Are There Affordable Low-DPI Large-Screen LCD Monitors? 549
jtownatpunk.net writes "As time goes by, I find myself supporting a greater number of users moving through their 40s and into their 50s (and beyond!). I notice more and more of them are lowering the resolution of their displays in order to 'make it bigger.' That was fine in the CRT days, but, quite frankly, LCDs look like crap when they're not displaying their native resolution. My solution at home is to hook my computer up to a big, honkin' 1080p HDTV, but that's a bit of a political risk in an office environment. 'Why does Bill get a freakin' big screen TV?!' Plus, it's a waste to be paying for the extra inputs (component, s-video, composite), remote, tuner, etc. that will never be used. And a 37-47" display is a bit large for a desk. So here's my question: Is there a source for 24-27" monitors running at 1366x768 that are affordable and don't have all of the 'TV' stuff? Or is my only choice to just buy 27" HDTVs and admonish the users not to watch TV? (And, no, just giving them big CRTs is not an option. Most people would rather stare at a fuzzy LCD than 'go back' to a CRT.)"
Re:Software? (Score:5, Informative)
I want a "zoom feature" for the OS. Hold ctrl-mouse wheel and resize EVERYTHING on the damn machine.
MacOS/X has that feature, FWIW.
Re:Software? (Score:2, Informative)
Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard...
Hold down the Apple key and scroll your mouse wheel.. voila.. instant zoom in/zoom out.
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:3, Informative)
To get Windows? No.
(Display, Appearance, Large Fonts. Also Effects, Use Large Icons. This is for XP.)
The millions of shitty Windows applications that assume that everything is running using "normal sized fonts," on the other hand? That's the challenge.
Some of these applications actively ignore the Windows Large Font setting, so even if you set Windows to use Large Fonts, they'll still use the same too-small fonts they've always used. (Not sure how they do that, since I thought Windows just scaled the DPI up.)
Even better are applications that will respect the larger font sizes, but still layout everything as if they were using the smaller font sizes, so only the top of text in labels, buttons, textboxes, et al are visible.
Short answer: Yes, it should. No, it doesn't.
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:3, Informative)
The newer versions of Windows have a "Change the size of text and other items on the screen" that scales fonts and (most) icons up nicely. KDE has a font scaling option too (and I'm sure other window managers will have that as well).
I think using scaling is a much better option than buying a low dpi screen (for example anti-aliasing looks waaaay better)
And the applications? (Score:3, Informative)
If you're on a Windows box, you can achieve the same overall effect by increasing the size of your icons and fonts.
Windows has preferences for large fonts and icons, but not all third-party non-free applications respect them.
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:5, Informative)
I tried it again this year - hooked up a PC to my 47" LCD HDTV running Media Center. Realized that I couldn't read text from the couch, so I increased the system font size to make email, etc legible. And Microsoft Windows Media Center, published by a company that really should be doing this kind of testing, took it's already 1" tall font, readable by a legally blind dog from 50 feet away, and blew it up even larger, breaking the screen layout in unusable ways.
And, so, I went back to the default system font size, again. I'll try it again in a few more years, but I just don't expect it to ever work the way a user wants it to work.
New Egg (Score:5, Informative)
As usual, it's New Egg to the rescue. You can search monitors according to pixel size. The largest pixel sizes give you a resolution of 1920x1080 at 28" (~$370). There are also some even larger screens at lower resolution, but I don't know how big you want to go. They have large format screens - 32" at 1366x768, but those seem to be quite a bit more expensive (~$950).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824254043 [newegg.com]
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16889252035 [newegg.com]
Personally, I prefer a 4:3 ratio on my screens and those have become very hard to find.
Re:Um, don't give them an antenna? (Score:2, Informative)
-1 for misspelling it.
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:2, Informative)
Isn't there a "large Icons" selection?
Just hold control with the desktop selected and scroll the mouse wheel up.. voila! Changable icon sizes (in Vista and 7)
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:5, Informative)
It's not my intention to troll, but with KDE4 on Linux everything is vector graphics and scales percentage wise to a resolution instead of Windows XP where everything is just fixed size and looking horrible when scaled up.
So if you are running KDE 4.3 for example on a low resolution screen (try a full screen Windows game in Wine and kill it from a terminal and switch back to the terminal where X is running and you can see very tiny windows, icons and fonts untill you go to the controll center and set it to run on your native resolution) everything scales down. On higher resolution everything scales up. This, for me, is a major advantage over Gnome = 2.2.8 on very high resolutions.
I am amazed at why Windows still doesn't do this. Maybe it's for the better to buy a large standard definition Plasma screen. It would eat up about as much power as a large, low-DPI CRT screen and if you can still buy it it is very, very, very cheap. Think about 299 USD...
More like on hold, but still present (Score:5, Informative)
Apple had at one point a plan to give OS X resolution-independent rendering, so that UI objects are always displayed at the specified physical size independently of resolution.
I think they still have that plan, but the engineering was delayed in shoring up the iPhone platoform...
However, you can use this today in most apps for OS X. You install the development tools, and then run /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/Quartz Debug.app - there's a menu option under Window for "UI Resolution" where you can set a scale. Most OS X apps after a restart obey the set scale, since they are all using the Cocoa text rendering... it also works with images.
That may well be a good option for people who are having eyesight issue.
It comes down to manufacturing issues (Score:5, Informative)
0.282mm to 0.285mm (19" 1440x900 or 22" 1680x1050)
0.270mm (seen in 24" 1920x1200 displays)
0.243mm to 0.248mm (19" 1680x1050 or 22" 1920x1080)
Personally, I find the 0.245mm pixels to be too small, with the 0.285mm pixels to be just about perfect for me. Then there's the 15.4" Thinkpad display that is 1680x1050, that has really really small pixels (around 128ppi or 0.200mm).
There is an Acer 27" that is 2048x1152 with reportedly 0.291mm pixels.
Basically, when monitor shopping, you need to look at a particular resolution (such as 1680x1050) and then make sure to buy the displays that are the upper end of the size range. The 1680x1050 glass is currently sold in sizes that range from 19" to 22". Your older users will be a lot happier with the 22" 1680x1050.
Or you could go looking for 24-26" 720p TV sets which are typically 1360x768 and have very large pixels. Of course, the small resolution will quickly become a bane to future users.
All of the smaller 1080p TV sets are all 24", which is only a pixel size of around 0.270mm. So the 22" 1680x1050 displays with 0.285mm pixels are a better choice.
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:5, Informative)
Since we're talking about Windows-land, it's worth mentionning that Windows Vista and Windows 7 both automatically scale icons to fit the display you're using, this way the icons take up about the same amount of physical space on screen, regardless of the size of the screen you're using. (as long as your screen properly reports itself to plug&pray).
I'm not sure what the issue is, though... if you want to buy somebody a 27" monitor, and are happy with 1366x768 resolution, then buy a TV. It won't cost you anywhere near as much as a 27" computer monitor will cost (besides which, if you specifically want the lower resolution, good luck finding a computer monitor over 17-20" that doesn't come in 1920x1080).
But if you're in Windows-land, updating to either Vista or 7 would solve the "large fonts and icon scaling" issue without needing to fiddle around with the graphics settings.
Re:Set the computer to use half the native resolut (Score:1, Informative)
Netbooks are almost always 1024 by 600 these days.
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, both Vista and 7, if Aero (i.e. DWM) is enabled, will scale up any application when you raise DPI. If application is marked as DPI-aware in its manifest, DWM will let the application handle that itself (by enlarging fonts and using scaling layouts); otherwise, it will apply simple bitmap scaling to the composed window bitmaps.
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:3, Informative)
I'm pretty sure vista used large images for icons.
Vista UI guidelines require [microsoft.com] providing icons of sizes up to 256x256. All stock OS icons follow the guidelines, and, to the best of my knowledge, so does all MS software released after Vista.
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:3, Informative)
Some of these applications actively ignore the Windows Large Font setting, so even if you set Windows to use Large Fonts, they'll still use the same too-small fonts they've always used. (Not sure how they do that, since I thought Windows just scaled the DPI up.)
Windows does scale DPI up, so if you request a font with size specified in points, you'll get a proportionally larger font. The problem is that you can also request a font with size specified in pixels, and that, by definition, won't scale with DPI.
Similar problem in fact exists with CSS, where pt will scale, but px will not (which is why, if you're ever using px to specify text size in your CSS, you're evil, and in Hell you will be blinded and then forced to surf Flash-based websites for eternity).
Vista and 7 mitigate that problem [microsoft.com], somewhat: they require every application to specify in its manifest whether it's "DPI aware" or not - it's opt-in, so you if you don't tell it that your app is aware, the default is that it's not. Note that this means that all pre-Vista applications are not DPI aware.
DPI aware apps,work the same way all apps did in XP and before - they get true DPI values reported by the OS, and have to adjust text size and window layout accordingly themselves. If they do it right (and hopefully, if they claim to support it in their manifest, there was some effort made to make it work right!), you get proper vector scaling. Ideally, if they use some sane UI framework with proper reflowing layouts - e.g. Qt or WPF - it "just works".
If an application isn't DPI aware, then, as far as it's concerned, it always runs at 96 DPI - the OS lies to it. Window manager then takes whatever the application rendered to its window(s), and scales that up using the usual bitmap scaling techniques. This isn't nice looking, because you get the usual pixellated and somewhat blurry picture as a result, but at least it is enlarged to the desired size - so you can read it with poor vision - and it always works correctly with any application.
Of course, this is meant to be strictly a legacy app support feature; all new applications should be DPI-aware. Also, users can opt out of this, and fall back to XP behavior (and risk badly written apps not handling non-standard DPI settings properly).
We need better-scaling desktops. (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, I'm dealing with just this problem lately. Its not so much that my eyes are going (although now that I'm 45, I find I do prefer larger text) its that I am working on a project that is supposed to be used from across a room. There is a very large set of program in both the Windows and Linux worlds that are incapable of working on a desktop running at 640x480 or even 800x600 resolutions. I've even found ones that can't be used at 1024x768.
One might think that the answer would be to go to a much higher resolution and then tweak all of the various menu- and font-size settings to make things large enough to read. This also doesn't work as those exact same programs often seem to have hard-coded assumptions as to font sizes and one regularly discovers menus which only show the first 3 characters of each entry. Plus, many windowing systems don't seem to provide the kind of user settings needed to configure things for this kind of environment.
While one can (and I do) blame the authors of these program for sloppy coding, there are a very large number of such programs, which can only lead me to think that the OS APIs for handling this stuff in a clean way are far too cumbersome to use correctly.
Re:The good news is, "sharpness" isn't critical... (Score:3, Informative)
The distortion by LCD's not running at their resolution are way worse than that. Hell, we even got a bug report from someone about our graph unit supposedly being buggy [freepascal.org] because text rendered in full screen mode was illegible, while the only problem was that he was using an 800x600 resolution on an LCD monitor with a different native size.
If you download the attachment to that bug report and unzip it, there's a picture of the screen inside. And in fact, it does look quite bad. Of course, there's nothing that we can do about that.
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:3, Informative)
Fixed in NeWS in ~1988 (Score:3, Informative)
It was twenty-or-so years ago today.... So back in the late 1980s, I was using Gosling's NeWS [wikipedia.org] on Sun Workstations. It could fit on a Sun3/50 with enough RAM, though it was happier on the SparcStations that came out in ~1989 and following. It was a Postscript-based windowing system - What You See Really Is What You Get. :-) Everything Just Worked (except when it didn't, in which case it crashed and died in ugly ways, but most of the time it worked, and the debugger was really cool.) For example, if you wanted to print something on a laser printer, you got the same fonts, rendered at the correct resolution, no jaggies required. The psterm terminal application we used instead of xterm didn't do anything special to iconize; you just shrank it to use a 1-point font, which is 1 pixel on a typical Sun workstation screen of its day, and anything happening in the window continued to work live, so you could see things scrolling by.
It later evolved into Java, which you may have heard of
My supervisor was in his early 60s and kept switching eyeglasses to talk to people or look at his computer, so we just cranked his font size to 24 points and he could read everything.
Re:The good news is, "sharpness" isn't critical... (Score:2, Informative)
Did they tell you that your near vision was definitely going to be shot? (There's no "possibly" about it short of changing the laws or refraction of light). If not, sue the SOBs.
And this claim [webmd.com] ...
9% report no change or worsening of vision afterwards [bizjournals.com] Not worth it. Glasses are safer, and they make you look [smartbuyglasses.com] smart [osu.edu] - and this study proves it's more likelyt to be true if you're nearsighted [infoniac.com].
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a 45 year old who has just had to buy his first pair of reading glasses, I absolutely concur. Not only do have these devices fixed usability problems with my computer display, they also fixed the same problem that was manifesting itself with the rest of reality.
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:2, Informative)
I work at 1440x900 and in Gnome there are some applications with windows and dialog boxes really big, cannot see all the fields sometimes or the OK/Cancel buttons are hidden because they are too big.
There are some windows like that in GIMP and actually need to enable more desktops so i move the windows between two so i can actually can click "save".
Re:So I suppose that.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why reduce the DPI instead of using larger font (Score:3, Informative)
if you use a 27" or 30" display, the menu is just as small as on a 13" macbook
Uh, that's exactly how it should be. Something that is 1cm on one screen should be 1cm on another screen, irrespective of the size of the screens. If you want everything bigger, then override the display DPI setting and apps will automatically be scaled to compensate.