Display issues

[jdhurst]

I have a T61p (8891-CTO) running Windows Vista Business 64-bit. It has a 14-inch 4:3 display and the Video Driver is NVidia Quadro 570M (7.15.11.7693 which is up-to-date). The display is either a Samsung 42T0369 or a TMD 42T0373.

It is a decent display but has a defect I cannot seem to rectify. If a web page (Experts Exchange is the worst) uses light blue text to define "read" hyperlinks (versus darker "unread" hyperlinks) the text (light blue on white) is very, very difficult to read.

I use 1280x1024 32-bit resolution which is a bit less than native (1400x1050 32-bit). In order to see this text, I must look at the monitor dead-on, otherwise I cannot make it out. I wear graduated bifocals for reading and with them on I have normal reading vision.

With the NVidia control panel, I had set brightness to about 60% and contrast to 70%. Gamma is at 50%, Vibrance is at 15% and Image Sharpening is at 0. I think the last three are close to default.

I found (google) http://www.hex2bit.com/products/product_mcw.asp and downloaded Monitor Calibration Wizard. I ran it and that lead me to brightness at 50% and contrast at 70%. So I was pretty close.

I went to my XP Pro Desktop with a NEC monitor running 1280x1024 32-bit and the same sights give me the same problem on the Desktop although not as bad. The monitor on that machine is permantely set for best viewing angle and it is a 120-volt monitor so bright and not subject to any power saving stuff except OFF after 10 minutes of no use.

So --- Questions:
1. I think my display is Discrete Graphics. How do I confirm?
2. Is what is see summarizing what I read here that people are generally unhappy with displays in today's laptops?
3. Is this driven only by cost saving?
4. Why aren't displays better?
5. Why do so many web programmers use colour combinations that would get magazine, book and newspaper publishers fired for gross incompentence. Pick up ANY newspaper. Easy to read. Pick out ANY random web page. Probably a problem.
6. What is IPS Flexview? How would I recognize it to see it?
7. If I really wanted a better display, are they available for my T61p? or is that just so much dreaming?

Thank you, ... JDH

[dozer]

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So --- Questions:
1. I think my display is Discrete Graphics. How do I confirm?

5. Why do so many web programmers use colour combinations that would get magazine, book and newspaper publishers fired for gross incompentence. Pick up ANY newspaper. Easy to read. Pick out ANY random web page. Probably a problem.

6. What is IPS Flexview? How would I recognize it to see it?

7. If I really wanted a better display, are they available for my T61p? or is that just so much dreaming?

Thank you, ... JDH

In regards to #5....I can't for the life of me answer -that- one!

The state of webpage design today is simply appalling. Not just the total lack of graphic-arts sense; but also the abysmally inefficient coding. Try running dialup for a few weeks, and you'll see what I mean. What possible sense does it make to load the stupid graphics first and the main body-text of a page LAST ??

In regards to #1, ir you've got nVidia, you've got a 'discrete' gpu.

In regards to #6, if you can't read the display except directly facing it, you don't have In Plane Switching, i.e. Flexview. Flexview is just a 'brand name' for an LCD built with IPS technology.

I'm not as up on models and configurations as some here, but as far as I know, there has NEVER been a Thinkpad made with IPS in a 14" lcd.

There has been IPS shipped in 12" in some of the 'X' series....and in 15" in the A30's, T40's, and T60's. Also, NEVER an IPS shipped on any T61......again, to the best of my understanding.

In regards to your #7...."no".

Actually, I believe that the lcd mfg's -did- make IPS in 14" sizes, used for a while by -other- makers of laptops....and in theory you could fit one of those to your T61 lid.

However, I have no idea whether simply reprogramming the lcd's 'EDID' eeprom would be enough to make it work....or whether the interface and timing would simply be incompatible no matter what you did.

I hope that someone like George will chime in here if I've made any incorrect statements.

In regards to your original problem, I'm not sure I understand why you would run your LCD at non-native resolution in the first place. That's certainly the worst possible way to run things; if clarity is of prime concern. Whatever you're trying to achieve, first set that back to 'default', so that the GPU is running at the screen's native res. Then go from there.

Richard

[jdhurst]

<snip>
In regards to your original problem, I'm not sure I understand why you would run your LCD at non-native resolution in the first place. That's certainly the worst possible way to run things; if clarity is of prime concern. Whatever you're trying to achieve, first set that back to 'default', so that the GPU is running at the screen's native res. Then go from there.

Richard

I did a lot of work on resolution. At anything below 1280x1024, you are correct in that the rendition of text is pretty bad. 1024x768 is unworkable.

Now my T41 was 1024x768 native and was very crisp, in part, because you could see the distinct pixels. I ran my desktop NEC at the same resolution.

I tested the T61p and did try native for a while, but it is just too small. Even 1280x1024 is too small sometimes. I have to get to normal reading distance to read the text. Sometimes, lying on the couch watching TV, the laptop is farther away than normal reading distance and that is a problem from time to time. Never was an issue with 1024x768.

So 1280x1024 is a compromise in terms of desirability, but not in terms of crispness or clarity. My text is clear and crisp. I do use NVidia scaling to improve things and Vista is supposed to scale fonts better at different resolutions. XP could never do this. It was a moot point, because my T41 had native 1024x768 and I would not go lower.

What I perceive with light blue on white is a lack of contrast. I have the same issue with light grey on white - Microsoft loves to use light grey on white. True black on white (dead easy to read) has just about disappeared. Oxid.it uses dark red on black - try reading that.

So I have played with the NVidia settings. I make a pencil note, adjust and return to original because (except for contrast that I moved from default 50% to 70%) these changes did not improve readability.

Thanks for your post. I thought your answers were good answers. ... JDH

[dozer]

hi JD,

I can relate very well; as I too have vision problems....mine due to an eye injury when young.

I started a thread a yeat ago asking about how to deal with this issue on a display that's much much 'worse' in this regard....the 1600x1200 on my t60p.

I was operating at a handicap because I was stubbornly sticking with windows2000... .....still running it right now, as a matter of fact, although I'm only a week away from finally doing a whole fresh install of my 'main machine' with XP.....as soon as my 500gb drive shows up.

Anyway, running the video-scan at other than native is not the way to attack this problem. It puts you at a handicap right away. In fact, problems with certain colors dropping out is exactly the kind of issue it will cause; as the pixel-mapping tries to 'split hairs' on whether to turn a pixel on or not.

The routines will choose a -color- in order to achieve a calculated -placement-....because the 3 colors that make up a pixel aren't on top of each other....they're -beside- each other. So when the output of the mapping-routine determines that a line should go 'here', but 'here' happens to be at the -edge- of a physical pixel on your lcd, rather than in the center, then it will achieve that placement by activating only color-segment of that pixel that's on that side of pixel-center.

man.....that ran on a bit....hope it's coherent enough to be clear...

Anyway, back to the nub of the problem.....text too small....stroke-weights too thin....

This is something you have to fix at the app-level and the OS-level. I said earlier that I handicapped myself from the get go by sticking with 2000. That's because win2k has no provision for -overall- scaling of all screen-draw objects. However, as I understand it, XP has -exactly- that capability....a whole new "GDI" I believe.

I won't know for sure until I experiment with it myself, in a week or two, but that's my understanding.

In 2000, after many hours of research and experimentation, I was able to achieve a fair bit of improvement by changing the system fonts from bitmapped to vector, and using a thicker-stroke font (I chose Tahoma, and the bold version of it in some places).

This worked very well, except that because win2k doesn't scale screen objects, the text -fields- in most system-generated windows didn't get any longer, even though I was using a larger font.

So the text is 'cut off' in a lot of fields. 99% of the time I can live with it because it's pretty easy to figure out what it's saying in whole. Other times it's really a pain in the [censored], because it's a pathname or something.

Note that I could've changed the 'DPI setting" in windows display to scale everything up. However, I do engineering graphics on this machine, such as PCB layout and machine drawings, and it's important to me that a CAD line drawn at an inch -appears- an inch long. So I've always had my DPI set to reality...i.e. the correct value that makes a 1" line 1 physical inch as measured with a rule.....i.e. the real DPI construction of this uxga lcd.

Now, my understanding is that XP's GDI will scale ALL system-drawn screen objects for you....which -should- allow one to increase the font-size of system window text AND increase the text-field and overall window size also.

If that turns out not to be true, I am going to be one [censored] off user....because I've been waiting for just that for a year now...

Apps: Many 'modern' apps generate their own windows and window-text, and thus are easy to make 'good' for our eyes. Firefox comes to mind as an example.

However, many of the smaller apps we run, like little utilities and such, even 'modern' ones, continue to use windows to generate their windows and text, so one still runs into apps/windows with the tiniest and thinnest darn text in them. I have written to many, many programmers over the past couple years....suggesting that they become cognizant of a couple new inventions called "laptop computer" and "small but high-res LCD"....and try using their own darn utility on it for an hour.

ClearTYpe: MS has something called cleartype, that only runs on XP and above, and which is specifically for making text easier to read on laptop screens. It's an edge-smoothing routine which uses partial-pixels to improve readability....essentially the same mechanism (use of individual pixel color-dots) as the non-native res-mapping described above....but this time in a positive way. In other words, it detects when a character-draw results in a stroke that's going to look too thin or jagged because of falling across the division between one pixel column and the next, and turns on or off adjacent partial-pixels to 'fatten things up'.

You might want to check into ClearType right away. Note that its default installation may not be optimum either. Although I've not delved into it in depth yet (not running XP myself yet), I've seen a number of white-papers and utils concerned with 'tuning' ClearType.

Very first thing to do though, is make sure your DPI is set right.

You may even want to set it 'off' to some degree, to enlarge all screen objects. Many human-related things are not linear....they're more of a threshold effect....just a few more percent and suddenly it's working for you. Perhaps you'll find that to be the case here....you try 10% more dpi, and it's still not happening for you, but at just a couple percent more, suddenly it feels like a big improvement....a workable result.

Then install cleartype, and get some of the white-papers about it. I've read a few of them that taught me a lot about displays and visual interactions in general....well worth the time to find and read.

Finally, do some googling on XP combined with search-terms like "display scaling" and "scaled screen objects" and other terms along those lines. See if you can find out how to scale system fonts and windows up easily.

Heck, for all I know, it's all now right in the Display/Appearences tab! I am woefully ignorant on XP still.....having only run it for an hour or so to clean the Lenovo garbage out of my wife's new T61 for her, and install all her apps.

Rest assured that whether XP does 'universally scale' like I've heard, or not, I will be figuring out -something- to make it more usable with my impaired vision....and will gladly pass on anything useful that I work out.

Richard

[libit]

In general it is always better to use the native resolution of your screen. Lowering screen resolution causes the image being displayed to be scaled up (by a a small and fractional factor) to fit the native screen resolution and this makes the image blurry and quite bad. Also scaling makes font antialiasing pretty pointless.
So my advise is to switch to native resolution (1400x1050) and just configure windows to use larger fonts/icons to improve readability.
For larger fonts, go to control panel - Appearence - personalization - adjust font size
For larger icons size, right click the desktop , point to view and choose Large Icons
And enable/tune cleartype.

[ZaZ]

I'll take a stab at #4. For most people who buy laptops today the LCDs being offered right now are good enough. Either they are uninformed about better options and don't demand them or are not willing to spend the extra money. What's the average cost of a notebook today versus five years ago? While a larger portion of the crowd here might be willing to pony up for a better display, we're such a small slice of the pie, it's not significant enough for Lenovo to notice.

[TTY]

If a web page (Experts Exchange is the worst) uses light blue text to define "read" hyperlinks (versus darker "unread" hyperlinks) the text (light blue on white) is very, very difficult to read.

You can solve this by setting colors of your choice for read and for unread hyperlinks. I have the German version of Vista, so it's difficult for me to guide you to the appropriate menus and settings; i'll give it a try. The following works on IE8 and might work on IE7. Open Vista's Control Panel. Click "Network and Internet". Click the second main category from the top, the direct translation from German would be "Internet Options". At the lower right on the first tab, you'll find a button which might be called "Accessibility" in English Vista. Click it. In the emerging pane, you can instruct IE8 to ignore webpages' color codings. Instead, Vista will use its own color codings for read und unread links. Click OK. If you don't like Vista's colors for unread and read links, you can choose your own colors. If you want to do so, click the "Colors" button at the lower left. Remove the tick at "Use Windows colors". Then set the colors you want to have for read and unread links.

I don't have an SXGA+ panel, so i don't know how font sizes are on such a panel. But i can only support what libit says. Try setting nVIDIA's scaling back to default, then set display resolution to native 1400*1050, then scale fonts with Vista's own means by changing DPI settings. I don't know if the result will be acceptable, but that's at least what i would try first if the fonts would seem to be too small.

[jdhurst]

Thank you for all the posts. Most informative.

@TTY - I tried your idea. It works great! The improvement in readability is something like 10-fold. This pretty much proves that the base issue is web design and not me, not my resolution, and not my PC, and (less so) not my LCD.

However, the loss of web page layout is also dramatic, so I will switch back and forth to see where I will land.

Also, I find issues with small font spreadsheets where the text is not black but rather light grey.

@libit - I understand your point of view, but native is simply too small to be of any use whatever. I also understand DPI, but I have found DPI is not universal. Some applications use the bigger DPI and some dialogue boxes do not. Badly, badly implemented by Microsoft .

On the other hand, resolution is universal (especially with the built-in 96 DPI). That works, and by using the NVidia settings carefully, I have very clear text.

I also understand Clear Type and it was one of the drivers that made me like XP.

@dozer - Thanks for all the input. I have read everything here.

... JDH

[jdhurst]

<snip>
Now, my understanding is that XP's GDI will scale ALL system-drawn screen objects for you....which -should- allow one to increase the font-size of system window text AND increase the text-field and overall window size also.
<snip>

Hi Richard - do let us know how you make out on this. You obviously know a great deal on how to tweak things. However, I think Vista is actually better than XP in this regard. I ran XP for years, but only on 1024x768 native, so I never tried the things you are going to try.

Finally, after all this, real issue is light text (light blue on white, light grey on white, light red or other colour on black). I have no problems with good colour.
... JDH

[dozer]

Hi Richard - do let us know how you make out on this.
... JDH

JD, I'll try to remember to post.

It'll likely be a month or two......as it will probably be that long before I've done not just the install, and install of all my scattered apps....but also gotten the hours in on researching and diddling enough to have some results worth reporting.

ps; if it's the system-created windows you're talking about, then I'd definitely suggest -changing- the system fonts....not just scaling things.

The stock fonts are pretty light 'stroke weight'. By choosing a font that's 'darker' in the first place, and also setting the system-font default size up a point or two, you can make a huge difference in daily-use readability.

I don't know yet, but I -think- that this is considerably easier to accomplish in XP than it was in the win2k that I'm still using.

good luck!

[jdhurst]

Just to follow up, I found an easy improvement.

Apparently, Microsoft invented Verdana for display use. I had thought they were just playing with fonts.

So if I pull up Windows Colour and Appearance -> Advanced, and change all the Sans Serif 8 to Verdana 9, I get larger fonts and better clarity all 'round. No DPI changes, no other strange changes.

I still have an issue with web designers using light blue on white (disgusting practice), but I have improved my display readability immensely.

So it never really was "bad display", just bad web design (primarily) and choice of Windows fonts (to a lesser extent).
... JDH

[JohnB2000]

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but I like to set my DPI setting to Large size 120 DPI.

[jdhurst]

DPI has been mentioned before. I have tried it, and I don't like it. Having changed the fonts, it seems similar to DP1, but I like the refinement of the font change better.

Also counterintuitive to me was that Verdana is a finer (not thicker) font, but it still renders very clearly on the screen. ... JDH

[sktn77a]

I have a T61p (8891-CTO) running Windows Vista Business 64-bit. It has a 14-inch 4:3 display and the Video Driver is NVidia Quadro 570M (7.15.11.7693 which is up-to-date). The display is either a Samsung 42T0369 or a TMD 42T0373.

So --- Questions:

2. Is what is see summarizing what I read here that people are generally unhappy with displays in today's laptops?
3. Is this driven only by cost saving?
4. Why aren't displays better?

Thank you, ... JDH

I have two 4:3 display T61p Thinkpads and their displays are MUCH worse than my old T4x or even 600E computers! I think the poor display quality is all due to cost savings - my 600E was over $3000 in 2000, my T4x computers were all over $2000 in 2003/4 and my T61p was under $1200 in 2008. On the one hand, you can't blame Lenovo for wanting to remain competitive with the likes of HP but on the other hand, the HP displays I've seen lately are much better than my T61p displays.

And don't get me started on widescreen displays...................