LCD Native Resolution VS Screen Resolution

[BJZeak]

Using LG L204 screens with native resolution of 1680x1050 relative ratio of 1.6 driven by (NVIDIA GEFORCE 7300) ... it has always been my understanding that if you needed to run anything outside native resolution on an LCD that one should choose a screen resolution that has the same relative ratio H / V. as the native resolution ... So I created a custom resultion of 1440x900 which is also 1.6 and set screen to this resolution ... the result was not very good.

Is there a general rule of thumb that one can use for changing the resolution or is this just trial and error?

We want to use 120dpi in native resolution which works great for most apps but our accounting software provider doesn't work in 120dpi and is unwilling to modify their software to work in that mode. They recommended we switch to 1440x900 but we are finding this extremely difficult for reading anything due to the inconsistancy of the font character thicknesses and blurred/fuzzy pictures.

 

[cdogg]

1440x900 is the correct resolution that you should be stepping down to. Realize however that even when you keep the H/V ratio correct, it doesn't guarantee a clear visual.

We have a lot of basic 19" LCD's where I work with a native resolution of 1280x1024. Although they look like crap at the next level down (1152x864), the picture recovers when you set it even lower at 1024x768 (not as sharp as the native resolution but like 5 times sharper than 1152x864). So there is clearly more going on that just the ratio. The monitor has to rely on interpolation to scale the image when using a non-native resolution. Obviously this works at some ratios better than others. From what I've read, it appears that the effect interpolation has on the loss of quality can sometimes be helped by using a DVI connection over a VGA connection when the monitor supports both.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
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[Nelviticus]

The problem is that unlike the old CRTs an LCD screen is like a sheet of graph paper - it actually has pixels, so yours has 1680 pixels horizontally and 1050 vertically. For any resolution other than 1680 x 1050 the graphics card software is going to have to figure out approximately which pixels to fill in.

Choosing other resolutions in the same ratio just means that things will be distorted horizontally exactly as much as they are distorted vertically. You may find that a different resolution in a different ratio actually looks better, because one of the dimensions might not be distorted as much.

If the software allows it you could try a custom resolution of 840 x 525, exactly half that of the screen. That way each pixel of the image will take up a block of exactly four pixels of the display, which will be ugly and low-res but at least consistent across the screen and not blurry.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[cdogg]

Yes, that's a good suggestion to try the half-resolution of 840x525. Things will seem ugly-big but at least it won't be blurry!