What You Should Know About Touchscreen Laptops Before You Buy
Since touchscreen technology is fairly new to the mobile computing world, there are a couple of things you should know before you spend your hard earned cash on a touch screen laptop. The technical specifications like the CPU, the amount and type of RAM, the size of hard drive, whether or not it has a DVD drive, are the same as any other laptop. The difference that you need to be aware of is that some touch screen laptops come with what is called a passive digitizer touchscreen if and some come with what is called an active digitizer touchscreen. They function quite differently and different users will definitely prefer one type or the other depending upon how they plan to use their touchscreen laptop.
Let’s talk about passive digitizer touch screens first. This type of touchscreen is one that is able to recognize touch from the user’s finger or non electronic stylus. The advantage of this type of touchscreen is one of convenience. The user can simply touch the screen to manipulate the computer without having to reach for an electronic stylus every time. The other advantage of this type of touchscreen is that it supports what’s called multi touch technology. Multi touch basically means that the user can touch the computer screen at more than one location and the computer will recognize both input points. An example of when one might want to use multi touch is when manipulating photos. If the user touches the photo on the screen with two fingers and rotates those two fingers the left, the image will rotate for the left.
A disadvantage of a passive digitizer touchscreen is that it doesn’t know when you intended to touch the screen in more than one place at a time or if the second input point was an accidental touch. With the computer screen folded over in tablet mode, if the user wants to simply write on the screen to take notes using the stylus, the computer with a passive digitize a screen often gets confused when the users palm bumps the screen. This causes many errors and can be quite frustrating.
Now onto active digitizer touch screens. This type of touchscreen only recognizes input from an electronic stylus. While an active digitizer doesn’t support multi touch functionality, it may be a better choice for those who plan on using handwriting recognition programs a lot. When the touchscreen laptops screen is folded over in tablet mode and the user is writing on the screen with the electronic stylus, a handwriting recognition program will translate the person’s handwriting into text. Active digitizer touch screens also have the reputation for more accurately reproducing handwriting strokes of the user.
As you can see, there are advantages and disadvantages to both types of systems. Only you can decide which system may work better for you.
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