Posted by Spartanicus on 09/13/05 17:35

"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@physics.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

>That kind of factor sure makes a difference in the text display stakes,
>just as it did in the CRT era when I compared an acquaintance's CRT
>display set below 90dpi, against mine set at around 135dpi (to the disdain
>of the peanut gallery who told me I had no business to set it higher than
>the CRT's inherent dot pitch, but it worked for me).

The name called reference would be me.

Contrary to what is alleged I did not tell Mr Flavell that "he had no
business to set it higher than the inherent dot pitch". What I did tell
Mr Flavell was that it's wrong to blame others for issues caused by the
misconfiguration of his own hardware.

Many people are confused about the issue of resolution on CRT monitors,
they think that by increasing the Screen Area setting, the resolution
follows suit. For colour CRT monitors this is only true up to a certain
point. Colour CRTs use a mask and phosphor clusters known as "dots",
these dots have a physical dimension referred to in specifications as
"dot pitch" [1]. A few examples: 0.24mm dot pitch = ~105PPI max
resolution, 0.27mm dot pitch = ~94PPI max resolution.

Mr Flavell has his Screen Area setting at a value considerably beyond
what his CRT is capable of displaying, the consequence of doing that is
that definition is lost. This makes text difficult to read, to
compensate he has configured his browser's default font size to a higher
setting. People who misconfigure their hardware like that then often
blame web authors for their problems.

Another issue that Mr Flavell is confused about are high resolution
screens. The 200PPI monitors referred to by him are not intended, or
suitable for general usage. Bitmapped resources (icons, buttons and
other UI elements, images etc.) shrink down to a size that is very
difficult to use. What Mr Flavell doesn't get is that these screens are
intended to be used in a dual monitor setup in conjunction with a
monitor with a normal resolution which displays the OS and the
application UI.

Such a setup is valuable for people who create work for print on
computer screens such as print cartographers. By using a 200PPI screen
to display the work they get a better view of what the result will be on
paper.

[1] More often than not the dot pitch figure listed by manufacturers is
not realistic, it may refer to the size of the grid pitch (the grid lies
a certain distance behind the phosphor dots), or it refers to the
vertical dot pitch only.

--
Spartanicus

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