DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I learned something important about LCD monitors today. I’m not sure I’m happy about it.

Before I go on I’ll make the disclaimer that I’ve experimented with exactly 1 LCD monitor, the Samsung 770 TFT. My experience is not universal, and my analysis may not be correct.

LCD monitors seem to have a “native” resolution, and any other signal is simply scaled to fit. This monitor’s native resolution is (AFAICS) 1280x1024. At that resolution, letterforms are crisp and sharp. At any smaller resolution, the image is scaled up to fit into 1280x1024 pixels, making letters smeary. This is more noticable (more annoying) in some fonts; probably I could tweak my font choices for a few weeks until I’m happy. But I’m tending to leave the monitor at its highest resolution, even though this makes text (at small point sizes) too small to read comfortably.

The monitor’s built-in menu allows me to disable scaling, but then the desktop floats in the middle of the screen; all the remaining pixels (to fill 1280x1024) are dark. This isn’t exactly what anyone used to a multisync CRT will expect.

All in all it’s not the miracle solution I was expecting it to be.

Also, Samsung’s support for MacOS simply sucks. The monitor works with my Mac — both have a standard VGA connector — but the CD of calibration software is Windows only. For that, I give Samsung my special Brainwashed by Wintel salute (hint: I only need one finger).