I am looking at getting a new monitor since my five year old monitor gave out. My friend has a 24inch monitor but I notice that the text is smaller than on a 19inch. I thought the idea of a bigger monitor was to be able to see things easier. How does that work? Why is text bigger on a 19inch? I do a lot of reading so what is the best size?
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Text Size
- Thread starter john5527
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Joe Average
Ad Blocker - Banned
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Well, the idea of a bigger monitor is two-fold:
1) More resolution so you can have more content onscreen at one time, and...
2) Provide more capabilities to adjust the content to the user's particular requirements, aka the look and feel of the GUI
Vista and Windows 7 "scale" very nicely compared to previous versions of Window. There was a thread recently discussing this sort of thing, referencing the concept of "resolution independence" which no OS truly offers (much to the chagrin of OSX zealots).
As for what's the best size, that would fall under the second provision, and luckily you can adjust it to whatever becomes the most comfortable and eye-pleasing in your particular situation.
One additional benefit to having a large monitor like a 24" LCD or whatever is that you can literally view two "pages" at the same time very easily. With widescreen being the "new standard" it becomes even easier to do such a thing as viewing two entire pages onscreen at the same time. For reading files, that means on most of the big LCDs viewing the content provided by two entire 8.5" x 11" standard pieces of paper is effortless.
Comes in handy for reading eBooks or PDFs, etc. And with ClearType which makes text rendering very readable on today's big LCDs, you'll be all set.
Hope this helps...
1) More resolution so you can have more content onscreen at one time, and...
2) Provide more capabilities to adjust the content to the user's particular requirements, aka the look and feel of the GUI
Vista and Windows 7 "scale" very nicely compared to previous versions of Window. There was a thread recently discussing this sort of thing, referencing the concept of "resolution independence" which no OS truly offers (much to the chagrin of OSX zealots).
As for what's the best size, that would fall under the second provision, and luckily you can adjust it to whatever becomes the most comfortable and eye-pleasing in your particular situation.
One additional benefit to having a large monitor like a 24" LCD or whatever is that you can literally view two "pages" at the same time very easily. With widescreen being the "new standard" it becomes even easier to do such a thing as viewing two entire pages onscreen at the same time. For reading files, that means on most of the big LCDs viewing the content provided by two entire 8.5" x 11" standard pieces of paper is effortless.
Comes in handy for reading eBooks or PDFs, etc. And with ClearType which makes text rendering very readable on today's big LCDs, you'll be all set.
Hope this helps...
I can also input that I am still on a CRT with 1600x1200 resolution, and when i sit about 4 feet away, I can't read text in Firefox. To remedy this, I just do Ctrl+MouseWheelUp, and it zooms in in Firefox, resizing everything.
Back to relevancy: When you have a larger monitor, you generally have a smaller resolution (Higher numbers, like 1920x1200 vs 1440x900) Now, text in most OSes will always be rendered to a certain amount of pixels. So if there are more pixels available, then that text takes up a smaller percentage of the screen space, and therefore looks smaller.
Make a bit more sense?
Back to relevancy: When you have a larger monitor, you generally have a smaller resolution (Higher numbers, like 1920x1200 vs 1440x900) Now, text in most OSes will always be rendered to a certain amount of pixels. So if there are more pixels available, then that text takes up a smaller percentage of the screen space, and therefore looks smaller.
Make a bit more sense?
TechStuey05
Gawd
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- Aug 5, 2005
- Messages
- 902
I know how you feel, the text will get smaller when you use a bigger computer monitor with a higher resolution.It wasnt a problem with CRT's because you could very easily adjust the resolution to your liking.
With LCD's your only option is to set it to it's native resolution which happens to be the highest resolution it can display (which will make everything smaller). in the future monitors will have much higher resolutions and everything you see on screen will be too tiny to see.
Every portion of the operating system will need to scale to the displays native resolution, this is called resolution independence. This was one of the most requested feature in OS Leopard but it was unfortunately not fully included in the OS.
Currently you can adjust the size of the text by increasing the dpi. Most of the OS will then scale to the dpi that you set it to. If you have a 24" LCD Monitor then it's best to set it to 120 dpi or higher.
Under Windows XP this option is located under display properties, on Windows Vista it's located under personalization. Not everything will increase in size though, only programs that are dpi aware will become larger. Windows Vista is better for high dpi displays then Windows XP is but it's far from perfect.
Gadgets will remain the same size as well as any programs that aren't dpi aware, you'll also need to manually enlarge the text when you browse websites.
I Hope that sorts out any confusion you may have. I'm currently on a 24" LCD Monitor running Windows Vista and have no real issues seeing text on my display. I have the dpi set to 120 which makes everything more readible.
With LCD's your only option is to set it to it's native resolution which happens to be the highest resolution it can display (which will make everything smaller). in the future monitors will have much higher resolutions and everything you see on screen will be too tiny to see.
Every portion of the operating system will need to scale to the displays native resolution, this is called resolution independence. This was one of the most requested feature in OS Leopard but it was unfortunately not fully included in the OS.
Currently you can adjust the size of the text by increasing the dpi. Most of the OS will then scale to the dpi that you set it to. If you have a 24" LCD Monitor then it's best to set it to 120 dpi or higher.
Under Windows XP this option is located under display properties, on Windows Vista it's located under personalization. Not everything will increase in size though, only programs that are dpi aware will become larger. Windows Vista is better for high dpi displays then Windows XP is but it's far from perfect.
Gadgets will remain the same size as well as any programs that aren't dpi aware, you'll also need to manually enlarge the text when you browse websites.
I Hope that sorts out any confusion you may have. I'm currently on a 24" LCD Monitor running Windows Vista and have no real issues seeing text on my display. I have the dpi set to 120 which makes everything more readible.
19" has a particularly large text size, it even has the same resolution as the 17" - meaning that you can fit just as much on a 17" as you can on a 19", with the only difference that everything bigger on the 19".
The same goes with 20" and 22" where 22" (usually) has the same resolution. Also 26",27" and 28" all have the same resolution as the 24" - so if 24" makes text too small then those might be an option.
Personally I think the DPI support in windows is just awful. People say it's better in Vista but I just can't see it - it's just as unusable in Vista as in XP. It's so bad that I won't even use it on my HDTV because I'd rather not be able to read the text than increasing the DPI... Hopefully Windows 7 will be better at this.
The same goes with 20" and 22" where 22" (usually) has the same resolution. Also 26",27" and 28" all have the same resolution as the 24" - so if 24" makes text too small then those might be an option.
Personally I think the DPI support in windows is just awful. People say it's better in Vista but I just can't see it - it's just as unusable in Vista as in XP. It's so bad that I won't even use it on my HDTV because I'd rather not be able to read the text than increasing the DPI... Hopefully Windows 7 will be better at this.
I think the DPI scaling in Vista and Win7 works just fine, as long as the programs support it. For example Firefox does but Google Chrome doesn't.
I find that setting the DPI scaling to match the pixels per inch of the monitor provides the best results. So for my 2560x1600 resolution 30" screen with a PPI of ~100 I set the scaling to 104% (100 PPI) and text isn't too small. On a 24" screen I feel there is no need for DPI scaling because the dot pitch isn't so fine yet.
I generally watch my monitors fairly close, at about arm's length. Anything more and I'd find reading the monitor uncomfortable.
I find that setting the DPI scaling to match the pixels per inch of the monitor provides the best results. So for my 2560x1600 resolution 30" screen with a PPI of ~100 I set the scaling to 104% (100 PPI) and text isn't too small. On a 24" screen I feel there is no need for DPI scaling because the dot pitch isn't so fine yet.
I generally watch my monitors fairly close, at about arm's length. Anything more and I'd find reading the monitor uncomfortable.
DPI would definitely be better. If you have a panel that doesn't support 1:1 pixel mapping, the 1280x1024 will be stretched and it will look blury and awful on that monitor.
And if you DO have a monitor that supports 1:1 pixel mapping, the pixels will still be in the center, and small. So it's a lose-lose there as far as text size is concerned.
And if you DO have a monitor that supports 1:1 pixel mapping, the pixels will still be in the center, and small. So it's a lose-lose there as far as text size is concerned.
thanks for all the information. I have just one more question. Is it better to adjust dpi or to use a non native resolution on a 24in, say 1280x1024? Which is the better option to increase text size?
Adjusting DPI is the best solution, but you may find that a lot of apps get cosmetically screwed up, because until very recently, application writers used GUI code that made assumptions about DPI.
If you run an LCD monitor at a lower resolution than its native resolution, you will get a fuzzy look on all text and lines. This is inevitable and can't be fixed. Imagine trying to display a 10x10 picture on a 7x6 grid - you will have to discard a bunch of info and it will never look quite right, becaue the pixels don't divide out properly.