Many years ago, typical laser printers offered 300DPI. Then new engines came out that could print at 600DPI. Twice as many pixels in each direction, so four times as many pixels per printed character.

No one complained that everything had to be magnified 200% to print on the new engines - even though that was going on behind the scenes. Instead, everyone enjoyed the new sharper and crisper printouts. And it was wonderful.

The same is true for displays. When you have a display that can run at 200% scaling, that gives you four times the pixels per character compared to your old 100% display.

Everyone's taste is different, but for myself, give me all the pixels I can get. I don't like pixels and I don't want to see them. I want to see the text and graphics I'm working on. If the display has more pixels to represent those, to the point where I can't even see the pixels any more, that's what I want.

I don't appreciate the natural resolution of my XPS 15's 4k screen because my typical use case is to use an external screen. For that use case, the laptop's own screen is totally irrelevant.

Without an external screen, 4k resolution makes everything too small. But setting scaling on the laptop's screen interacts badly with the external screen, which I use almost all the time and do want at 4k. So I end up with the laptop being that much less usable when I'm using it by itself.

That's actually a software problem and not a hardware one. But it's also one of the main reasons I bought a 1080p laptop instead of 4k one.

The main reason is to get better pixel density. That's what Apple's Macbooks do by default, and it's really georgeous. I couldn't go back to the full resolution and everything being super small.

You do not have "this", an OLED panel, in your XPS 15.

>>> All jokes aside the specs for this thing look great. 15.6" and 4k. I want to see this in production laptops ASAP.

>> I have this on my Dell XPS 15.

> You do not have "this", an OLED panel, in your XPS 15.

That's... uncharitable. I also have a 4k screen on my XPS 15. Why would I care whether it's OLED? 4k on a 15 inch screen has been in production laptops for years.

> Why would I care whether it's OLED?

For the reasons laid out in the article. Which is about a specific OLED display which will be used in laptops like the XPS 15 later this year. Those laptops are in development but not released yet.

200% scale is really easy to do. Its when you need something like 150% that it gets hard.

125%, 150%, 175% - they’re all available out of the box on Windows 10, without even selecting a custom dpi.

Now try using them any of them, and you'll see what the GP meant. For example, try opening the (built in) device manager.

It's "good enough", honestly. It will never work perfectly with older apps, which is why Windows has started to default to just bitmap-upscaling them wholesale instead in many cases. And there are still nooks and crannies in Windows itself that are not high-DPI aware (another one is the font installer). But for day to day use, it's not something that you notice.

On Mac I used switchresx to add a new scaled resolution like this:

2560x1440 (native) * 1.5 = 3840x2160 HiDPI / 2 = 1920x1080 (effective resolution)

Obviously it is not as good a real panel but looked good enough to me.

I did the same thing on Ubuntu using xrandr, it was pretty good when it worked (sometimes it didn't, even using the exact same command)