Clarity of text

Hi, I was wondering what hardware of a laptop screen deteremines the clarity of text? I mean some laptops seems to have crystal clear while others have a little foggy. So what is it? How can get a laptop with the best possible text clarity? I am asking this b/c even though, I sit on my sister's laptop: Dell Inspiron 1501, after a while, it makes my eyes burn. However when I sit on my bro's high def. sony monitor which is pretty expensive, my eyes don't burn at all. Please note that the effect is not immediate it happens if I read a book on it or something.

Thx.

 

Uh...I'm not sure about the burning your eyes part...But from what I know, the text clarity is mainly affected by 1) getting a good lcd in general and 2) the screen resolution. Text clarity is highest at the native resolution of the screen.

 

I would emphasise that LCDs are only sharp when used at their native resolution, otherwise a lot of interpolation goes on and the display becomes blurred. The maximum resolution offered in Display > Properties > Settings is usually the native resolution (unless the option to show modes the display cannot handle has been checked).

People often step down the resolution to make everything a bit bigger, but the best way to enlarge everything is to increase the display DPI setting above the standard 96DPI. However, certain things, particularly dialog boxes, assume 96DPI in their design and text can get truncated at the edge of the box. The DPI setting is at Display > Properties > Settings > Advanced.

Personally, I don't like a fuzzy LCD, but the people who use them often don't know what a sharp LCD looks like. They are probably happy to not have any flicker.

John

 

I know about that, and thats now it. My sis' LCD is at its highest resolution. And hey Who3marice, who do you mean by good lcd in general? What part of hardware are you talking about?

Her laptop is still pretty good, I mean my eyes only burn if I do hardcore reading for hours on it. But my point is, when I do that on my bro's lcd monitor, I don't anything at all, also I checked, he has the widescreen from dell, not sony as I mentioned earlier. So both are good, but relatively one is better. Which is what I am trying to understand. How do you get which is relatively better? if its rather the combination then how can I determine which is the best laptop in the market for reading?

 

Maybe you already considered this, but you can tell windows to anti-alias the text on the screen. This means letters will be rounded and will not excist only out of black and white pixels, the letters will contain grey tints. This is called Cleartype and may cause the difference between the two screens.

You can turn Cleartype on on every windows xp and higher (maybe earlier versions too, I don't know). It is in the display setting menu (the tab where you can choose the window styles (in XP, Vista I don't know))

I hope this is the problem and I hope I was able to help you.

 

If you haven't already, try using ClearType

It has helped a great deal with me

 

Well, some lcds are just plain better than others. It's like comparing a low end Acer to an IBM Thinkpad T60. Both are laptops, but one's clearly better, right? My family has an LCD screen by some company (not sure off the top of my head, I think it might be ProView?) that we got for free after rebate (hooray for Black Friday)...but it just plain sucks. Everything is fuzzy, the screen flickers, there are horizontal lines running across the screen. Some screens have a higher nit count (=brightness) which can add to screen quality. There are plenty of other things as well, pitch, pixel count, etc.

 

Thx a lot guys.

 

I feel the opposite: Cleartype makes text look fuzzy and weird in my eyes and i always turn it off when possible.
And also, to me, even the smallest scaling looks bad, no matter what the appliction (even games).

 

you can used IOISLAND clear tweak... try it and see the difference..