On Sat, 2007-02-17 at 10:36 -0500, Claude Jones wrote: > I had always followed the above adage, but of late, I've seen signs and > have had evidence that it no longer holds, and I've wondered about that. In > the early days of lcd's trying to use anything but native resolution always > looked horrible. I've seen more recent offerings where that didn't hold - so, > I wonder if you know what accounts for that. Is there some fancy > anti-aliasing going in the video cards, have the lcd chip technologies > changed, or what? For example, my HP ZX5000 laptop with native 1920X1200 > screen reso, looks just fine if I down-rez it - there's a very slight > increase in aliasing, and a very slight blurring, but, nothing like I've seen > on early vintage lcd's. It could be as simple as this: Newer LCD screens have higher resolutions than the older ones, and the aliasing errors on in-between screen modes, as well as non-synchronised pixels and LCD elements, are now just smaller. An 800x600 screen really only works at that rate. Trying 640x480 on it is going to look awful because it's not directly half (two graphic pixels will not cover exactly one LCD element). Take that up to around twice that resolution, and you've got much smaller screen pixels to work with. Errors are much smaller. And you've got more options (the native resolution, and direct divisions like half resolution), ones in-between will still have *some* aliasing errors. If OSs would only get better at letting you pick sizes of fonts and GUI elements, we'd be in a better boat. Some people don't want to run their monitors at full resolution as the display gets too tiny, and what they have to counteract that doesn't do a very good job. -- (This PC runs FC4, my others FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
