the annoying "granularity" of LCD vs CRT

I'm still mourning the recent death of my beloved FW900 and now trying out a Soyo MVA 24" while I wait for a videocard to show up that can do the full 2560x1600 of the 3007 I have sitting here.

One thing I just can't get used to is the super-fine exact precision of the pixels on this LCD and how aliased certain text characters look even with cleartype on.

For example:

/ [size=+1]/[/size] / [size=+2]/[/size] / [size=+3]/[/size] / [size=+2]/[/size] / [size=+2]/[/size] / [size=+1]/[/size]

I can see the pixels break in those regular sized forward slashes.
On my FW900 the monitor's mask would ironically make that smoother.
Unfortunately you can't do background colors here which make the effect even stronger.

Will the higher resolution of the 3007 allow me to turn on "large fonts" (120dpi vs the 96dpi now) and get more pixels in the same character space, therefore more anti-aliased?

I'm starting to realize, it's not how small the pixels are that counts, but how much of that incredibly tiny space is between them that counts.

Those lines are 100% smooth on my 24" g2400wd with cleartype enabled. 1920x1200. Note this res is used on 26 and 27" monitors as well, they will have less dpi and possibly be more grainy.

Even with text size increased in firefox they are still totally smooth diagonal lines.

Think it's your monitor, is cleartype enabled?

Yes I have cleartype enabled but what level do you have set?

The most I can tolerate is 1.8 before characters get too much color fringe on them, using this microsoft powertoy

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/7/0/b7019730-0fa3-47a9-a159-98b80c185aad/setup.exe

The small text in your footer - does it have any color fringe on it in your display?
On mine there is a light rainbow pattern.

Oh interesting, when I set 2.2 the diagonals get better but I now cannot tell the difference between bold or normal on them.
The rainbow on small text also goes away at 2.2

I am starting to believe that true DPI instead of the phony boost of cleartype is the real answer. I think I'm willing to accept the problems that a few programs have with the "large fonts" 120dpi setting for the extra clarity.

On my Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 and my 1680x1050 20.1" NEC 20WMGX2, those diagonal lines don't show pixels until my nose is 10 inches or less from the monitor (yes I measured, and my nose is small). 10 inches isn't a very usable distance.

According to the Pixel Size Calculator, my display has a pixel size of 0.257 mmor 99.6 pixels per inch. If you are running your 24" at 1920x1200, its pixel size is 0.269mm, or 94.3 pixels per inch. A 30" monitor running at 2560x1600 would be 0.251mm, or 101.0 pixels per inch.

Ugh, the forum lost my last post because of the db fixing

In any case thanks for the dpi calculations which were pretty much what I figured by dividing width by dots (22.4 inch / 1920)

It may be another reason why I liked the FW900 so much, it's visible area is only 22.5" and it's 1920x1200 so that's 100dpi too. Apparently anything below 100dpi and my eyes are unhappy, even 94dpi.

I switched back to large fonts which my eyes definitely like better and I'll just have to use vmware to make sure any web designs still fix properly with normal fonts.

It's interesting to look at what cleartype does - I think my eyes must be less sensitive to the blue and red dots so my brain doesn't fill in the character properly:

/ [size=+1]/[/size] / [size=+2]/[/size] / [size=+3]/[/size] / [size=+2]/[/size] / [size=+2]/[/size] / [size=+1]/[/size]

on the first character, I only seem to see the whiter dots.

Sorry to hear your loss vibe.

I'll pour some out for him.

Sit further away.

vibe:

Have you run with Cleartype disabled? When I switched to LCD (NEC 2490) from CRT (Sony GDM-F520) in Dec, I had to do this.

I prefer the razor sharp, unvarying appearance of no ClearType to the mess I see with it on. I used ClearType tuner and wasn't happy with any of the settings.

Similarly annoyed with ClearType, I was looking into this and found a very promising app called GDI++. It hooks into the Windows text rendering subsystem and does its own form of antialiasing based on FreeType. It can be customized by modifying gdi++.ini. (A description of the different settings can be found here: http://free.flop.jp/gdi++/src/gdi0808.txt )

The results are incredible, I think even you'll be impressed, if not at first, then try tweaking the settings.

Here's what those slashes in the OP look like at 100% and 400% with the default settings:





Also I found that someone had packaged it with a nice installer... I uploaded that version here: http://files.filefront.com/Ojalords+GTI+Installerzip/;12998208;/fileinfo.html

For further reading check out these threads:
http://www.aqua-soft.org/board/showthread.php?t=48069
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=639471