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Large LCD screen and blurriness
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 12:25 pm
by alex.barylski
So I went shopping for LCD monitor's the other day...looked at a few 20" and 22" wide screen and normal LCD monitors...
The most expensive ($799) 22" was an HP non-wide screen monitor and the cheapest was an Acer 20" wide screen...
I fired up notepad on each and copy and pasted a bunch of garbage...and starred at the screen for a bit...I noticed that some monitors (running Windows and having tuned off ClearType rendering) some monitors had a shaper picture than others...
Constract Ratio seemed to help in making the picture more "sharp" for instance the HP was I believe 1800:1 whereas the Acer models were 600:1 and so on...
Despite the same size monitor and wide screen format, etc...the expensive monitor seemed more sharp - which is what I like when staring at a screen all day. Part of the reason I dislike Linux for development...Windows fonts appears more sharp...despite having installed them under Ubuntu Windows still looks better (not the point of this disscussion).
The point is, I found some monitors made the text blurry, especially smaller fonts...my 15" LCD on my laptop running XP home is awesome...better than a CRT. I can stare at this screen all day without wincing. I believe it's wide screen...
The larger the screen the more blurry the font became - is this a correct assumption of mine? Should I dump more money and buy a high quality? Has anyone made this observation as well or were my eyes playing tricks on me?
Cheers

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 12:31 pm
by Chris Corbyn
I believe if you're using VGA rather than DVI you'll get interference with electrical equipment nearby. However, some monitors do distort more than others anyway. It's funny you should mention anti-aliasing of fonts. I find it hard to see how it can be a bad thing. OS X does it too... it only seems to be windows who haven't started doing that.
PS: You can turn font anti-aliasing off in most desktop environments too

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 12:40 pm
by Ollie Saunders
Part of the reason I dislike Linux for development...Windows fonts appears more sharp...despite having installed them under Ubuntu Windows still looks better (not the point of this disscussion).
I have exactly the same problem! I really can't stand it.
On my Mac fonts with anti-aliasing are too blurry for me and without are too faint. I stick with anti-aliased but I really prefer Windows' look. You seem to be able to fit so much more on screen per pixel in windows too. When screens commonly display 4096 by whatever resolutions then anti-aliasing will be great (with a bigger font of course) until then I'm not happy.
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 12:41 pm
by feyd
When displaying images that are not at the native pixel resolution images will blur. Higher native pixel counts will increase the blur effect. Some displays are better at upsampling than others. The physical display surface size often correlates to higher pixel counts. However, the more pixel density is, the sharper things will appear.
The key is running stuff at the native resolution of the display only, nothing more, nothing less. .. Although as long as the display mode is near (one step away in either direction) the native resolution, it will often not look too bad.
Contrast ratios does help, as can internals being of better quality. DVI connections are better than VGA at many resolutions. While refresh rates are important on CRTs, LCDs don't really have as many problems at 60hz.. although I do recommend staying as high as possible given the native resolution of the display.
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 12:51 pm
by alex.barylski
feyd wrote:When displaying images that are not at the native pixel resolution images will blur. Higher native pixel counts will increase the blur effect. Some displays are better at upsampling than others. The physical display surface size often correlates to higher pixel counts. However, the more pixel density is, the sharper things will appear.
The key is running stuff at the native resolution of the display only, nothing more, nothing less. .. Although as long as the display mode is near (one step away in either direction) the native resolution, it will often not look too bad.
Contrast ratios does help, as can internals being of better quality. DVI connections are better than VGA at many resolutions. While refresh rates are important on CRTs, LCDs don't really have as many problems at 60hz.. although I do recommend staying as high as possible given the native resolution of the display.
I made sure to set them all to their native resolution...but it was only small fonts that blurred on some monitors...everything else appeared fine...the problem is...as developers we stare as small fonts all day, so I kinda want that clear and sharp as possible...
Higher native pixel counts will blur the display you say...?
So I wasn't seeing things when I looked at a 17, 19, 20 and 22" and noticed the 19 and 17 had the sharpest display?
I really need to be able to look at the screen for more than a couple minutes so I'll go with a 19" if it's clearer than a 22"
How do you measure pixel density?
the number of pixels at native resolution and the size of the physical screen?
So my laptop right now is a 15.4" widescreen with a native res of 1280x800 - not sure what the contrast ratio is though?
I should try and find a monitor with similar density if I want the "sharpness" of my laptop?
Cheers

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 1:20 pm
by feyd
Hockey wrote:Higher native pixel counts will blur the display you say...?
So I wasn't seeing things when I looked at a 17, 19, 20 and 22" and noticed the 19 and 17 had the sharpest display?
Let me say it another way: at the same resolution across a variety of displays the image will blur (or artifact) more the farther away from native resolution of the display it is with LCD panels. This is entirely due to the fact that they cannot change their pixel dimensions like CRTs do.
Hockey wrote:How do you measure pixel density?
It's pixels per inch.. or some other unit of measure. It has to do with a calculation of the native pixels and the size of the display, essentially.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixels_per_inch
Since I run at a pretty high native resolution (1920x1200 on two displays) my fonts aren't set all that small. I believe my settings vary between 10 and 12 pt.
You also may want to look into the ClearType tweaking power-toy if you're having troubles with smaller sizes getting too blurry.
The higher pixel density displays will almost always cost more. Also the quality of the materials used, and even the quality of the panels themselves can vary between manufacturers.
The displays I prefer right now are LaCie, Dell and Apple. My grandparents have a Gateway one that isn't bad either hooked up to their Mac.
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 2:18 pm
by alex.barylski
Cool, thanks

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 2:21 pm
by Chris Corbyn
I'm just waiting for the day they make programmer spectacles so you can stick a pair of glasses on and see clear code everywhere you look.
Hmm, thinking about it, that would so totally suck if they used a VGA cable.... you'd want at least 10 metres so you could wander around a bit.
EDIT | No, actually a monocale would improve things about or you'd spill your coffee everywhere
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 2:22 pm
by Kieran Huggins
@feyd: dual 1080p, eh? I'm jealous!
I've been waiting and waiting for 24" LCDs to drop so I can replace my dual 21" tubes.
Soon....
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 2:27 pm
by Jenk
Ghosting will occur when the monitors contrast ratio and response times are low and slow respectively. Contrast ratio you want as high as possible, response time you want as low as possible. Samsung SM940's have 700:1 and 2ms response - they are very sharp.
Also look out for viewing angle, you might think "But I'm only going to be sat infront of the thing.. why should 180 degree viewing angle matter?" but when you get lower viewing angles, you'll notice a difference in colour between corners and a plain colour (fullscreen) will appear like a gradient.
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 4:49 pm
by Ollie Saunders
Samsung SM940's have 700:1 and 2ms response - they are very sharp
My friend has some Samsungs, I know he boasted about a very fast response so I guess that could be the model. They are exceptional, he's always complaining about web designers compressing their images too much. I thought he was just being an obsessive but when I saw a couple of sites through those beauties I could really see what we meant.
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 6:45 pm
by jayshields
I'm going to break the mould here. I don't care much for monitors. I've been using the same 17" CRT for about 8 years. I like to use the motto "If it isn't broke, don't fix it", so that's mostly why. I can't see anything wrong with this, and deskspace is not an issue.
At uni I have a TFT. It's 14/15" and the frame bit (what's the word for that? It's on the tip of my tongue...) must be 6" wide on every side, lol. It's absolutely ancient; it's an IBM! I play games through that, it's VGA and I convert from DVI and I just can't see anything wrong with it at all. The on/off button doesn't even work! I have to leave it on standby constantly! To me that's not worth spending £150 for a new monitor though.
I'm the same with Hard Drives. I've been using the same HDD's for about 8 years, but there's nothing wrong with either of them. Back then 60gb was huge. I just bought a 250gb SATA2, but I'm going to keep my old drives in and use all 3.
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 7:14 pm
by feyd
jayshields wrote:It's 14/15" and the frame bit (what's the word for that? It's on the tip of my tongue...) must be 6" wide on every side, lol.
The bezel.
jayshields wrote:I'm the same with Hard Drives. I've been using the same HDD's for about 8 years, but there's nothing wrong with either of them. Back then 60gb was huge. I just bought a 250gb SATA2, but I'm going to keep my old drives in and use all 3.
I go through drives fairly quickly.
For example, I've got 1TB in storage as some may remember sitting in my current desktop. It currently only has 75GB free.

I doubt that'll last through the end of the semester. .. but by then, I will likely be getting a nicely decked out Mac Pro.
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 7:20 pm
by jayshields
Dragging the thread slightly off-topic, but how can you fill all that?! It must be raw video? How long does it take you to defragment?! Is it set up as RAID?
All I store on my computer are a few hundred photos (<1mb each) and all my music (7gb). I've not got many apps installed, and as soon as I finish a game, I remove it. I heard no matter how large your disk drives are, you should never use more than 75% of the capacity, is that true?
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 7:26 pm
by feyd
Here's a link to the last reference to it that I recall:
viewtopic.php?p=270690#270690
I'll try to break it down quickly: lots of (legal) music; lots of large photos, images, and video files for work; several very large applications.
As for the 75% "myth" .. I haven't heard of such a thing, sorry.