"Native" resolution of a notebook's screen

[vaughan]

What does the phrase - the native resolution of a notebook's screen mean?

I heard somewhere that a laptop's screen displays the pixels in its TFT layer at a certain optimum setting. If you change the settings from say 1024 x 768 to a higher setting like 1400 x 1050 then the clarity of the image is reduced.

[NeoGen]

Yep, that's just it.

TFT screens are made up of a number of cells (can't remember better name) that each one is equivalent to a pixel in the screen.
The size of the TFT defines it's best resolution, the native one, as that pre-built number of cells adapts perfectly to a given screen resolution. The number of cells match the number of pixels you see on the screen.
If you increase or decrease the resolution on the TFT, then each cell doesn't correspond to one pixel anymore, so to adapt the cells to the resolution a certain image stretching and smoothing is applied, which causes that what you see isn't so sharp anymore.

And that's one reason why I like CRT's so much. :)