Thinkpads Forum

I have an IBM L171p plugged in as my second screen and rotated 90degrees (using iRotate). Everything is now just slightly fuzzier than it should be (seems like a shadow underneath everything). I understand that the RGB pixels are aligned horizontally so this is unavoidable but are there any tweaks that will improve things?

Marc

What you describe seems to be how fonts were looking on my dad's lcd. He accidentily didn't use the native resolution (he had taken a few pixels less in the height), hope this helps...

Good point, I checked and it is at the native 1280x1024 resolution of the panel. I am pretty certain it is to do with the physical pixels as if I turn my head sideways it is like they effect just goes away - like an optical illusion you have to try really hard to see what you know is there.
So far I've tried changing the refresh rate up to 75Hz, using 16 bit colour, fiddling with some of +- sync options in the ATI properties panel etc

drekbour wrote:Good point, I checked and it is at the native 1280x1024 resolution of the panel. I am pretty certain it is to do with the physical pixels as if I turn my head sideways it is like they effect just goes away - like an optical illusion you have to try really hard to see what you know is there.
So far I've tried changing the refresh rate up to 75Hz, using 16 bit colour, fiddling with some of +- sync options in the ATI properties panel etc

Also try Microsoft's ClearType Tuner, it has the option to define RGB versus BRG or something (the ordering of colours), it might help.

I'm a recent convert to 'portrait' displays, using "pivot" software.

1) Are you on DVI? DVI helped slightly -- the fonts/icon/menus/etc didnt look as clean as on the thinkpad display when using analog out to the DVI-capable LCD. I switched to DVI by getting the minidock.

2) Some panels have limited viewing angles (e.g. samsung 204B, which is a nice panel for the $$). When rotated, the viewing angle is odd -- turns out the normal "vertical" angle is not symetric to the center of the panel -- end result is that, when rotated, the center of the viewing angle 'horizontally' is not centered, resulting in an odd effect. (Probably unrelated.)

3) If on analog, make sure you have a good cable.

Microsoft Cleartype certainly helps, thanks for that one. It doesn't actually stop the pixel problem (using BGR mode made it much worse!) but does help me ignore it slightly better

I didn't realise you could get DVI output by using a docking station. I'll try that out sometime over the next week.

All good tips, thanks! Marc