LCD monitors--and resolutions

[Haruko]

I do not know if it was like this the first time I set it to 1280x1024, but I noticed that, trying to do that now, the task bar, pages, and what not all look kinda blurry and stretched. Everything looks great on 1680x1050, or 1600x1200, but otherwise, it's bad. Is this just because of the monitor I chose, or has this happened to anyone else, and what did you do about it?

I, of course, plan to ask the manufacturer itself, but thought I might ask here, too.

By the way, mine is an Acer AL2002W, 20-inch TFT LCD.

[Stark]

Native res, dude. Didn't you do any research before you bought a monitor? It's scaling the image to fit your native res, and it looks like poo. You can use your drivers to do it on the GPU instead, but it'll still look like poo (less so). If you use a widescreen resolution (ie not fucking 12x10, but 12x7 or something) it'll look much better. You're sending a smaller, square image to the monitor and it's stretching it to be larger and wider, so it looks like shit.

[phongn]

All LCDs work that way. You should be running at 1680x1050 or some integer fraction thereof (e.g. 840x525).

[Stark]

If he's playing games he's best off just turning scaling off. He'll get letterboxing, but if his GPU can't push 16x10 it's his only choice for image quality.

[Haruko]

Oh, I see. And yes, I did neglect to do adequate research. I thought I knew all I needed to know about LCDs from what little reading I bothered to do. But mercifully, even after learning what I did with the replies made in this topic, and one at my own forum, I still would gladly go with this LCD. It's not a big deal that I can't go on 1280x1024 without it looking like crap, anyways, as I like how much more space there is afforded on the LCD's native resolution, anyways.

After the replies in the topic I linked to, though, I did do more reading, learning about the native resolution thing. I just didn't know it would look that bad on 1280x1024, and I think I'm imagining when I thought it looked less crappy the last time I went to that res on the LCD.

[Stark]

Yeah, I ummed and ahhed for ages over a monitor, and when I got a 16x10 one I bought a new 3D card to push enough pixels to work at that res. Any widescreen res (ie, same ratio as 1680x1050) should look passable, and turning off scaling will aloow it to draw a lower res in native, with black borders. I play non-widescreen older games like that, to prevent the stretching you get otherwise.

If you're primarily desktop stuff, is there a reason why you can't run it at 1680x1050?

[Darth Wong]

Personally, I think way too many LCD manufacturers push the resolution of their monitors too high for comfort, so that I end up with tiny text if I use native resolution.

In theory, it shouldn't be a problem if the operating system scales up its fonts accordingly, but I've found that globally increasing font size is much more of a pain in the ass than it should be. You can increase certain font sizes, but others stay small. You can go through every application, manually tweaking default font sizes in all the various app configuration screens, but who wants to do that? You can select "large fonts" in Windows or "100dpi" in Linux, but it's a pain in the ass and still doesn't necessarily give you the desired result.

What operating systems need is a global font size adjuster and a global icon scaler. If they had that, then I wouldn't care about the annoyingly tiny pixels common on too many LCD panels.

[Stark]

I believe that sort of thing is a prominent feature of OSX and many Linux distros. They have some font-scaling thing, and I think that's what it does.

[phongn]

What operating systems need is a global font size adjuster and a global icon scaler. If they had that, then I wouldn't care about the annoyingly tiny pixels common on too many LCD panels.

The industry is slowly moving towards resolution-independence but, as you noticed, the going is slow and fraught with a lot of issues - not the least that a lot of applications are hard-coded to assume 72 or 96 dpi.

I believe that sort of thing is a prominent feature of OSX and many Linux distros. They have some font-scaling thing, and I think that's what it does.

It's pretty imperfect right now, alas.

[Netko]

WPF apps are supposed to be resolution independent (currently possible to see with the magnifier tool - regular apps do the standard pixelated and blurred magnification, WPF apps don't) and there have been some rumors the next Windows version is supposedly going to be resolution independent.

[img=left]http://img503.imageshack.us/img503/4986/magexbr3.th.png[/img]EDIT: Example of what I'm talking about; the image (thumbnail) is a screenshot of magnifier's output - the upper part is from Expression Blend, a WPF app, while the lower part is from Magnifier's window, ironically, not a WPF app.

[Darth Wong]

WPF apps are supposed to be resolution independent (currently possible to see with the magnifier tool - regular apps do the standard pixelated and blurred magnification, WPF apps don't) and there have been some rumors the next Windows version is supposedly going to be resolution independent.

If the last Windows development cycle was anything to go by, my son Matthew will be old enough to drive by the time that comes out. If the current trend continues, he'll be old enough to vote.

[Netko]

And they know that hence a much tighter focus on making the next version on time (2009.-2010. timeframe).

Also, to be fair, they did scap all their work and restart in 2003., and then had a year of downtime while they focused on security (SP2). So effectively, Vista was only developed since 2004. or so. And you can bet that the new guy in charge is not going to allow such a fiasco again.

[Terralthra]

Maybe you can bet that...I'm going to take the safe side of the wager and bet that Microsoft will continue to mostly be mediocre.

On the other hand, the guys at MS Research consistently turn out neat stuff. I use Scalable Fabric on my tablet, for example.

[Starglider]

Personally, I think way too many LCD manufacturers push the resolution of their monitors too high for comfort, so that I end up with tiny text if I use native resolution.

More resolution is always good, unless you have sucky apps. Everything looks sharper and more detailed. Font smoothing and edge antialiasing works better because it has more pixels to work with.

What operating systems need is a global font size adjuster and a global icon scaler. If they had that, then I wouldn't care about the annoyingly tiny pixels common on too many LCD panels.

As a software developer that's been around a bit I can guarentee you that this would not happen if high-res displays weren't becoming commonplace. The hardware has to come first before there's a motivation to write the software, just like 64-bit support, multiprocessor/multicore support and new graphics card features.

[Darth Wong]

Personally, I think way too many LCD manufacturers push the resolution of their monitors too high for comfort, so that I end up with tiny text if I use native resolution.

More resolution is always good, unless you have sucky apps. Everything looks sharper and more detailed. Font smoothing and edge antialiasing works better because it has more pixels to work with.

Of course it looks sharper and more detailed. I never said otherwise. What I said was that the text looks smaller unless I manually increase font sizes, and that doesn't always work well. Also, desktop and menu icons can get really small, and there's nothing I can do about that.

What operating systems need is a global font size adjuster and a global icon scaler. If they had that, then I wouldn't care about the annoyingly tiny pixels common on too many LCD panels.

As a software developer that's been around a bit I can guarentee you that this would not happen if high-res displays weren't becoming commonplace. The hardware has to come first before there's a motivation to write the software, just like 64-bit support, multiprocessor/multicore support and new graphics card features.

I wouldn't have a problem with the ultra-high resolution LCDs if the industry didn't have a habit of quickly standardizing on these new high resolutions and making it extremely difficult to find lower-resolution panels for any given size of screen.

[Pu-239]

Personally, I think way too many LCD manufacturers push the resolution of their monitors too high for comfort, so that I end up with tiny text if I use native resolution.

More resolution is always good, unless you have sucky apps. Everything looks sharper and more detailed. Font smoothing and edge antialiasing works better because it has more pixels to work with.

Of course it looks sharper and more detailed. I never said otherwise. What I said was that the text looks smaller unless I manually increase font sizes, and that doesn't always work well. Also, desktop and menu icons can get really small, and there's nothing I can do about that.

Aren't you using KDE, which has a setting for icon sizes? I know GNOME does, and given KDE's tendency to insert settings for everything, I'd expect that to have it too... I generally do the opposite and shrink sizes for everything since 1024x768 and 1400x1050 on laptop and desktop respectively are insufficient for me.


[EDIT]
Granted, I don't think there's a setting for menu/toolbar icons in either.

[Adrian Laguna]

What I said was that the text looks smaller unless I manually increase font sizes, and that doesn't always work well. Also, desktop and menu icons can get really small, and there's nothing I can do about that.

There is, actually. You also don't have to increase font size. I was bedevilled by this problem for a while, the tiny everything hurt my eyes. It really wasn't hard to find the solution once I looked for it. Go to Display Properties -> Settings -> Advanced, another window will pop-up and the solution should stare at you under the "General" tab.

[Starglider]

I wouldn't have a problem with the ultra-high resolution LCDs if the industry didn't have a habit of quickly standardizing on these new high resolutions and making it extremely difficult to find lower-resolution panels for any given size of screen.

That decision is (naturally) driven by simple economics; LCD production lines are very expensive, there aren't that many factories in operation, the market for 'obsolete panels' is too small to make it viable.

That said, there's generally tons of surplus stock around for years after a product line has been formally discontinued, via smaller retailers and ebay. Maybe that falls into 'extremely difficult to find' for you, but I've always been able to source moderately obsolete new products with an hour or so of online searching. An exception is really obscure stuff like the two 'conch shell' computer cases I recently ordered; made as a limited edition in 2005, it took me about a day to find two companies in Europe that actually had one in stock (and in both cases it was their last one).

[Aaron]

I wouldn't have a problem with the ultra-high resolution LCDs if the industry didn't have a habit of quickly standardizing on these new high resolutions and making it extremely difficult to find lower-resolution panels for any given size of screen.

If you don't mind buying used, the government auctions off it's computer kit every few years and some of it ends up in a surplus store. There's a few in Ottawa so there should be at least one in TO. They started with the LCD's about five years ago, so the first issues should be available and the second issue will be dumped this year.

[Darth Wong]

What I said was that the text looks smaller unless I manually increase font sizes, and that doesn't always work well. Also, desktop and menu icons can get really small, and there's nothing I can do about that.

There is, actually. You also don't have to increase font size. I was bedevilled by this problem for a while, the tiny everything hurt my eyes. It really wasn't hard to find the solution once I looked for it. Go to Display Properties -> Settings -> Advanced, another window will pop-up and the solution should stare at you under the "General" tab.

Do you not know how to fucking read? I already know about that, and I mentioned it earlier. It doesn't fit the bill at all.

[Durandal]

I believe that sort of thing is a prominent feature of OSX and many Linux distros. They have some font-scaling thing, and I think that's what it does.

Mac OS X's resolution-independence is present but not complete. You can experiment with different DPI scaling factors in the Quartz Debug application, but there are still obvious flaws in the positioning algorithms (views don't line up correctly). But the fonts look great.

In any case, all Apple applications shipping on Leopard are high-DPI ready, meaning that they use CoreUI to do their drawing, and their image resources are very high resolution bitmaps or represented as PDFs. Font scaling is the easy part of resolution independence, because we've been scaling fonts to arbitrary point sizes for decades now. The hard part is deciding how to trade off between a purely vectorized approach (which has huge computational demands, and some things are hard to describe purely with vectors) and a high-resolution image-scaling approach (which has huge memory demands and is not infinitely scalable).

[Adrian Laguna]

Do you not know how to fucking read? I already know about that, and I mentioned it earlier. It doesn't fit the bill at all.

You said you changed the font sizes. Changing the DPI setting makes everything larger, including menus and icons.


EDIT - Well I'll be dammed, this thread is not that thread. So, thinking I'd already read them, I missed every post but the last few.