High DPI - complex issues

I have just bought a T520 with the FHD (15.6" 1920x1080) screen, and I am really struggling with blurry fonts, blurry images in web pages (only tried IE9), UI legibility etc.

I have done about twelve hours of googling on the subject, but don't feel that I am all that close to a solution. I can accept a kludge at this stage, as long as it is a mostly useable kludge. So really I am just looking for people who have 15.6" FHD screens (ideally I suppose of the same kind as the T520), who have found a decent workable set-up.

My main problem seems to be in finding a Custom DPI setting and a font plus Cleartype combination that allows me a legible non-blurry size of text. I also seem to have image scaling problems in IE9. I don't really intend to use IE9 after I manage to set up this laptop, but I am worried that this may apply also to other browsers. I intend to use Firefox, because I understand it has decent colour management for wide gamut displays (as does IE9), whereas Chrome for example does not.

So, for those who have a similar screen, please tell me your settings.

Things I have already looked at:

In Windows 7, Microsoft has really baked in the Segoe UI fonts, and Cleartype, such that to remove them is a serious PITA. For example, many interface elements are hidden from the user controls in Control Panel Personalization, so in order to change the font for those elements requires at best some theme and/or registry hacking, and at worst just cannot be done. The same goes for Cleartype, which still crops up however much you try to disable it (explicitly or with the "smooth edges of screen fonts" thing). If you doubt this, please research the subject before replying.

If I could just obtain a useable interface with Segoe and Cleartype, I would mind less about the inelegance of the way this has been implemented. As it is, I have not found useable settings, so the poor implementation is annoying me quite a lot.

Anyway, I am aware of things such as NoSegoe and Windows Aero (Tahoma), which are both efforts essentially to eliminate Segoe and Cleartype from the Windows UI. If I need to go that far, I will experiment, but I would rather not.

Settings/issues I am aware of:
1. Cleartype (On/Off) plus tuning.
2. DPI scaling (including custom, and XP style scaling On/Off).
3. Changing interface font and point size through Personalization - Theme - Window Color - Advanced Appearance Settings. The fact that this is only partially effective can be seen within the "Window Color and Appearance" dialog itself because there is a tab on the dialog labelled "Window Color and Appearance" for which the text size cannot be changed within the dialog, a nice irony.
4. Registry hacking to point Segoe fonts to another font.
5. Theme customization, playing with .msstyle files.
6. Reverting to Windows Classic.
7. The fact that different fonts may have better hinting at different point sizes.
8. Need to cope with non-dpi aware and dpi aware applications.
9. Forcing the use of different rendering paths in Windows (WDDM 1.0 or WDDM 1.1), or replacing the GDI+ rasterizer.
10. Some other things!

 

Well, I have found a simple setting that is so far the best one, namely just putting custom dpi to 147%, which gives me 141 dpi, the native dpi of the display.

This seems to solve the worst of the blurriness, although I find it to be a waste of space overall, e.g. the Start Menu is now just over 5 inches, or about 13cm, tall. (The height of the display is about 7.6 inches, or 19.4cm, so yeah, a bit of a display hog.) In addition, I still don't like the look of the antialiased text.

Hoping for better ideas!

 

I am reading that actually IE9 has the best native scaling. There is a Firefox add-on called NoSquint that is supposed to clean up FF's scaling issues, but I am not sure it interacts well with a custom dpi setting in Windows. Anyone with any experience of this?

I sort of want to go with Firefox for the ad blocking more than anything, although I believe you can get some of that through Tracking Protection Lists in IE9, if you add Easylist as well as Easyprivacy. I read that there is less granularity in IE though in terms of distinguishing ads from other content, so the Easylist thing is a semi-hack.

 

Well, I will continue the monologue, in case it helps anyone.

I have compared IE9 and Firefox plus NoSquint (not in a highly scientific way), and I find the output to be very similar for a given zoom setting. NoSquint is much more customisable, however, e.g. it can remember zoom-levels on a per site basis, and in any case as I have said, Firefox is my preferred browser for unrelated reasons. NoSquint can also zoom either or both text and images.

I have installed a custom icc profile for the display that I found on the Lenovo forums, posted by someone with an i1 Display2 color calibrator:
W520 Wide Gamut Color Profiles in v2 and v4 versio... - Lenovo Community
It seems the profile that comes built-in with the Lenovo display driver actually does nothing (!). The auto-calibration feature on the W520 is also seemingly useless. Anyway, the new profile I installed seems reasonable having tested it with various online calibration images.

One thing I am unsure of is whether I have properly tuned Cleartype for my display. The display has BGR subpixel rendering. Under Windows XP it was possible to download a Powertoy for Cleartype and explicitly select a BGR type display. In Windows 7, there is a Wizard-style tuner with no explicit option, but perhaps the wizard implicitly optimises for BGR as one chooses between the offered renderings. It may be possible to run the XP Powertoy under Windws 7, but I have not tried yet.

Anyway, I am getting there, but it seems as though it is harder than it should be.

Edit: By the way, this Microsoft download: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2545698 did help font rendering in IE9.

 

It turns out that the Windows 7 Cleartype Tuner does not seem to pick up the need for BGR-type adjustments.

There is a per-User registry setting at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\FontSmoothingOrientation , which should be set to 2 if you have a BGR monitor. In my case, it was set to 1 (standard LCD). 0 is for CRT monitors.

So I changed it to 2 (if you are a Standard, i.e. non-admin, user, you need to run Regedit as an Administrator,using "Run as", accessible by right-clicking the Regedit.exe in the Windows folder). Then I reran the Cleartype Tuner.

I think the results are a bit better, but not radically so.

 

I don't want to bore you, but I feel I have made a further small improvement by reducing the Custom DPI scaling percentage to 133% from 147%.

My reasoning was that 9-point text, which is the default size of the Segoe font in Windows 7, would then render at a height of exactly 16 pixels, the same as 12-point text at 100% dpi scaling. I have a feeling it might be easier to render fonts to an integer number of pixels, although honestly this is beyond my knowledge as of now.

It also means that the interface is less "blown up", compared with 147%, and therefore less blurry with non-dpi-aware apps (which must be pixel-stretched).

After a further re-tune of Cleartype at this scale, the Windows interface seems quite useable. I have done the same with default browser scaling with NoSquint (133%). It just remains to investigate if Office apps need tweaking.

 

Well, I have made some more discoveries.

IE9 doesn't support color management after all, except in a narrow sense. It does respect directives in tagged images, but it cannot render an image in anything other than the sRGB color space. In short, it is of no use to people with wide gamut displays.

The behaviour of IE9 is actually somewhat typical of many applications that are sometimes described as "color managed". For example, the popular image viewer Irfanview has the same issues. This means it can be quite hard to establish what applications are suitable for use on wide gamut displays.

A further problem I have discovered is that there are two separate components to the in-built color calibration of Windows 7. Firstly, there is the gamma setting; and secondly there is the need to load the correct color look-up table (LUT) into your video card driver.

For gamma, after adding your ICC profile from the "Devices" tab of the Color Management applet, you should select it and set it as your default profile by pressing the appropriately-labelled button on that tab. You should also select the checkbox labelled "Use my settings for this device". This will deal with gamma.

As for the LUT, it is surprisingly hard, in the Windows GUI, to instruct the OS to handle it correctly.

You need to run the Color Management applet as an administrator (I think you may need actually to log in to an administrator account - I couldn't see how to use "Run as"). You click on the "Advanced" tab, and press the button labelled "Change system defaults". A new window opens, and once again you must select the "Advanced" tab. The checkbox option labelled "Use Windows display calibration" should now be selected. This will ensure the correct LUT is loaded by your video card, based on your ICC profile. You should now close out of the Color Management windows.

A further problem arises because, especially with Intel-based graphics, the system will forget the LUT from time to time and revert to default settings based on sRGB monitors. This can happen whenever a UAC prompt is activated, e.g. when resuming from standby. A workaround is to disable all the Intel graphics startup processes, such as igfpers.exe and igfxtray.exe, which are not really needed for normal uses, and (possibly) then to adapt a built-in task in Windows's Task Scheduler, which reloads the calibration settings after log-in of your normal user account.

I have had real difficulties in understanding how to get the Windows calibration loader to work consistently for a Standard User (no admin rights), and I still don't get it. Having tried all kinds of privilege elevation within Task Scheduler, to no avail, I then found the problem just seemed magically to disappear. I reverted everything in Task Scheduler back to the defaults, and I haven't seen the problem reappear yet.

Anyway, within the Task Scheduler GUI, there is a folder hierarchy, and under "Task Scheduler Library\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsColorSystem", you should find a built-in task called "Calibration Loader". Play around here; it might help you.

Some more tips:

-Firefox, in recent versions, only supports ICC v2 profiles because of a bug in the v4 profile handling.

-The Windows desktop is not color managed, so your icons, wallpaper and so on cannot be corrected by the OS for wide gamut displays. I recommend muted wallpaper!

 

Hmm, to add a different voice to this somewhat one-sided thread , I wonder how much of what you are seeing is really due to graphics card/driver-related issues. As one data point, my Dell Precision M4500 (FHD) came set up with the standard 125%DPI setting, and this seems to work fine for all font sizes I throw at it. Everything is razor-sharp. However, I admit that I don't feel like experimenting with this setting, and trying custom DPIs, since I know from experience that this can land you in DPI hell, from which only a system restore from an image can save you...

Anyhow, do you get good quality rendering if you just use the 125% setting?

 

Thanks! I was beginning to think I was going mad, just talking to myself.

My machine arrived with what appeared to be the factory installation, re-installed from the Lenovo recovery partition (this is a second-user machine).

Like your's, my system was set to 125% dpi scaling; but text seemed horribly blurry, even after a Clearype tune, so that is when I started trying something different.

I think a big problem may have been the fact that, as I was setting up the machine, I was using IE9, for which Microsoft has made available a patch for blurry font problems (see above).

But in the course of my investigations I uncovered the registry setting to do BGR-optimised Cleartype, and also experimented with different scalings, eventually settling on 133%, which I find about right in terms of legibility of the Windows UI. (Changing the point size of UI fonts caused problems with text not fitting into text boxes and so on, plus there are certain UI elements that are not exposed in the Control Panel interface, so you end up with fonts of differing sizes, unless you really hunt things down in the registry.)

So I would agree with you - I don't think it is really a question of driver or graphics card issues as far dpi is concerned. It was more the fact that certain problems of the Operating System in its default configuration were exposed by my particular hardware (high dpi, BGR display, unpatched IE9).

The driver and graphics card issues relate more to the color management side of things, which arise because my display is also wide gamut, not sRGB.

 

But see, this is what I find strange to begin with: At the same setting, and same screen resolution, my M4500 looked perfectly fine. My fonts look sharp in all sizes.

I also never had an issue with IE9, which I installed over IE8 once the final version had become available.

Since this is a second-user machine, I keep thinking that somebody somehow botched something in the past. I don't know if that is even an option for you, but if there's not too much software and configuration that went into this machine, you might consider reinstalling the OS from scratch (not from a recovery image; it's possible that Lenovo has botched this on their side).

What I can say for certain is that the issues you have been fighting are not normal for Windows 7.

 

I don't know, maybe it's because your M4500 has an RGB-LED screen as opposed to BGR?

It's not an option that I find especially attractive . Things seems OK now, apart from the need to locate decent software that is fully color-managed.

 

Yes, that is possible.

Heh, I hear you... And, sure, if things work well enough, then it's probably best to leave 'em alone.

 

OS X Lion appears to have a very useful HiDPI features that allow for "resolution independence" by increasing image sizes and font scales for high resolution displays. This is precisely how Apple will manage to make "retina displays" readable on upcoming Macbooks.

I haven't used it myself but it does seem to make sense. It will be interesting to see how long it takes this sort of functionality to appear in Windows and Linux? Apple apparently has been working on it since 2005?