What is "native resolution" for my mac mini G4?

The term "Native Resolution" refers to the display, not the computer driving it. It is the number of pixels on a digital display - so your Samsung's native resolution is 1920x1080.

(Analogue - CRT - displays don't have "native resolution" but they do have "maximum resolution" - but that's another story.)

Whether documents look life size depends on many other things, like the SIZE of the pixels in the display? and what the document software (word processor, graphics layout app., etc.) is expecting.

There used to be nominal 72 pixels per inch in the old days of the first bit-mapped displays, but that's not the case any more - there are usually more - and it varies from display to display. Your 1" of graphics will probably look smaller (but still be sharp) on your display. Similarly a word document will probably look smaller on the display than when printed.

However, it can be safely said: set your computer to output at the native resolution of your display for the sharpest image.

You cannot run any LCD monitor higher than it's "native" resolution; "native" is the maximum resolution the monitor can support.

Mac OS X outputs icons and text at a fixed number of pixels regardless of the resolution of the monitor. So when you use a monitor with a higher resolution for a given screen size, things on the screen will be smaller.

Regards.

cocteau3,

You may be confusing native with default. The G3 desktop would default to 640 by 480 if you zapped the PRAM. You then went into monitors and sound to increase the resolution to what ever the monitor would support and the onboard video port would support.

Before the days of multi-sync monitors, the resolution was fixed for each monitor. Until the Mac II, you had a fixed resolution monitor built in. With the introduction of the NUBUS card, you could buy a card with support for a larger display that was also a fixed resolution.

The Mac IIcx had no onboard video. You bought a NUBUS card for what ever monitor size you wanted. The card and monitor usually came together. With the Mac IIci, in an almost identical case, you had an onboard video port plus the option to add up to three nubus video cards. Native for that onboard video port was now based on the maximum number of pixels that could be supported at thousands of colors or millions of colors. If you wanted millions of colors, you had to add more VRAM or reduce the matrix from 1024 by 748 to 640 by 480. Some games had to be at 256 colors because that is how they were programmed. If you wanted 1024 by 768, you had to settle for thousands of colors, or less color depth than millions. It was simply math. How much math could the computer video port handle?

At our store, in 1999, we had a Quadra 950 set up with five displays. The onboard video would only support 640 by 480 if you wanted millions of colors. That was the native size. Increase the image area (or monitor size) and you decreased the image size. By having four NUBUS cards installed, you could have five monitors connected at once. It was very easy to demonstrate that a 20" monitor could display 640 by 480 and have large text - viewable by the visually impared. A second 20" monitor was set for 1152 by 870 and the text was tiny. Also displayed was a 17" multi-sync that could change resolution.

With the advent of muti-resolution monitors, the idea of 'native resolution' has been replaced by 'supported resolutions.' A monitor may have a default setting but if it is multi-sync, there is no such thing as native. Just factory default. Set any size and frequency you like, so long as that frequency is supported.

This is the best historical link I found:

http://www.proaxis.com/~ferris/docs/dpi-monitor.html

Note that 72dpi was convertable to typesetting because of that long forgotten concept of desktop publishing.

Finally, you can have a large display set at 1600 x 1200 to display many windows and have one window zoomed in to show text at 200%. So many variables that native is not as useful as twenty years ago.

Ji~m