The kids visited with Grandpa today and he gave them a bunch of cherries to eat. The cherries were excellent. So Ian asked, “Can we grow a cherry tree from these seeds.” Well… we could, but it probably wouldn’t work very well. “Why not?” Well… to get a good fruit tree usually involves hybridization and/or grafting, and that means that these seeds might not grow a very good tree. “Where can we get a good tree?”

And that took me back to Burpee and Stark Brothers. When we lived on the farm, we could get consistently good stuff from these two companies – Burpee for seeds and Stark Brothers for trees.

So I looked them both up on the Internet for the first time. Both have an easy way to order a paper catalog. And I found myself immediately filling in the forms to get those catalogs. As I did it, I asked myself why. What causes me to prefer a paper catalog (which will take a few days to get here) instead of using the Internet? As I thought about it, it gave me a way to imagine what the “perfect screen” would look like.

The advantages of a paper catalog are pretty impressive, even in 2009. Here are a few:

1) I would like to look and see everything that Stark and Burpee have to offer. In other words, I want to browse. Both companies have hundreds of products. To do it on the web, that means hundreds of mouse clicks (one click in and one click out of each individual product page). The web is a total pain in the ass for browsing. A paper catalog is much faster.

2) Why not download a PDF version of the catalog to reduce the number of clicks? Viewing a PDF on a laptop means terrible resolution compared to paper. Even on my desktop machine, with dual monitors that offer a total of 3,200 x 1,200 pixels, the paper catalog wins. The paper catalog offers at least 300 dots per inch, or roughly 5,100 x 3,300 pixel resolution. In other words, the paper catalog offers four times more pixels.

3) I would like to do my browsing with multiple kids while sitting or lying someplace comfortable. Paper is perfect for that. A laptop with really low resolution is not. A B&W low-res Kindle does not solve the problem.

4) A laptop in bed generates a lot of heat, is unwieldy, etc. compared to a paper catalog.

So what would the perfect screen look like if we want to create something equivalent to a paper catalog experience?
1) It would be Big – like the size of the front page of a city newspaper.
2) It would handle landscape or portrait viewing.
3) It would have huge resolution, like 5,000 x 3,000 pixels or 6,000 x 4,000 pixels.
4) In color
5) It would be thin and light, possibly flexible, possibly foladable in the middle with no bezel.
6) It would have great battery life with no heat (paper has infinite battery life and zero heat)
7) It would connect to the Internet fast enough that the page-turn delay matches that of a paper catalog
8 ) Touch screen

As soon as we have a screen like that at a reasonable price, we won’t need paper anymore. How long will that be? Even at half the size and resolution (roughly equivalent to a single magazine page) it would probably work.