Thinkpads Forum

My eyes are getting worse & worse......

I have changed my office 'puter (19" LCD) and my Inspiron 6000 to 800 x 600 screen sizes.

I am going to be getting a new T60/T61 (either 15" or 14.1) and want to know if I should even be considering anything other than the basic screen?

Anything smaller than the 800 x 600 gets me really squinting.

Advice?

Thanks.

Unlike CRT monitors, running an LCD monitor at a non-native resolution will give you blury images.
You should set your office monitor to native resolution and use DPI scaling to blow up the size of fonts (i've heard vista is better than xp at this)

If portability is not an issue, I would get a 15.4" WXGA. If it is, then a 14.1" WXGA.

As you probably know, LCD screens have a "native resolution" which looks best, and any other resolution on those screens looks far worse by comparison. Therefore, you will be served best if you use a native resolution on whatever screen you have.

Given the above, you might want to consider a 15" XGA screen at 1024x768 (native) rather than a 14.1" XGA running at 800x600. The native 1024x768 on a 15" might be close enough for you to the 800x600 on a 14", yet the native resolution on the 15" would look better than the non-native/interpolated resolution on the 14".

OK..........sounds reasonable.

Thanks.

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http://www.opera.com/download/

EOMtp,
thanks for the translation.
My English is getting rusty after 8 years of Korean.

I would argue that since he wishes to use a resolution that lacks a panel to run pixel mapped with, a higher resolution panel is preferred for scaling. This means that a 1400x1050 probably looks better in 800x600 than a 1024x768 would do. A UXGA 1600x1200 would even be perfect with an 1:2 absolute mapping and 800x600 would be razor sharp, if you can call it that.

Rose,
pls refer to below taken from the 1st page of
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... light=qxga

quote
Good point. I've tried that under Win XP Pro by reducing the resolution from QXGA to XGA, and it looks surprisingly sharp at this non-native resolution. You might think that's just because it's now using exactly four pixels in place of one, but reducing it further to SVGA (where it uses 6.5536 pixels for each pixel, on average), it still looks prett good, definitely better than viewing the original UXGA Flexview panel at SVGA. The result should be even better with Vista.
unquote

Proves your point. More pixels give you a sharper image when it's changed to a lower res.

But I would advise against this for "normal" SXGA and UXGA panels as the LCD will be always sharper in their native resolution.

dssxxxx wrote:I have changed my office 'puter (19" LCD) and my Inspiron 6000 to 800 x 600 screen sizes.

When you set your widescreen Inspiron 6000 to display at 800x600, doesn't that cause things to be stretched horizontally?

I think it does a little but not that it creates a problem.

I would probably have to go home tonight and check it out but as I recall (I use it almost every night) it has not been too bad.

dssxxxx, I suggest that you set your Inspiron 6000 at 1280x800 (i.e. WXGA) and see if you can tolerate the size of things on the screen. If you cannot, then you can rule out all 15.4" WXGA Thinkpads and focus on getting a 15.0" 1024x768 Thinkpad.

Based on that recomendation, I will probably pick up a T60 with the 15" screen.

Thanks.

dssxxxx wrote:Based on that recomendation, I will probably pick up a T60 with the 15" screen.

If you haven't ordered one yet, here's a 15.0" XGA T60 for $713 shipped.