1920x1200 display..nitemare to the eyes!

i thought id make myself proud and ordered an alienware m5550 with a 1920x1200 display, instead of the standard 1280x800. The shipment arrived and i was amazed at the clarity of the micro display...for a while. soon it was headaches or sore eyes from continually tryin to strain at what was been printed at nano-metric sizes on the screen. tried a few other resolutions, viz 1680x1050, 1024x650 and so on, but they all lack crispness and seem overly blurred. tried all other cranks that i could rig up...changed font sizes, windows and stardock themes, dpi settings ..and am still at square one.

is there any else that can be done to improve/increase the overall size of dekstop elements and fonts at this 1920 resolution??

thanx in advance.

 

lcds need to be run at native res,if its not at native res,its going to be fuzzy, its always a good idea to go to several stores and look at various display types before you order, you can go to the appearance tab under display prperties and increase the dpi, that will enlarge your fonts

 

I agree that downscaling the resolution increases the fuzziness. Did you enable ClearType? I find this makes a big difference to the legibility of the high resolution displays.

The best setting to change is the DPI setting under Display Properties > Settings > Advanced. I have my WSXGA+ 15.4" display set to 120 DPI and most things are about the right size. You would probably need an even higher setting (?144 DPI?).

I read somewhere that Vista will fix the size problem by reading the display size and resolution and adjust itself so that the font sizes on the display would be the same as the font sizes when printed. I presume similar intelligence would be applied to graphics and icons. However, that was written a year ago but I have never seen this feature mentioned in reviews of Vista.

John

 

Yea I totally agree. Native resolution is probably the best for the LCDs. I too have a 1900 x 1200 resolution screen. The first day I got it, I left it like that because you know you paid it you want it right . But now trying to save my eyes, I reduced it down to 1650. Sometimes I would even connect my laptop to an external lcd to make it 1280.

 

As gorgeous as displays with this resolution (and higher on desktops) are they can be a pain (literally) for the eyes. They also can effect gaming peformance. 1600x1200 or 1680x1050 etc is the perfect balance if you ask me for visuals and performance.

 

i think you'd better buy a cheap external LCD
i've never seen any point in throwing money at a WUXGA smaller than 17", or even 19", it's quite good for pictures editing though , you can't run games at 1900x1200 with Go7600

 

had the same issue when I got my inspiron 8500 about 4 years back. I hated that display and still do to this day. I finally settled on about 132dpi with large fonts.

One gottcha there is some programs simply do not deal with scaling to allow prompts, menus, etc for different font sizes and screen dpi. Soooo, you might need to guess at some promts for some applications

WUXGA+ on a 15.4" display might be one of the biggest cheats from laptop makers there is...but in their defense MS promised true font scaling in SP2 but pulled it out at the last minute instead adding it to Vista. If we had gotten that as promised our WUXGA+ displays might not actually induce blindess from use...

 

If you haven't already, try installing(or if done so already), tinkering around with ClearType.

 

iv tried changing dpi, and tuning with cleartype wizard... windows menus & its related objects look ok...but when viewing webpages, its all a myriad mix of font sizes here and there. overriding default fonts/sizes does seem to have some effect thought. hopefully vista will be easy on the eyes...and one last odd thought..keeping a monitor attached to the laptop...doesnt this go against the whole idea of portability?

 

Thats why i get 1440x900 in my dell 9400. I think 1900x1200 is to much, only thing its good for is pictures and games if you got the gpu card to handle it.

 

Yea I would've gotten the 1440 lcd but it wasn't glossy. Maybe it is different now.

 

Change the properties for the size of the icons/ text. Here is how-Display properties-> appearance-> effects-> use large icons, and on the appearance tab, change the text size from normal to large or extra large.