External displays with similar pixel density to 17" MBP display?

Question

I've got a 17" MacBook Pro, native resolution 1920x1200, which is quite high in terms of pixel density. I have a 24" external Samsung display, also 1920x1200, which means the pixel density is lower. It works fine, but (as you might expect), screen items increase in size rather noticeably when I drag from the laptop display to the external display. (The 24" LCD Apple Cinema Display is also 1920x1200, so the same thing would happen). I've been looking all over the place, and I can't seem to find an external display in the 20-24" range that has a resolution higher than 1920x1200. Ideally I'd like to find a display with the same amazing pixel density, so everything is the same size on both my laptop display and on the external display. I don't know what that would be--probably something like 2048x1152 on a 20" or 22", and 2560x1600 for a 24". Even Apple's 30" Cinema Display at 2560x1600 (or what I imagine will be the new 27" LCD coming out later this summer, probably at 2560x1600) would suffer from this problem, because while the resolution is great, the screen size is so large that the pixel density is lower and once again screen items would increase in size when moved from the laptop monitor to the external monitor. I don't really care about screen size or cost. I'd buy a 20" display, or a 30" display, at pretty much any price, if the pixel density were identical to my MacBook Pro. Anybody know where I can find something like this?

Answer 1

The pixel densities of the 15" hi-res MBP at 1680 x 1050 and the 17" at 1920 x 1200 are really quite extreme — the 17" slightly more so than the 15". To read the "fine print" on those screens without a resolution-independent user interface (which the Mac OS doesn't yet offer), most users have to sit closer to those displays than they'd want to be to a 27" or 30" display, simply because for a viewer sitting that close to it, the bigger display would extend outward beyond the central field of sharply focused vision. One would constantly be leaning forward and back: in to read the menus or palettes and then out to see the whole screen. That would be pretty tiring. Thus I think it's quite unlikely that we'll ever see 30", 27" or maybe even 24" displays from Apple or anyone else at the same pixel density as the highest-resolution MBPs: 133.2 pixels per inch for the 17" and 128.6 for the 15", compared with 108.8 for the 27" iMac and 97.7 for the 30" Cinema Display). The current standard-resolution 15" MBP at 110.3 actually has a lower pixel density than the 13", at 113.5.
Interestingly, the current 24" Apple LED-backlit display at 113.2 has almost exactly the same pixel density as the 13" MacBook Pro screen. For someone who wanted things to stay the same size when moving from screen to screen, that would be an ideal pairing. But the 13" MBP sure wouldn't be any match for the 17" in terms of screen real estate when each was being used as a stand-alone portable.