Comments on: Weird resolutions for 23″ LCDs popping up

By: cherry

cherry — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:09:30 +0000

I think what he meant is that on smaller screens with too high of a resolution, the pixels will appear very small. So the easy solution is to not use the highest resolution. =)

By: BobW

BobW — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:15:00 +0000

I apparently wasn’t clear.

I have two situations:

1) A 22″ 1920×1200 monitor on my desktop. The pixel density is higher than your 24″. Things sized by pixel are tiny. The desktop runs XP.

2) A 12″ 1280×800 LCD on my laptop. The pixel density is also quite high. The laptop runs Vista.

The dialog problem was on the laptop. I got the enormous Office dialogs when I used the facility under Vista that zooms the screen. I am less familiar with Vista than I might be, so I may have misadjusted it.

It’s also important to differentiate between the browser and application windows. I think Ctrl+ and CTRL- only work on the browser.

By: notgonnatellya

notgonnatellya — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:30:18 +0000

BobW, I don’t understand what you’re saying at all. I’m on a 24" 19×12 monitor. I can easily fit 1 browsers on the screen with room to spare. If I felt the need to use larger fonts, on this page, I can hit CTRL+ 7 times and still not have a horizontal scroll-bar (at 8 there is one, but I lose nothing).

If you’re legally blind, then I suppose this may not be sufficient, but even without glasses, I can read the screen from several feet away (when enlarged +8). If I wear my glasses it’d be at least 10 feet.

On Yahoo, I can only enlarge it 5 times before they stops rearranging the UI.

For dialogs, does it help to use the the magnifying glass tool they have in Vista? Don’t recall where it is, because I never use it, but maybe that’s a work around. Are you using Office 2003 or 2007? Maybe the Ribbon UI works better…..with that said, it might be worth waiting for 2010 at this point…especially if you use outlook, since it doesn’t always use the ribbon UI in 2007.

By: BobW

BobW — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:54:00 +0000

I've been adjusting font sizes since Windows 3.0. Vista has a way to scale everything on the screen up.

Neither is very satisfactory. Most web pages hard code fonts and font sizes. If you set the browser to ignore font size specifications it ruins all placement on most pages. If you set the browser to scale the whole page it ends up too wide for the screen even on wide screen monitors.

I scaled up the entire screen in Vista and it gave me those fun enormous dialogs.

Whatever happened to dialogs coded to use the default system font?

By: George Ou

George Ou — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:09:55 +0000

BobW, you can change the font sizes in Windows. Most web browsers also let you change font size (including image size). I agree it isn’t perfect, but that’s the problem with raster based user interfaces. We’re long overdue for a fast 2D vector based user interface that isn’t sluggish.

Jeremy, I don’t recommend going vertical since font smoothing technology doesn’t work that way.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:07:42 +0000

Yeah I must say, my 24" is crazy wide for most things. Viewing Apple HD movie trailiers and watch Netflix streaming is great, but on the web, I end up with a lotta white space.
Unfortunately I went semi-cheap and got a Asus 1080p monitor with HDMI and built-in speakers, forgetting that on such a big monitor it would be nice to have it rotate for less scrolling on websites with a lot of reading.

By: BobW

BobW — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:03:42 +0000

Now all we need is software that doesn't display everything in teeny tiny pixel sizes.

I have a 22" 1920x1200 Lenovo monitor, and I also have a 1280x800 LCD on my 12" laptop.

Web pages tend to specify placements in pixels This tends to be too small to read.

Adjustments are a pain. After setting the display to adjust for the higher density various dialogs in MS Office were too big for the screen.