Template:VESA/doc

This is a documentation subpage for Template:VESA. It may contain usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page.

This template generates a code to designate a video or graphics display resolution according to recommendations by VESA CVT.^[1] It internally calls {{resratio}} if necessary.

In the past, the computer industry has used a de-facto standard system of naming for various spatial formats,which traces its roots to the very early days of the personal computer. In the 1980s, IBM produced a series ofgraphics systems and associated display products, which were referred to as “graphics adapters”, such as theMonochrome Graphics Adapter (MGA), Color Graphics Adapter (CGA), Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA),and finally the Video Graphics Array (VGA), Super-Video Graphics Array (SVGA), and Extended GraphicsArray (XGA) systems.

These names were certainly useful distinctions in their day, but unfortunately the nomenclature survived longafter the original hardware became obsolete – in the form of names informally applied to the spatial formatsused by those systems. Thus, in current usage, VGA most often refers to the 640 x 480 format, XGA to 1024x 768, and so forth. This system has become increasingly cumbersome, and the names do not provide muchinformation about the specific format they are intended to represent. QVGA, for instance, is most oftenintended to mean “quarter-VGA”, or 320 x 240 pixels, while QXGA has been used to refer to “quad-XGA”,or 2048 x 1536 pixels.

It is our intention at this time to replace this outdated system with a simpler, more informative standardconvention for referring to industry-standard display formats. Taking a cue from other electronic-imagingmarkets and systems, we are introducing with this standard the convention of naming image formats using thenumber of pixels contained in each. In this document, the standard naming for each format is the pixel count rounded to the nearest 10,000 and expressed in mega-pixels, or with the suffix “M”. As there remains the possibility of confusion between formats of similar pixel counts, but different aspect ratios, the vertical component of the aspect ratio shall be appended to the mega-pixel number, in hexadecimal format.

This specification makes 5∶3 = 15∶9 indistinguishable from either 4∶3 (3) or 16∶9 (9). This template currently generates unambiguous 6 instead, i.e. assumes canonical 10∶6.

VESA refers to 8∶5 as 16∶10 and accordingly suggests A (hexadecimal 10) for it (not 5), which this template complies with.

In 2013, VESA recognized 5∶4 and 15∶9 for legacy formats but discouraged any new native display resolutions with an aspect ratio other than 4∶3, 16∶9 and 16∶10, thereby its naming convention did not anticipate future ultra-wide formats.

Examples

Usage