There was a brief period of sanity in the late 90s early 2000s where resolution used actual numbers (ex: 1024x768)

Otherwise it is a mess. There is the letter soup (WSXGA+, WQUXGA,... ), the lines (1080p, 720i,... a throwback to analog CRTs), the HD (Full HD, HD ready, ultra HD,...), the K (4K, 8K,...)...

Is it that hard to use 2 numbers?

Both existed at the same time.

You had VGA (640x480) for example.

But I do agree we should have called it 2160p not 4k, but marketing guys are like that.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Vector_V... What a mess.

I remember when makers were advertising "8514/A!" You know, 1024x768 interlaced 43Hz.

You missed Megapixels too, which is usually used for cameras, but I have seen used for screens. 1080p is around 2 megapixels, 4k is around 8 megapixels.

That doesn’t really help, as while typically it’s assumed the aspect ratio is 16:9, that’s not always true, making such a scheme ambiguous. Listing vertical resolution with aspect ratio is fairly sane, though. Or use standardized specific resolutions (e.g. FHD, QHD, 4K UHD).

These specifications don't mean anything for a lot of people. To me they sound like marketing buzzwords that companies use to try to sell me inferior products. I'd much rather have them say 2k than any of the "FHD" abbreviations.

I actually like the abbreviations because, while exceedingly optimistic if you sound out what each letter means, every vendor maps them to the same number of pixels. For example "QHD" or "Quad HD" means 2560x1440. "That's not 4 times HD, what a dumb name," I hear you scream. But in this system, HD is 1280x720, not 1920x1080 as everyone in the real world understands it. But it's fine, because anyone selling their monitor as QHD will be giving you a 1440p display. They get to mislead you as to the specifications... in a standard way that everyone agrees is the maximum amount of misleading they can get away with, so you actually know what you're getting! (If they did 4x "real" HD, then they'd call it "UHD" or "Ultra High Definition".) It's all genius and I love it.

Perhaps they don’t mean anything for a lot of people, but ambiguous terms mean nothing precise to anyone at all, so how useful are they really? At least a term one doesn’t know they can look up and learn, rather than be perpetually misled by ambiguous terms.

If anything 2K and 4K and 1440p are the more marketing terms because their ambiguity allows companies to apply them to products in a misleading way to market their product as something better than it is.

At least FHD almost universally means 1920×1080 and is googlable. This is less true for QHD / QHD+, unfortunately.

I thought QHD was almost unambiguously 1440x2560 (4xHD), and QHD+ was wider than that.

I think QHD+ is a little more ambiguous, as it could also reasonably be used to refer to taller displays (16:10 display at 2560x1600, for instance).

Also, annoyingly enough, QHD itself can stand for "Quad HD" or "Quarter HD", the old smartphone standard of 960x540, which admittedly has pretty much entirely fallen out of use

Isn't that qHD?

Today, it is. But humans are usually not very good at paying attention to the case and machines are too often very bad at preserving it (the best — or should I say worst — example being search engines). And that's without even taking into account the fact that the need to distinguish both didn't exist before QHD was a thing and that most people have no idea there's ambiguity at all.

It's exactly the opposite. Whenever you see 2K you have to check what they actually mean with that. I can be ~2000xAnything or they can blatantly lie and name 1440x1440 2K. FHD however is defined its exactly 1920x1080 and nothing else.

I've always wondered why we can't just use the pixel count.

That's how you'd end up with a billion pixel monitor that's 100x100000

Camera manufacturers often advertise the number of "dots" in their displays/viewfinders, but they also tend to count each subpixel separately so it's 2-3x higher than the pixel count.

That was never a thing so we can't go back to it. A resolution is 2 dimensional height + aspect ratio works. But for all the popular resolutions we have a standardized short form like FHD/QHD/XGA/VGA but these obviously cant cover every existing resolution. Like for example the one from the article 1440p 1:1 there is no standardized name for it.

At least for me, the short forms are hilarious and obnoxious. I can get an understanding of what 3840x2400 could mean in terms of aspect ratio and pixel density. But WQUXGA? I have to look that up.

When widescreen LCDs were starting to replace 4:3 LCDs and CRTs, the screens were described as 720p, 1080i, etc. It wasn't until 4k was a thing that screens were described by their width instead of height.

The "p" is kinda interesting because it used to convey useful extra information (presence of Progressive Scan), but now that's simply a given in almost every context. So the "p" has sort of degraded into nothing more than a signifier that someone is writing about resolution.

"c" could mean Colour. Bob uses a c2160p monitor!

i stands for "interlaced" that has nothing to do with display resolution. p stands for "progressive scan" technically also not related to resolution but it makes clear that the number before describes the vertical resolution.

My main monitor is 5120x1440. Is it 1440p?

Yes, but without aspect ratio you don't give all information. It's also 5K but again missing aspect ratio so best is to name the pixels.