Display resolution standards
A display resolution standard is a commonly used width and height dimension of an electronic visual display device, measured in pixels. This information is used for electronic devices such as a computer monitor. Certain combinations of width and height are standardized and typically given a name and an initialism which is descriptive of its dimensions.
The graphics display resolution is also known as the display mode or the video mode, although these terms usually include further specifications such as the image refresh rate and the color depth.
The resolution itself only indicates the number of distinct pixels that can be displayed on a screen, which affects the sharpness and clarity of the image. It can be controlled by various factors, such as the type of display device, the signal format, the aspect ratio, and the refresh rate.
Some graphics display resolutions are frequently referenced with a single number, which represents the number of horizontal or vertical pixels. More generally, any resolution can be expressed as two numbers separated by a multiplication sign, which represent the width and height in pixels. Since most screens have a landscape format to accommodate the human field of view, the first number for the width is larger than the second for the height, and this conventionally holds true for handheld devices that are predominantly or even exclusively used in portrait orientation.
The graphics display resolution is influenced by the aspect ratio, which is the ratio of the width to the height of the display. The aspect ratio determines how the image is scaled and stretched or cropped to fit the screen. The most common aspect ratios for graphics displays are 4:3, 16:10, 16:9, and 21:9. The aspect ratio also affects the perceived size of objects on the screen.
The native screen resolution together with the physical dimensions of the graphics display can be used to calculate its pixel density. An increase in the pixel density often correlates with a decrease in the size of individual pixels on a display.
Some graphics displays support multiple resolutions and aspect ratios, which can be changed by the user or by the software. In particular, some devices use a hardware/native resolution that is a simple multiple of the recommended software/virtual resolutions in order to show finer details; marketing terms for this include "Retina display".
Table of display resolution standards
Aspect ratio
The favored aspect ratio of mass-market display industry products has changed gradually from 4:3, then to 16:10, then to 16:9, and has now changed to 18:9 for smartphones. The 4:3 aspect ratio generally reflects older products, especially the era of the cathode ray tube. The 16:10 aspect ratio had its largest use in the 1995–2010 period, and the 16:9 aspect ratio tends to reflect post-2010 mass-market computer monitor, laptop, and entertainment products displays. On CRTs, there was often a difference between the aspect ratio of the computer resolution and the aspect ratio of the display causing non-square pixels.The 4:3 aspect ratio was common in older television cathode ray tube displays, which were not easily adaptable to a wider aspect ratio. When good quality alternate technologies became more available and less costly, around the year 2000, the common computer displays and entertainment products moved to a wider aspect ratio, first to the 16:10 ratio. The 16:10 ratio allowed some compromise between showing older 4:3 aspect ratio broadcast TV shows, but also allowing better viewing of widescreen movies. However, around the year 2005, home entertainment displays gradually moved from 16:10 to the 16:9 aspect ratio, for further improvement of viewing widescreen movies. By about 2007, virtually all mass-market entertainment displays were 16:9. In 2011, was the favored resolution in the most heavily marketed entertainment market displays. The next standard, , was first sold in 2013.
Also in 2013, displays with appeared, which closely approximate the common CinemaScope movie standard aspect ratio of 2.35–2.40. In 2014, "21:9" screens with pixel dimensions of became available as well.
The computer display industry maintained the 16:10 aspect ratio longer than the entertainment industry, but in the 2005–2010 period, computers were increasingly marketed as dual-use products, with uses in the traditional computer applications, but also as means of viewing entertainment content. In this time frame, with the notable exception of Apple, almost all desktop, laptop, and display manufacturers gradually moved to promoting only 16:9 aspect ratio displays. By 2011, the 16:10 aspect ratio had virtually disappeared from the Windows laptop display market. One consequence of this transition was that the highest available resolutions moved generally downward.
In response to usability flaws of now common 16:9 displays in office/professional applications, Microsoft and Huawei started to offer notebooks with a 3:2 aspect ratio. By 2021, Huawei also offers a monitor display offering this aspect ratio, targeted towards professional uses.
High-definition
All standard HD resolutions share a aspect ratio, although some derived resolutions with smaller or larger ratios also exist, e.g. and, respectively. Most of the narrower resolutions are only used for storing, not for displaying videos, while the wider resolutions are often available as physical displays. YouTube, for instance, recommends users upload videos in a 16:9 format with 240, 360, 480, 720, 1080, 1440, 2160 or 4320 lines.While the monikers for those resolutions originally all used a letter prefix with "HD" for the multiplier, and possibly a "+" suffix for intermediate or taller formats, the newer, larger formats tend to be used with "K" notation for thousands of pixels of horizontal resolution, but may be disambiguated by a system qualifier that includes "HD", e.g. "8K UHD" instead of just "8K".
(qHD)
[|qHD] is a display resolution of pixels, which is exactly one-quarter of a Full HD frame, in a 16:9 aspect ratio. Notably, it is neither "qFHD" nor which would be quarter of "HD" resolution.Some of the few tabletop TVs to use this as its native resolution from around 2005 were the Sony XEL-1 and the Sharp Aquos P50. Sharp marketed its ED TV sets with this resolution as "PAL optimal".
Similar to [|DVGA], this resolution became popular for high-end smartphone displays in early 2011. Mobile phones including the Jolla, Sony Xperia C, HTC Sensation, Motorola Droid RAZR, LG Optimus L9, Microsoft Lumia 535, and Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini have displays with the qHD resolution, as does the PlayStation Vita portable game system.
(HD)
The HD or 720p resolution of pixels stems from high-definition television, where it originally used 50 or 60 frames per second. With its 16:9 aspect ratio, it is exactly 2 times the width and times the height of 4:3 VGA, which shares its aspect ratio and 480 line count with NTSC. HD, therefore, has exactly 3 times as many pixels as VGA, i.e. almost 1 megapixel.In the mid-2000s, when the digital HD technology and standard debuted on the market, this type of resolution was often referred to by the branded name "HD ready" or "HDr", which had specified it as a minimum resolution for devices to qualify for the certification. However, few screens have been built that use this resolution natively. Most employ 16:9 panels with 768 lines instead, which resulted in odd numbers of pixels per line, i.e. 1365 are rounded to 1360, 1364, 1366 or even 1376, the next multiple of 16.
(HD+)
The HD+ resolution of pixels in a 16:9 aspect ratio is often referred to as "900p".(FHD)
FHD is the resolution used by the 1080p and 1080i HDTV video formats. It has a 16:9 aspect ratio and 2,073,600 total pixels, i.e. very close to 2 megapixels, and is exactly 50% larger than 720p HD in each dimension for a total of 2.25 times as many pixels. When using interlacing, the uncompressed bandwidth requirements are similar to those of 720p at the same field rate. Although the number of pixels is the same for 1080p and 1080i, the effective resolution is somewhat lower for the interlaced format, as it is necessary to use some vertical low-pass filtering to reduce temporal artifacts such as interline twitter.Sometimes, this resolution is referred to simply as HD. This is evident from derived terms like qHD, which have a half of the lines and columns of their common base, whereas QHD has double the dimensions of instead.
When set in relation to higher resolutions, is also referred to as 2K because it has roughly 2000 pixels of horizontal resolution.
The next bigger resolution from in vertical direction is , which is hence called FHD+ by some producers, but is elsewhere known as WUXGA, the wider variant of UXGA.
(DCI 2K)
DCI 2K is a standardized format established by the Digital Cinema Initiatives consortium in 2005 for 2K video projection. This format has a resolution of with an aspect ratio of or roughly "". This is the native resolution for DCI-compliant 2K digital projectors – active displays with this resolution are rare. The display aspect ratio is frequently wider than the native one, requiring non-square pixels.(UWFHD)
The resolution is equivalent to Full HD extended in width by one third, with an aspect ratio of 64:27. Monitors at this resolution usually contain built-in firmware to divide the screen into two screens.There are other, [|non-standard display resolutions with 1080 lines] whose aspect ratios fall between the usual and the ultra-wide, e.g.,, and. They are mostly used in smartphones or phablets and do not have established names, but may be subsumed under the umbrella term "ultra-wide HD".
(QHD)
QHD or 1440p is a display resolution of pixels. The name "QHD" reflects the fact that it has four times as many pixels as HD. It is also sometimes called "WQHD"; the W is technically redundant since the HD resolutions are all widescreen, but it emphasizes the distinction between QHD and qHD.This resolution was under consideration by the ATSC in the late 1980s to become the standard HDTV format, because it is exactly 3 times the height of SDTV NTSC television signals, with a wider aspect ratio. Pragmatic technical constraints made them choose the now well-known 16:9 formats of and instead.
In October 2006, Chi Mei Optoelectronics announced a 47-inch 1440p LCD panel to be released in Q2 2007; the panel was planned to debut at FPD International 2008 in a form of autostereoscopic 3D display. As of the end of 2013, monitors with this resolution were becoming more common.
The 27-inch version of the Apple Cinema Display monitor introduced in July 2010 has a native resolution of, as did its successor, the 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display.
The resolution is also used in portable devices. In September 2012, Samsung announced the Series 9 WQHD laptop with a 13-inch display. In August 2013, LG announced a 5.5-inch QHD smartphone display, which was used in the LG G3. In October 2013 Vivo announced a smartphone with a display.
Other phone manufacturers followed in 2014, such as Samsung with the Galaxy Note 4, and Google and Motorola with the Nexus 6 smartphone. By the mid-2010s, it was a common resolution among flagship phones such as the HTC 10, the Lumia 950, and the Galaxy S6 and S7.