15 watts) will reduce the battery life to around five-and-a-half hours.
The Yoga is so called because of its hinge, which allows the display to be bent all the way backward to put the laptop into a (heavy) ‘tablet mode’. Of course, you can’t really use it like a tablet because the total weight of the device is 1.3 kg, while tablets typically weigh around 0.5 kg.
The biggest drawback for the Y-900 is the price. The same model sells for $1,300 (Rs 86,500) in the US.
The device is clearly unaffordable for 99% of the population. However, let’s hope other manufacturers take a hint from the launch and bring in more and more laptops with retina-level displays.
