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[OM] Re: LCD Monitor Question

Subject: [OM] Re: LCD Monitor Question
From: Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 22:22:34 -0500
But a high resolution device with good dithering algorithms should be 
able to overcome the problem.  Display dithering on analogue monitors 
has been around since the early 80's so the technology should be well 
understood.

Chuck Norcutt

Dan Mitchell wrote:
>> Is this not the case with other monitors that advertise different  
>> resolutions at different refresh rates? The Dell seems like it would  
>> be perfect for such tasks as web authoring because I could set  
>> resolution down to something more likely to be right for the majority  
>> of viewers, in the 1024 to 728 range, which is the resolution my  
>> current site was written at.
> 
>   Basically, the problem you're hitting is that LCD monitors are 
> fundamentally digital and CRT monitors are fundamentally analog.
> 
>   If you look at both of them up close, you'll see a pattern of tiny 
> dots; phosphor on the back of the CRT for old-school monitors, LCD 
> elements on newer ones.
> 
>   The reason that CRTs handle different resolutions better is that they 
> get lit up by a beam (okay, 3, but let's pretend we're in black and 
> white for now) of electrons whizzing back and forth, and the beam 
> changes intensity as the pixels change. The maximum resolution is 
> determined  by how fast the electronics can change the intensity of the 
> beam, but the maximum _useful_ resolution is determined by the number of 
> little dots of phosphor.
> 
>   Here's the tricky part -- if you want to run a CRT monitor at a lower 
> resolution than it's maximum, all that it does is slow down the speed 
> with which it changes the beam intensity. That means that one pixel will 
> smear over multiple phosphor dots -- if you look up very very close, you 
> can sort of see this happening, but in general it's not a problem.
> 
> 
> 
>   Now, with LCD monitors, there's a bunch of pixels, and they're either 
> on or off; there's no beam flying around. This means if you have a 
> 3000-wide screen, and you want to display a 2000-wide image on there, 
> there's no way to say "every image pixel gets 1 1/2 pixels horizontally" 
> (at least, not in any monitor I've seen). So the monitor has to 
> alternately give each image pixel 2 and 1 screen pixel, which is why you 
> get the awful scaling effect. (some screens won't even do this, you just 
> get the 2000-wide image on the center 2000 pixels of the screen).
> 
> 
> 
>   If you want to test web sites at different sizes, you can use 
> something like http://www.wpdfd.com/restest.htm
> 
>   -- dan
> 
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