My present Dell monitor has the rotating ability but not the automatic display change. I rarely do rotate it, not because changing the display setting manually is a bit of a faff but also because the rotation itself is awkward and annoying to do when in the middle of working.
Bert
I don't find it surprising: even with my glasses I need to increase the font sizes to make them legible.
Bert
My Samsung 22 inch TV (2018) is full HD and works well as a monitor, using the HDMI input, and also has Picture in Picture so I can watch live TV in a box that can be positioned at any of the four corners.
It doesn't have an IPS screen and I can tell the difference between it and a proper IPS monitor.
Now I use an iiYama 32 inch IPS monitor for PC work and keep the TV separate.
OLED TV's may not be suitable for extended PC use because of screen burn. Read the manual and exclusions.
You can get it for the same price directly from the Samsung site, and not bother with Amazon
BUT .. read the reviews on the Samsung website complaining about USB C issues
BUT .. would the average user know which, if any, of their USB-C ports supported DisplayPort Alt Mode?
I'm using a 50" 4k TV as a monitor. It's approximately the same dot pitch as my old Dell 1920x1200, so things look about the same size.
It's perfectly clear.
You might get away with a 40", but this one was free.
(The Dell has died after many years)
Andy
But there's a reason for that.
When you look at a Windows 11 screen, there can be three kinds of font rendering on the screen. There is ordinary ("legacy") rendering where the pixels are just on or off. The colour chosen is a nice black pixel for those.
There are two kinds of subpixel rendering going on. Normally when you draw letters, you start with the legacy pixels, the on or off ones.
but if you sprinkle coloured pixels around the edges of the black and white areas, your eye "smooths" the colour variation and the eye assumes it is seeing a fraction of a pixel (a subpixel). Colouring the edges then, is supposed to improve legibility. A small percentage of the population (1% to 2% maybe), this method has the opposite effect, and the users "absolutely hate" the effect and what is happening is they have a survival adaptation which exaggerates the coloured edges more than is normal (a zebra effect). To them, the font looks like a "buzz saw".
OK, so we have the concept then, of sprinkling coloured dots, to fill in the holes. The eye averages this out, and it seems like the font is marginally sharper.
But Microsoft has two of these schemes, and the latest one is worse.
In addition, the black fonts don't use black ink. They use grey ink. The legacy fonts, they have pure black pixels. By using light gray pixels on a blindingly white background, old eyes see reduced contrast.
What is the purpose of all this rubbish ?
Why, it sells 4K monitors :-)
When you turn up the font size on a 4K monitor, more of the pixels for each letter, are solid pixels. This makes the feathering slightly less important. But what this still does not correct for, is the usage of gray pixels, when a black pixel would have worked better.
I expect some different policies are present on Windows using Dark Theme. Where the letters are white on a black background. But I've not tested that.
Historically, Dark Themes were never implemented properly, and it was bug after bug if you wanted to run Dark Theme on a permanent basis. This is one reason, that I have a built-in bias against Dark Theme, because the implementation tended to be rubbish. Some people are quite happy with Dark Theme, as an alternative to the light theme subpixel rendering issues.
Some of your applications, will have HiDPI modes, and that provides a way to adjust the behavior of a browser, when it is used on a 4K monitor.
*******When colour monitors first came out, they sometimes used "six bit pixels". Yet, each of the RGB colour signals, provided "eight bit colour". The difference between the two, caused the panel in the monitor to dither in the colour space, to approximate an eight bit colour, by alternating between colours it could render.
Then, there was an honest era, where the pixels were eight bits and the colours were eight bits. No more dithering.
Some monitors now, are HDR (High Dynamic Range). This can involve ten bit colour. Usage of such a colour scheme, pushes up the data rate on the monitor cable, and requires a good video card.
If you don't like what you're seeing, you can try switching it off at the monitor end, or, find some sort of setting on the OS itself. HDR might be useful for gaming and video playback, but not necessarily for office applications.
Not all monitors have it, and it's just another whizzy thing to play with.
Paul
If a TV set is as big as an elephant, yet it is only 720p, that means the pixels are as big as screw-in light bulbs. Even though the screen is big, the text is not sharp, because there are so few pixels.
That is the essence of native resolution.
A lot of rubbish TV sets, were listed as "HD-ready" or some such, yet native they were only 1366 x 768. And editing text on a screen like that ? Awful! Seeing a 1920 x 1080 proper HD screen was better.
When a TV is "native 4K" and actually lists "3840 x 2160" Ultra HD, then you know you're getting a boat-load more pixels. Further, if the panel type is IPS, the viewing angle is 178:178, you can move your head way off axis without too much colour shift.
TN panels are bad for this and my laptop TN panel has to be "tipped backwards" to use it. Anything other than TN (twisted nematic), they will list a better viewing angle. 178:178 is a lot closer to "perfection".
On a quality monitor, they are not afraid to tell you what kind of panel is used. But generally, the viewing angle spec tells you the panel is not TN. And the GTG (gray to gray time), tells you whether the panel is a sluggard and would leave pixel trails. For example, TN panels (gamer monitor), the GTG is 1 millisecond, which is extremely fast. The worst panels, several decades ago, were around 25 milliseconds and a pixel trail would be seen while gaming. (Move the mouse cursor, there would be mouse cursors left behind for a bit).
So when they won't tell you the panel type:
1) Suspect TN 2) Using viewing angle and GTG, determine panel type based on indirect determination.Paul
At what viewing distance?
When I mocked-up a 42" 4K monitor as it would sit on my desk, I decided it would give me a sore neck as if watching a tennis match ...
Now that is very interesting. Is the effect you refer to "anti aliasing"? I use Paint.net for producing icons for my programs and its default is anti aliasing on so if I try and clean the edge of something it sprinkles stuff around and makes it a blur. I then have to hit undo and turn off anti aliasing, unfortunately it doesn't remember settings.
Indeed, super high res on a small screen is relatively pointless.
Mathematically, maybe it is equivalent to that, but if you need to look up the topic, I would try "subpixel rendering" first.
Paul
There is a size of panel, after which you can't make it ergonomic at reasonable distance. Your eyeballs no longer line up with the top row of the monitor, when sitting in your chair. Since people come in different statures, you have to measure this for yourself (a "monitor fitting").
If my monitor got big enough, I would have to lower the stand all the way down, until the bottom of the panel touched the desk.
You can take a tape measure, measure from the top row of the monitor (which is currently aligned with your eyeballs), and measure the distance from there to the desktop. Then, using the 16:9 aspect ratio of the monitor, work out what size monitor fits in that limit. And that tells you what the max monitor you can "comfortably" use.
Everyone knows the state of their own neck and shoulder muscles, as to how much abuse they will tolerate. Such as making the person "look up" to see the top of the monitor.
You could also elevate your current monitor, to make it uncomfortable, and see how bad it is :-) I know I won't be doing that. I used to suffer a lot of neck pain at work. I would sooner lift 50lb sacks like my student job, than put up with that pain.
One other thing to watch is, if your monitor height is not correct, you might actually be slouching in your chair to compensate. It's personal choice of course, whether that works for you or not. I have two monitors here, and it just occurred to me, they're set at different heights, and... that can't be correct. I suspect I slouch when using the other one.
Paul
Well move to Linux, and pick whatever colours you want...
My screen is all white on black, except on some Thunderbid email messages where its white on white :-)
But I 'select' the text, and it then goes white on blue :-)
(I was attempting to fix a bug in thunderbird with some custom styles but they changed thunderbird, and I cant be arsed to work out what I did and undo it)
Brilliant security wheeze :-)
I'm really grateful for your detailed answer (and in your other recent post too) which was extremely informative; many thanks.
On what I presume is a related matter, I've noticed that some LCD monitors, often but not exclusively those designated as for gaming, are described as VA. Google explains the concept of vertically aligned pixels but I can't find any information about whether or not this is beneficial for largely text-based programs. Can you help?
Thanks again,
Bert
They don't show the pixel layout here, just make subjective comments.
The One Laptop Per Child project, is famous for their weird XO LCD panel. And that's how I bootstrap into geometry. I try to find an article on OLPC so I can find the right terms.
And that does not cover Plasma (no longer made), OLED (organic LED), and quantum dot.
While Windows Cleartype tuner covered a few of these options, it probably would not work well with the XO panel. The tuner only needs to cover the display types normally used in the ecosystem. And it was not much of a tuner -- it just "tried six configurations" and it was up to the user to select "I like this one". Presumably one of the subpixel methods, looked just a tiny bit better than the others, and that was your tuning process.
*******This article shows the geometry of IPS, VA, and TN and they're the same.
You can see that one of them has sharper contrast (but the colour viewing angle isn't as good). Each panel type has a different kind of user in mind. IPS allows you to move your head around (178:178 viewing). The viewing angle is the angle it takes to affect the colour by a factor of ten. So if you really did hold your head way out at 178 degrees to the panel, it would look pretty crappy. But if your head is in the center of the screen, moving your head from side to side or up and down, you don't see anything change on the panel view.
And the dishonest bastards at the computer store, they play videos on the LCD monitors, and playing a video is un-demanding of quality. So to do my shopping, I would have to reach under the table and modify the distribution box, so the machines would run computer desktop displays, and then I'd open Notepad to see what text looks like. That's what dedicated shopping is about. You have to f*ck with stuff. And that's part of the parallax test, is getting a decent stimulus for the screen. Text is demanding of good panel properties.
Paul
Arms length.
When I use it for a TV I slide my chair back a bit, maybe to 2m.
Usually the window I have open isn't full screen, because as you say the corners are a bit far away.
Andy
IPS is better than VA is better than TN.
The most obvious difference is viewing angles - on a TN panel the colours will change drastically if you look at it at an angle too far from straight-on, and it's worse side-to-side compared with up-and-down. This is especially an issue if you rotate your monitor, as side-to-side in landscape becomes up-and-down in portrait.
VA is a lot better, and IPS is better again.
Theo
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