My own experience has been that comic books benefit from a high-resolution screen, and a large screen. I spent a while trying to view them on a tablet and generally wound up shifting over to a desktop.
For size: a comic book is designed to be comfortably read at regular reading distance.
The standard dimension for a Comic Book today is 6-5/8 inches in width by 10-1/4 inches in length.
If you want to have the ability to view two-page spreads with the pages side-by-side, then you’d ideally want a screen that’s 13.25 inches wide and 10.25 inches tall if you want to replicate that reading experience.
Even a 14" screen laptop (if 16:9 aspect ratio, 12.2" by 6.9") isn’t going to be as large, and the laptop may not be ideally situated for reading distance.
A 16" screen laptop (16:9 aspect ratio, 13.9" by 7.8") is still a fair bit smaller than the actual comic book.
It’s only when you’re getting up to a 21" desktop display (18.3" by 10.3") that you can display a comic spread at full size on a standard-dimension monitor.
If you could get a non-standard resolution, you could get by with a 12" diagonal screen – that’s that comic diagonal, but you’d need something in a ratio of 1.547, which I doubt that you’re going to find.
As for resolution, I don’t know what resolution comics are being published or pirated at these days, but to Google up a quick example:
That image is 1965 pixels high. You’d need a 4k screen to view that at full resolution.
So if you want the full effect, you’re looking at something like a 21" 4k desktop monitor to view current scans taking up the originally-intended arc of your viewing angle, and that assumes that your display is as close as you’d hold a comic book.
Can you view a comic smaller and at lower resolution? Sure, you can zoom in and out to read details and the like. You can just not view full-page spreads, only do a single page at a time. Depends on what you’re willing to give up.
If I were going to view a comic book in a portable form, though, I’d try to get the largest display I could manage, and probably as high-resolution display as I could. I’d probably lean towards using a low-end, large-screen 16" laptop rather than a tablet.
I’ve found that small, portable devices like tablets and e-readers – both of which I have read books on – work a lot better with traditional, “text” books than with comic books. Phone screens are even worse, really cramped. With “text” books, those devices can mitigate the impact of the small screen, re-flow the text so that each on-screen page has less text than does a page in the book. You flip the page more frequently, but no big deal. But that doesn’t work with comics – you can’t re-flow the images in a comic book, graphic novel, or artbook. There, you have to view the content in the original page “chunk” size.
EDIT: One other point. Someone mentioned e-ink screens. I have owned several e-ink devices, like them for “text”-style books, but one point to keep in mind is that if you think that you’re going to need to be zooming in or panning around comic pages because of the size of the screen, their slower response time may be annoying…and the outstanding battery life one can get from an e-ink display is predicated on the assumption that the image is spending the bulk of the time being static and unchanging, not being constantly zoomed or panned.
This is a lot to think about! I really appreciate the depth of thought you’ve given this. I initially assumed I just want to tablet but I’ll give comics a whirl on the ol’ desktop and see how much better they are…
Depends on what you’re going for.
My own experience has been that comic books benefit from a high-resolution screen, and a large screen. I spent a while trying to view them on a tablet and generally wound up shifting over to a desktop.
For size: a comic book is designed to be comfortably read at regular reading distance.
https://www.measuringknowhow.com/comic-book-dimensions/
If you want to have the ability to view two-page spreads with the pages side-by-side, then you’d ideally want a screen that’s 13.25 inches wide and 10.25 inches tall if you want to replicate that reading experience.
Even a 14" screen laptop (if 16:9 aspect ratio, 12.2" by 6.9") isn’t going to be as large, and the laptop may not be ideally situated for reading distance.
A 16" screen laptop (16:9 aspect ratio, 13.9" by 7.8") is still a fair bit smaller than the actual comic book.
It’s only when you’re getting up to a 21" desktop display (18.3" by 10.3") that you can display a comic spread at full size on a standard-dimension monitor.
If you could get a non-standard resolution, you could get by with a 12" diagonal screen – that’s that comic diagonal, but you’d need something in a ratio of 1.547, which I doubt that you’re going to find.
As for resolution, I don’t know what resolution comics are being published or pirated at these days, but to Google up a quick example:
https://readcomic.me/comic/spider-man-2022/issue-11
That image is 1965 pixels high. You’d need a 4k screen to view that at full resolution.
So if you want the full effect, you’re looking at something like a 21" 4k desktop monitor to view current scans taking up the originally-intended arc of your viewing angle, and that assumes that your display is as close as you’d hold a comic book.
Can you view a comic smaller and at lower resolution? Sure, you can zoom in and out to read details and the like. You can just not view full-page spreads, only do a single page at a time. Depends on what you’re willing to give up.
If I were going to view a comic book in a portable form, though, I’d try to get the largest display I could manage, and probably as high-resolution display as I could. I’d probably lean towards using a low-end, large-screen 16" laptop rather than a tablet.
I’ve found that small, portable devices like tablets and e-readers – both of which I have read books on – work a lot better with traditional, “text” books than with comic books. Phone screens are even worse, really cramped. With “text” books, those devices can mitigate the impact of the small screen, re-flow the text so that each on-screen page has less text than does a page in the book. You flip the page more frequently, but no big deal. But that doesn’t work with comics – you can’t re-flow the images in a comic book, graphic novel, or artbook. There, you have to view the content in the original page “chunk” size.
EDIT: One other point. Someone mentioned e-ink screens. I have owned several e-ink devices, like them for “text”-style books, but one point to keep in mind is that if you think that you’re going to need to be zooming in or panning around comic pages because of the size of the screen, their slower response time may be annoying…and the outstanding battery life one can get from an e-ink display is predicated on the assumption that the image is spending the bulk of the time being static and unchanging, not being constantly zoomed or panned.
This is a lot to think about! I really appreciate the depth of thought you’ve given this. I initially assumed I just want to tablet but I’ll give comics a whirl on the ol’ desktop and see how much better they are…
Thank you again for all this, seriously!