Lower resolution, same sharpness

[Radical]

My eyes are pretty bad, so I was wondering if there's a way to get the effect of using a lower resolution (everything on screen is larger), but with the same sharpness of native resolution.

I'm thinking there must be some program out there that would allow you to run at say 1920x1200, but enlarges everything on the screen so it looks as if you're running at 1280x800.

This is with Windows 7, thanks in advance.

Edit: I should add that I know how to make text larger, but I'm hoping there's a way to make EVERYTHING larger.

 

[guney]

The simple way of achieving what you're after is to use a screen resolution such that your display's native resolution represents a full multiple of the horizontal and vertical pixel counts of the resolution that you've picked. For example, if your display's native resolution is 1920x1200, then using 960x600 would give you unscaled text and graphics (i.e., they will be as sharp as running at your display's native resolution).

The down side of this is that 960x600 is the highest resolution that would work in this manner. The other options would be 640x400, 480x300, 384x240, etc.

If that resolution is too low and you're looking for a solution that would achieve this at some in-between resolution (like 1280x800), then you'd be talking about an impossibility. Using a resolution between 960x600 and 1920x1200 on a display whose native resolution is 1920x1200 would either result in badly uneven aliasing of text and graphics, or would need to be scaled using antialiasing.

As a quick visual example of what I'm talking about, see the first figure displayed on this page. Using a resolution of, say, 1280x800 on a display whose native resolution is 1920x1200 is directly analogous to scaling a 960x600 image to 1280x800 (i.e., by a factor of 1.33), which would result in a similar appearance to what that figure shows. (That figure represents a factor of 1.5, but the end result will be similar.) You'd have to choose between the non-antialiased fractional scaling, which is the example captioned as "Conventional" in that figure (which is plain ugly), and the antialiased scaling, which is the one captioned as "Anti-aliased" in that figure (which will not look as sharp as the native resolution).

Since you've specifically asked for a solution "with the same sharpness as native resolution", I assume you won't be interested in the "Anti-aliased" option. And I'm sure you'll agree that the "Conventional" option is ugly and would become bothersome very quickly. But, for resolutions for which your native display resolution is not a full multiple will necessarily have to result in one of those two cases. There's physically no other possibility.

So, I'm afraid your only options (short of buying a different display) would be to live with the low 960x600 resolution or to learn to tolerate antialiased scaling and use a fractional resolution...

 

[evilsofa]

Pixel doubling: just set the resolution in the video drivers to half of the native horizontal and vertical, so each original pixel is represented by four of the display's native pixels. Result is no loss of data, no fuzzy text, everything is displayed four times as large; only con is that blockiness may be increased. 1920x1200 pixel doubled is 960x600, and 2560x1600 pixel doubled is 1280x800.

ppi = pixels per inch. The smaller the ppi, the larger the text (and everything).

30" 2560x1600 = 101.0 ppi = 0.251mm pixel size
24" 1920x1200 = 94.3 ppi = 0.269mm
27" 1920x1200 = 83.9 ppi = 0.302mm
32" 1920x1080 = 68.8 ppi = 0.368mm
40" 1920x1080 = 55.1 ppi = 0.461mm
30" 1280x800 = 50.31 ppi = 0.504mm
24" 960x600 = 47.2 ppi = 0.538mm
50" 1920x1080 = 44.1 ppi = 0.576mm
27" 960x600 = 41.9 ppi = 0.605mm

The 32", 40" and 50" sizes would be TVs; I do not know if you can easily pixel double them. It may depend on the TV if you can do it at all. 32" 1080p LCD TVs are fairly inexpensive and may give you everything you want with a native resolution that displays everything pretty big; just do careful research to find one that can be set to not process the image at all.

 

[suiken_2mieu]

You could just set the "dpi" level in windows.

Go to: Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Display

I use %125 because my 30"rs have a small dotpitch.

Then after that, on most programs you can hold Ctrl while scrolling the scroll wheel to scale things up or down.