The Framework 13 Pro looks awesome, and pretty great that it has a touchscreen finally. At 2880×1920, it also has a much denser display than the 16’s 2560×1600. As Nirav said in the reveal, the 13 Pro’s resolution suits Linux displaying scaling at 200% pretty well.
The 16’s display has neither of these properties, and it’s a shame. I usually have my display set to 150% scaling, which is mostly enough for the text to be ideal in size for me, but it also produces some pretty bad artifacts by not being a whole integer.
I would definitely call for a new display to simply do two things:
3840×2400 pixels. This will dramatically increase the pixel density and make 200% scaling work well while providing more screen real estate than the current display. It’ll also allow 16:9 4K content (YouTube, Blu-rays, etc) to be put on the screen with no scaling whatsoever.
Touchscreen. Honestly, I would say it’s sort of an optional component, but it would just be nice to have.
Yeah, I can’t see a great deal of use for a touch screen unless you can use a stylus with it. I’m quite prepared to be bounced on this, but please provide examples of using a touch screen beyond just using your finger to select tabs instead of using the mouse pointer.
I’m probably the wrong person to extol the virtues of a touchscreen :) I did say “would just be nice” instead of being necessary. Even still, there are applications and interfaces that are designed for touch first, and with multi-gesture touch, zooming and rotation can be even better than obtained through mouse and keyboard.
I also assume there’s a way to disable touchscreen on the OS level, so even if the hardware is capable of it, you should be able to effectively disable it.
I agree with the upgraded panel entirely, but the thing I would want most would be OLED.
I’m not sure if that’s a feasible thing at the size of the orders framework makes (I mean, I have genuinely no idea)
For my part I could take or leave touchscreen capability. I would just disable touch functions if the hypothetical new upgraded panel was only available as a touchscreen.
OLED are bad news. We have a LG OLED 65 inch TV and within less then 3 years it started to show Screen Burn In. Any display part that has a standing image will burn in, no matter what.
OLEDs work great on phones and watches as the display is never on for very long, but on a computer where you have images that don’t change for hours on end, its just not suitable.
For one oled is constantly improving in that regard and for the other the performance can be worth having to replace the panel from time to time (good thing panel replacements of frameworks are that easy). There should certainly still be lcd options available (especially since come people can not tollerate oled flicker) but oled would be a nice option for people that want it.
I haven’t yet used an OLED screen on anything besides on my cellphone (where I have always on display turned off) and TV (which I don’t use often), so I don’t have a lot of experience, but I do know I really desire the deep blacks that they can display.
Truth be told, on a laptop where I can easily replace a panel a more limited lifetime is not at all a deal breaker for me, as long as it isn’t TOO limited (<3 yr is admittedly close to that line for me, especially for a TV), and as long as the panels aren’t horrendously expensive to replace. If I have to replace a panel on my laptop or cellphone every three years, I wouldn’t be too put off.
That’s the problem. They would be quite expensive. Don’t get me wrong, we loved the depth of the colours of an OLED and would buy another one in a second if it wasn’t for burn ins. We had a Plasma for years and with the same usage, it never had any burn ins at all and they were known for their burn ins. The OLED was 10 times worse. And this was from LG. Literally the inventers/makers of just about every OLED Panel out there.
The hell are you watching on that thing? My lg oled tv is like 6 years old at this point with no sign of burn in. Not even the worst oled should have burning anywhere near as bad as plasma so there is something weird going on here.
Also Lg only makes like half of the tv oled panels the other half is samsung, monitors and to an extent laptop displays use a different manufacturing process and phone secreens jet another one and aren’t fully comparable.
Still even if the display would only last 3 years, it is replacable and there are people willing to buy them. Again noone is asking for the removal of lcds, they have a lot of advantages but so do oleds, they just aren’t the same ones.
Australia, ABC News/Prime etc. They use things like taskbars and kind of widgets. Despite that they update, the background of the taskbar/widgets are always a solid colour background.
The TV in question is a: LG OLED65C8PTA
This was the highest quality OLED you could buy at the time.
We still have it but its in use in the bedroom as a secondary. The new TV is a LG QNET91 75inch. So I can make direct comparison between them. The QNET is now 3 years old and shows zero deterioration with the same usage pattern.
Right stuff like that was known to be pretty unkind to early oled panels, then again these kind of news channels don’t tend to have the visual fidelity that benefits from oled so if that’s the primary content you may as well just use some cheap tcl okay-ish lcd pannel.
I would bloody hope an lcd ould not have burn in.
But that’s just the thing, different horses for different courses, if you want to do a lot of static content in a brightly lit room matte lcd is the way to go, most oleds loos their perfect blacks in brightly lit scenarios anyway so there is little upside. If you however want to do more dynamic content in more light controlled scenarios the perfect blacks and instant pixel response times of oled are just hard to beat. Modern panels can also take a ton of static content at lower brightness.
Asus, lenovo and hp have been selling laptops with oleds for ages and their warranty load was evidently not big enough to stop. Most oled manufacturers these days also offer multi year burn-in warranties on top of the regular one. Monitor panels use somewhat different tech than tvs so I would expect a tv to have a lot more burn in than a monitor panel in the same scenario as those are expecting much less static content and are usually run a lot harder by default.
When they revealed the new 13" touch display for the 13 Pro, Nirav mentioned that this was the first fully custom display for Framework. All previous panels were existing ones reused by Framework (for example, the previous FW13 panel had non-functioning corners because it was for a laptop with curved corners).
As they’ve now grown to the point where they can custom order displays, I’m hoping something better is in the works for 16 as well. 150% scaling isn’t great (particularly for games/programs that don’t natively scale), so a screen that best scales to 200% would be excellent.
I don’t agree with that, a lot of people use the laptop 16 for gaming and 2400p res would be hard to run on the current hardware and future hardware. The laptop 16 has already has a dense display at 189 ppi. That’s dense enough to not see pixels at normal viewing distances, thats a very sharp ppi. My wishes would be for a 240hz OLED.
I mean optimally they would ship out a 2400p screen for people who use the 16 as a productivity/viewing machine and a OLED 240hz one for people who use it for gaming. 1200p res would look bad on a 2400p screen, especially because its a downgrade from the current res. Anyone who uses it for gaming would feel cheated out if framework chose that upgrade path.
More than likely, if an upgraded display were made available, the gen1/gen2 versions will still be available while supplies last. If that suits you better, make do as you will.
Would 1920×1200 really “look bad” on a 2400p display? It provides a perfect integer scale, after all. I’m sure you can select any other resolution in between if it’s satisfactory for you.
Just speaking from my own experience of owning a 7940HS CPU, it’s already not powerful enough to run heavy games at the full native resolution (2560×1600) and running them at a lower internal resolution is an easy solution to mitigate that issue. There’s also three GPU modules to choose from if you want to expand the graphics capabilities of the machine; I don’t own any of them (yet?), but the 5070 options are probably especially adequate for 4K gaming. If you want a gaming laptop, that’s what the GPU modules are for, after all.
Yea older gen displays would be available but they would be eventually phased out for the newer display’s, although 1200p would scale well, 1200p on a 2400p display will always look worse than 1600p on a 1600p display. Yea possibly the 5070 graphics module (especially the 12gb variant) could run games at 4k but its unnecessary. You would be getting much worse performance for nearly no graphical improvement because the density of the screen is already so high. With your hardware it probably is hard to run heavy games at full native res, but your hardware is being phased out for more powerful hardware to saturate the screen. It seems the main reason you think they should change the screen is for Linux scaling, but even then not everyone uses Linux.
It is the OS I run, so yes, I am biased toward making a request to that effect :)
It is the reason Nirav stated that the Framework 13 Pro’s 2880×1920 screen is particularly advantageous, and it would be nice to bring that same advantage to the Framework 16. I go between 125% and 150% depending on how much stuff I want to do at once (100% is too small), and I think 150% is a “sweet spot” for legibility (maybe it’s my aging eyes, but I digress). It also causes clear visual anomalies just by not being a full integer multiple. 150% scaling effectively brings my display down to a virtual size of 1707×1067. It’s barely enough space to multi-task on one screen and keeping text and elements nicely flowing.
Conversely, a 3840×2400 screen at 200% scaling would be a virtual size of 1920×1200. The text and elements would (physically) be about 89% of the size I’m already used to, while exhibiting none of the aforementioned drawbacks. More room for multi-tasking, no artifacts from a fractional scale. Just a good, clean scale. Plus video (and even game) content could render at the native 4K resolution; if the video content is 4K native, it’ll just be letterboxed without any other pixel manipulations.
This is my opinion only, of course, but I do feel pretty strongly that my proposed screen resolution would be ideal.
Im not arguing that the display your proposing wouldn’t be good for linux use, im saying if they offered just that it would cheat out people who use it for gaming because of the huge performance hit for nearly no visual benefit. You would be better off sticking with the limited gen 1 panels. What would you do when your screen breaks and you need to replace it, but the gen 1 panels arent produced anymore?
Cheated?
I don’t believe Framework has advertised / strongly positioned the Framework 16 as a “gaming” laptop. One can not expect that a screen upgrade will have a special focus on the aspects gamers especially look for. Only if Framework explicitly promised gamer focused upgrades soon should one feel “cheated”.
Also, I would not expect two screen options to be released at the same time or even in close succession. While you never know, they haven’t done that before. Keeping more moderate expectations based on past actions would help reduce disappointment when exactly what one would like doesn’t appear promptly.