This is motivated in part by the discussion forwarded from Joe Trotter about WinMDI. We all like to put the prettiest possible pictures into our presentations and publications. However, what most of our flow cytometers and software are generating are data based on 256- to 1024-channel one-dimensional distributions and 64-by-64 to 256-by-256 channel two-dimensional distributions. These data are inherently somewhat "grainy", and are therefore faithfully represented by relatively low-resolution bitmaps. What higher display or output device resolution gets you is the ability to have much better looking text for your legends and scale marking than you would get with, say, 8-by-14 bitmapped characters. Higher resolution does make contour plots look smoother, but a lot of us tend to forget that a contour plot is typically made by smoothing a 64-by-64 or 128-by-128 two-dimensional distribution, and, as a result, looks much better than the real data. A lot of the people who listen to our presentations and read our papers never knew that in the first place. Since I believe in showing the real data, warts and all, I avoid using contour plots, and display two-dimensional distributions using a binary log color scale or gray scale in which the color or gray value changes for every doubling of the number of events (e.g., yellow for 1 event, blue for 2-3, magenta for 4-7, green for 8-15, etc.). Most software packages let you do this. Pretty pictures are nice, but not to the point at which you end up with "ars longa, data brevis". -Howard
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