Screen real-estate on the 15" MBP Retina display

Question

The 15" MacBook Pro Retina Display has a remarkable 2880x1800 pixel resolution, compared to the 27" LED display's 2560x1440. Normally, screen real-estate is defined as how much stuff (windows, menu bar items, bookmark lists, etc) you can fit on the screen, with a larger (that is, more pixels) screen being able to show more stuff using its native resolution.
With the MBP's Retina display, the pixels are so small that using its native resolution in the same way as with the 27" monitor should result in, say, really small menu bar items, etc. As a result, the default monitor setting involves scaling, so that something which might normally take up one pixel might get four or eight devoted to it, making it larger and easier to see. Its monitor control panel allows changing that relationship so that everything could be made to appear even larger, resulting in less screen real-estate, or smaller, resulting in more screen real-estate; i.e., lots more stuff can fit on the screen.
My question is whether, at the smallest setting offered, the screen real-estate is the equivalent of, say, a 32" monitor which also has 2880x1800 pixel resolution but is spread over a much smaller physical area, or is the Retina's display still scaled to some smaller equivalent resolution because straight 1 to 1 would simply be too small to be practical? If that's the case, what does the effective resolution work out to be at the smallest setting?
I'm aware that's not a simple question because, for example, I understand that an HD Movie could be displayed pixel for pixel even if everything else outside that window is scaled. Moreover, the use of vector graphics complicates the matter further. But for things like menu lists and word processing documents, can the MBP's Retina display be set to what we understand to be 1 to 1?

Answer 1

joshcali wrote:
actually.... it doesn't.
the 1920 is simulated, and apple doesn't recommend it.
Apple doesn't offer the option of full resolution (2880x1800) and says everything other than 1440 x 900 won't look as good as 1440x900.
so while you can set the monitor to 17" resolution (1920x1080) it has to simulate it on a 2880x900 screen and has to blur and reinterpolate elements to make it work
they've really messed it up for anyone wanting true HD resolution for professional reasons.
Indeed. Everything except 2880x1800, which is unavailable without SwitchResX, and 1440x900, which comfortably fits one pixel of the image into a four pixel square of the Retina Display, must be simulated or scaled. However, while the scaling is real, the 17" "simulation" looks as good, to my eye at least, as my wife's MBP 17". Going smaller will test one's eyes probably as much as Apple's scaling algorithms so the tradeoff for greater screen real-estate may turn out not to be as bad as we'd think. All I need is a MBP Retina Display and SwitchResX to find out...