Increase your effective resolution dramatically

I almost put a question mark at the end of the thread title, but I really want the "brain trust" (and you know who you are!) of the Sony Forum to take a good look at this and say what you think. I haven't tried it myself, frankly because it strikes me as "too good to be true" or at least too good to be virtually unknown.

So what "it" is, is that someone recently posted (on a different forum, I don't even remember which) the post shown below about dramatically increasing your screen resolution far in excess of it's native maximum. As you'll see below, the poster's thumbnails show greatly increased vertical and horizontal real estate from his screen's native 1280x800 to 1706x1066 (not sure why he chose that particular resolution, but the point is the same: it apparently worked!)

So, with all the brew-ha-ha over screen resolution and the tragedy (when going from 1280x800 to 1366x768) of losing 32 pixels of vertical image, while gaining 88 pixels of horizontal image, which can be very handy in viewing two windows side by side or wide spreadsheets - but I digress...

I recently came upon this post suggesting a simple hack can get you almost any DPI resolution you choose, and the result can be quite crisp and clear even if you choose a vastly greater density than your screen's native one. Comments from those of you who know better, and have the knowledge/guts to try this out "at home?"

How to Hack DPI settings in Windows 7 (likely works for Vista too)

lightnica
Notebook Consultant

Join Date: May 2011
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How to Hack DPI settings in Windows 7 (likely works for Vista too)
<hr style='color:#EEEEEE' size='1'> I've been wishing my laptop display resolution was higher than 1280x800 for a while now.

I decided earlier today to mess around with windows' DPI. The front end however only lets you raise the DPI (make things bigger). So I did a bit of googling and found the back-end way, via the registry.

[Insert token warning about messing with your registry here.]

It was actually pretty easy. In regedit (if you don't know what this is stop here please), go to HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG>Software>Fonts. Change the decimal value of LogPixels from the default of 96 to something lower. I went for 72 (75% of "normal" DPI). Then reboot.

Most things resized nicely on reboot. Firefox however only "half" a resized, the menus got smaller but the actual webpage didn't. As a work around I grabbed the "Default Zoom Level" addon for it and set the default zoom to 75%.

For me the net result is my 1280x800 display is now pretending to be a 1706x1066 display. I've attached a screen capture, what do you think?
<fieldset class='fieldset'> <legend>Attached Thumbnails</legend>
</fieldset>
<hr style='color:#EEEEEE' size='1'> Last edited by lightnica : 06-21-2011 at 06:59 PM.

 

did you try to display a picture?

very interesting tho, i will try this on my 24" 1200p at home

 

well it doesnt really increase your screen resolution per se. i just tried it on my acer timeline with 1366x768 screen, it feels like theres more space and certain icons are shrinked accordingly (but not all, such as back/forward button stayed the same size). however, right click on the desktop and select "screen resolution" and its still stuck at 1366x768, so you technically dont gain anything other than some "perceived screen space" but some of your application layout will break/mess up eventually because you are forcing some text and icons to be smaller.

this is technically the same as making your font size DPI bigger, but the other way around (though windows wont let you go below 96 or 100% unless you hack it via the registry). i honestly dont think u will gain anything here since the screen resolution doesnt change. try loading a pixel-based image at 100% and i'd bet nothing changes

 

I think I follow you, but there's no question the OP with this idea was able to fit more rows and columns of legible text onto his 1280x800 monitor. It is just a "DPI trick" I suppose, but it seems to offer some real benefits in certain cases in our pixel-starved ultraportable world, no?

 

i must admit that the shrinken text is rather hard to read and i have good eye vision myself, i prolly wont recommend it in the long run

anyways, the registry hack is perfectly safe to do, go give it a try yourself; just change back to 96 if you want to go back to normal

 

Aren't we just talking about the thing that Windows and other operating systems do (even OS/2 used to do this years ago). That is: when you define a larger resolution than the display/display card can handle, it creates a larger desktop (for example 1706x1066). Your monitor then becomes a window into that larger desktop, meaning, you can't see your whole desktop at once, you have to scroll it around to see everything.
Is that what you are talking about? or something else?

 

^ No, reducing DPI just forces all windows and text to be shown smaller, so it practically looks like a higher display resolution but in fact of course it isn't. Simply imagine that windows reduces font sizes - a 12pt font will be replaced e.g. by a 9 or 10pt font. With that method, you gain some more screen real estate but the image will not be displayed sharper.

Summing things up, you can calculate the change with that equation:

font size in pixels = font size in inches × screen dpi

 

^ Agree with everything you said.

I expect the loss of clarity is due to non standard DPI, with the display having to dither in order to fit the content. Perhaps a more friendly fraction might produce better results. Has anyone dared to try 48?