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Cleartype In Depth
spectecjr writes "Looks like Microsoft have at last released some detailed information on their ClearType technology. It involves a whole load of Fourier Analysis to come up with the optimal distribution of color energy and to reduce color fringing. You can read the paper and more indepth info in PDF and gZipped PostScript, as well as the paper submitted to the IEEE Signal Processing Letters journal PDF. Samples of ClearType vs. standard anti-aliasing are up online too."
...unless you have an LCD (which is not an iMac).
From the site: "In order to view a sample of the optimal ClearType filters, you must view this page on an LCD with RGB stripes. You will not be able to see the full ClearType effects on a CRT. Some LCDs (such as in the iMac), use BGR stripes, which will not work with these samples."
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because I don't see any Internet Explorer integration ANYWHERE. :)
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I copied the sample from the website and did a zoom in on it. Cool! You can see all the fill-in pixels
I copied the sample from the website and did a zoom in on it. Cool! You can see all the fill-in pixels.
until someone demonizes the technology because it was created by Microsoft? The under is 1 minute.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
...what, there seems to be something actually new in this implementation?
Slashdot groupthink had convinced me that MS never creates anything original... hmm... must think... *smoke* brian overheating...
*kaboom*
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That's why I used the !@#$ smiley
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They had this in the Apple 2, so they could squish ultra-small letters for 80 and 120 column terminals.
a) cleartype samples appear a bit sharper/darker than "traditional" anti-alias techniques, when viewed from monitor-eyeball distance. Closer inspection revealed some aliasing effects on the cleartype sample.
b) cleartype looks just a hair better at small font sizes.
c) the difference between cleartype and traditional anti-aliasing, on a CRT rather than an LCD, is pretty insignificant.
If I can get either of my laptops semi-reliable for more than a few minutes, I'll post some info on the difference. So far, my impression is that this is redundant technology that would mostly benefit Microsoft rather than the licensors of other anti-aliasing technology - perhaps the impetus for the creation of cleartype in the first place.
http://grc.com/cleartype.htm
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
These are crazy days, when microsoft provide downloadables in GNU Zip! :)
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"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
While I heartily applaud the steps being taken to make screen more legible, I question the truth of the Microsoft claim to have invented this technology. Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation , has a whole page dedicated to this very issue, located here. He makes some very straighforward points, including reminding us that Apple had something which worked the same way around 15 years ago.
And of course this does absolutely nothing for screens other than LCD..
For some more information on the "jaggies" (the stuff that makes things look bad, that this technologies aimes at improving in fonts) in OpenGL and OS/2 check out:
http://www.edm2.com/0603/opengl.html
Wheeeee
Very interesting
Yes, your still have to have an LCD to see that it works
checkout:
http://grc.com/ctwho.htm
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
Do they ahve some prototype we don't?
Or do they perhaps mean the iBook?
Certainly I have found that different Apple LCD screens have different pixel orders
Damn useful for all those black-and-white e-books...
The clear-type sample on that there page looks real good when ya' look at it compared to that teeny-weeny lil' web font they'all use.
Now mebbe if Micr'Soft replaced all 'content' on tha' web with -1 font-sizes -ClearType'd look even better by comparison.
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Starsucks
That the anti-aliasing technique shown is 61-tap... fairly CPU intensive.
If ClearType is computationally equivalent to an (example) 8-tap anti-aliasing method than it is a major breakthrough. (can't believe I'm saying something positive about M$...eww...)
Remove the NOSPAM to spam me...
All I have to do is iterpret symbols on the screen as letters, the more you dull them out the less information can be packed into the screen. (Of course that would be one wacky font.)
Besides, this ClearType also requires a color display adding to the battery draw...
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All arguments over wether this is actually different than what Apple did way back with the II or not aside I'm not as impressed as I had expected to be.
Back when this was first announced I thought it made sense and would work great. I even read a few pages which showed how Apple did the same thing and loaded the samples on there up on a few screens to see how they looked. Yeah there was a difference but nothing major.
Now this comes across with what sounds like samples made using the exact algos that MS is touting as their great new innovation. So I pull out the old palmtop and laptop and check the page out.
But this looks like hell to me! I can see major color fringing and in those text waterfall examples I see rainbows in the CT examples that are so prominent they make it harder for me to read than the AA example! Yuck!
Does anyone else notice it as much as I do? Or are my eyes just abnormally color sensitive?
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
Cleartype is basically antialiasing which takes note of the way in which the LCD screens make up their pixels. From the comparative samples, it's difficult to compare the two samples given on a normal (i.e. CRT) monitor. I strongly suspect that this is not going to make such an impact on CRT-based techniques for several reasons. The conventional monitor scans a modulated electron beam across a mask before hitting the coloured phosphors which make up the display. Despite the regular display patterns of the mask, a pixel on a conventional CRT could line up with any combination of the coloured phosphors, as the start of each pixel could be on any of red/green or blue phosphors. The Cleartype technology relies on being able to make use of the arrangement of single-coloured pixels to enhance the imagery (and yes, I do believe it can make a difference) and must therefore be aware of the mapping from the resolution of the image on screen to the resolution of the actual screen matrix itself.
Something does strike me as odd in the samples though. One of the things that ideal anti-aliasing should do is give a completely even weight to every letter/symbol in a font (assuming that the base font definition is designed with this in mind). However, scrutiny of the samples seems to suggest that either the font they are using is subtly broken in this respect, or that the anti-aliasing and Cleartype render used here is not ideal - take a look at the weighting of the 'x' character, and slightly less of a problem is the 'k'. This could be hinting gone wrong, or a bad font definition - I'd be interested to know whether it looks better on an LCD screen.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
This is an interesting side of Microsoft I hadn't realized existed: Microsoft Research. It looks like they are working on a lot of very interesting stuff. I was searching through their stuff I found that one of the things they were working with was IPv6 related networking, and you can download a web server called "Fnord!". I downloaded it, and checked out license.txt and it is the GPL! Apparently they used Fnord! written by someone else and used it as a basis for some research software, and you can download it, source and everything. Cool.
Here is the software of the guy who claims Apple figure all this out years ago. He has a demo written (idiosyncratically enough) in pure i386 assembly:
Free and Clear
However, his discussion doesn't seem nearly as complex as the one we have linked in this article. My feeling is that the idea of sub-pixel manipulation is one of those "floating revelations" that recur to more than one clever mind, but that MS Cleartype is the first practical application.
Oh, and here's the cleartype site at MS. Be sure to view it with an LCD screen - otherwise you won't get the benefit due to the triangular distribution of color spots on a CRT:
MS Reader
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Anyone remember Steve Gibson's ClearType demo? Steve says that Apple invented this tech looong time ago (so long that patent already expired). I'm hoping that he will re-check facts and tech again and see if MS really did innovate something this time. I still think that this is old Apple's tech that Woz discovered some time ago. If anyone has a LCD pannel handy I recommend you check MS samples and Steve's ClearType app and see that the results really are similar.
Someone should ask Steve Gibson to opensource his app so that we can incorporate this tech into X display server (it's written in ASM so it's very fast to).
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I'm sure the analysis to get these results is much more sophisticated. Without a doubt it will be or is patented, but wouldn't a poor-man's approximation of this be to anti-alias (pixel interpolate) with blue tints on the right and orange tints on the left (instead of grey as is more standard)?
I'll bet the algorithm is much simpler if you do it that way, and you'd probably get 90% of the results with 10% of the effort.
The anti-aliasing algorithm is really simple and typically works really well. Imagine a grid of squares (pixels), and you want to draw a thick diagonal line through this grid.
Now, we'll encounter some problems. In a traditional pixel-drawing scheme, we would color all squares completely covered by this diagonal line, and any other square, even those partially covered by the line will not be colored.
Zoom back from this drawing, and you have a very jagged, aliased line.
Now the anti-aliasing scheme solves the jaggedness by a simple yet clever solution; the squares are shaded depending on what percentage of their area is covered. That is, if a square is 95% covered by the line, it will be very dark, and if it 5% covered, it will be very light. Zoom back from this, and you have a nice smooth anti-aliased line.
Note that other anti-aliasing methods exist for differrent things, but the above is mainly for simple line drawing. For example, when anti-aliasing is done on a 3d rendered scene, a typical solution is to slightly shake the camera and re-render the scene, then blend the different renderings (this is known as oversampling).
Now, this cleartype technology seems interesting. I'm not sure how it works, but judging from the examples given, the fonts look a bit "fuller" when larger on the screen. Also, very small fonts are very easily read, whereas in an antialiased scheme the smaller fonts are difficult to identify (this is probably because the antialiasing algorithm has trouble dealing with sub-pixel drawing instructions). One downside of cleartype, however, is that I noticed a fair amount of green and red color fringing on the small-to-medium fonts. I suppose this type of distortion is a side-effect of taking advantage of sub-pixel drawing technology.
it was demonized months ago when the original story was posted and everyone said "This isn't any different from anti-aliasing!"
Former research IBM scientist Ron Feigenblatt has some interesting comments about Microsoft ClearType. Feigenblatt explains subpixel addressing, dynamic pixels, and color convergence problems on LCDs.
Apple had color LCD screens in 1985? I'm pretty sure what they had was whole pixel (monochrome) anti-aliasing as opposed to sub-pixel rendering. It's different.
And of course this does absolutely nothing for screens other than LCD..
This is akin to complaining that the latest rechargeable laptop battery technology isn't good for anything other than laptop computers. CRT's don't even need this technology-- it's designed specifically to enhance the text quality on portable color LCD devices.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
This is new?
Some people have too much time on their hands. Putting a shiny label on something to sell it better is kinda, ironic. It's sorta like changing the date on a carton of milk...
Perhaps it is innovative because it suchs more of your processor into viewing text (whoopee!)
Eh...
You can definitely see an improvement in the smaller font sizes. The 6, 7, and 8 point are much more readable with the cleartype. The larger ones are more crisp too. Not a huge difference but it does look better.
Several people have already pointed out that ClearType does not represent innovation on Microsoft's part. Here is a related point for your consideration.
When the Free Software / Open Source community creates something innovative, anyone can use it in any way, improve upon it, incorporate it into any kind of tool. Everyone benefits. This is the paradigm of science.
When a corporation such as Microsoft creates something innovative and keeps it proprietary, no one can use it in any way except as the corporation permits. The lion's share of the benefit goes to the corporation, and further innovation is stifled. This is the paradigm of intellectual property.
Anyone, including a corporation, has the right to handle their creations as they see fit...but where do you want to go today?
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You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
> Let's just say that having a bright idea and actually implementing that idea are two very different things. How many people in the /. audience have clever pet inventions that they just don't have the time, or the skill, to make a eality?
I've been thinking about this for a bit. A lot of good ideas are lost because of technical problems. Myself I have a big list of things I want to do "when know how to". How about creating an "idea database". Anyone with a good idea can enter it. Others can browse those idea's to find a solution to a problem they have. If they find someone they can contact the original author to discuss it further and/or help him implementing it.
The Apple II doesn't really do this. It uses the properties of the NTSC colorburst signal to create color from a synchronized high-resolution monochrome signal. The physical "subpixels" on the CRT can't be aligned to this signal, and the end result is fuzziness, not clarity. The R,G,B phosphors on the screen are not directly addressed.
CRT's and even analog LCD's don't gain anything from this, as this technology needs direct access to the R,G,B elements of the display to create antialiased text that is as sharp as possible. It even needs to know the order of the RGB elements. This done through wholly digital displays that directly address the color pixels on the display, such as an LCD on a laptop. The next step would be to make this independent of the display type, with tuning tools or profiles for individual display devices.
Television does this naturally, being a wholly analog system. Point a color camera at some text, and the edges of the text will fall on the color elements within the camera, irregardless of arbitrary pixel boundaries. If you magnify a still image on a TV set, you'll notice that any sharp edges are defined independantly of the positions of the color elements, and they are "smooth". In contrast, any computer-generated edges show a bias toward pixels, causing some jagginess in even the best anti-aliased graphic. Of course, if the source camera and the receiving TV set have different color element geometries, the result will be a little off.
Whatever you call it, this is antialiasing taken to the max. I'm glad that someone is taking it seriously, even if it's Microsoft. CG for television should take notice, too, to try to simulate the natural look of purely analog signals.
Um, here's a direct quote. This looks like sub-pixel rendering to me....
The Apple II's highest resolution mode was 280 pixels horizontally by 192 vertically. However, this was really the 'sub-pixel' resolution. (Similar to the example above where an 800 pixel wide LCD is really 2400 sub-pixels wide.) The Apple II's display generated two sub-pixels per pixel. On an LCD display every third sub-pixel is Red, Green, or Blue and all three must be turned on to get white. On the Apple II, every other sub-pixel was green or purple and they both needed to be turned on in order to get white.
here's more
But thanks to Apple's built-in sub-pixel technology, white pixels were often composed from each half of adjacent whole pixels to yield a much smoother result.
So why only LCDs? What about CRTs? I suspect what Microsoft is really after here is the handheld market. They'd like for PocketPCs leap ahead of Palm OS at least as far as display clarity goes. It may seem like a minor battle but Joe Consumer standing in Best Buy looks at chunky Palm OS two-color screen then sees bright and crisp PocketPC screen and buys that instead.
What I find curious is ClearType has been presented at a few conferences and white papers submitted to IEEE yet I don't see any clear statement on how/if ClearType will be treated as a public standard, or released under some sort of licencse, or jealously protected by zealous IP lawyers. Could it be a case of adopt-now-and-we'll-bill-you-later? Maybe I just can't find a link to the license agreement. Whatever.
On an LCD screen.. there are subpixels as follows
RGBRGBRGB
RGBRGBRGB
RGBRGBRGB
Traditionally, we treat any group of 'rgb' as a pixel, so.. to make a 'white' display, we need *any* 3 adjacent pixels.. they use this fact to effectively triple horizontal rezolution. ie: Insted of 50%r100%g50%b, on a diagonal line, the next one would be 100%g50%b50%r, etc...
1) Is the main purpose of this technology to provide a technically irrelevant selling point for the Pocket PCs?
2) Is the main purpose of this technology to justify the cost of the processors to run the bloated software?
3) Is the main purpose of this technology to show, when two PDAs are running side by side with ClearType, that the Pocket PC is the better machine(given the optimization)?
When we know the answers to these questions, then we can decide whether this is innovative or just annoying.
See Color LCD Panel Subpixel Rendering by Prof. Hank Dietz, December 15, 1998.
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Tim Mattox
Ironically, this paper couldn't be released sooner because it was rejected the first time it was submitted for publication. Why, you ask? Because during the anonymous review process the reviewers felt that the technology was too similar to Microsoft's Cleartype!
On the other hand, both examples look much better than the non-antialiased text I'm used to looking at under Linux... :-/
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
You've made all these judgments about ClearType, but none of you have looked at it on a PocketPC display! I mean, the webpage with the samples flat-out TELLS you that a CRT can't display it correctly, and you won't be able to appreciate it. Does ANYONE out there in have a PocketPC so they can tell us if it really works?
...would be more like 50 pages, and it would actually contain equations. You can use harmonic analysis for lots of things, and this is a pretty simple application, that arguably doesn't really rely on it to work, rather Microsoft just uses it to give a hand-wavy justification of why it works.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
A very concise and easy to understand explanation.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Basically, you fake a 3x resolution increase to make edges smoother.
:)
My question is, will this technology be relevant once monitors at 3072x2304 are common? The extra resolution would surely be wasted on making your browser window or text editor larger -- because your eyes can only read so much. But if you used it to enchance the readability of everything on the screen, making all your edges sharper -- it could make things much easier to read, scale, and enjoy.
1024x768 screens are fairly uncrowded. They give you lots of space to overlap windows when you need to work between a couple of applications, and provide a nice size for working in one application. But once you go past to resolutions of 1280x960 or 1600x1200, you begin to not see any useful gains. "Everything" begins to shrink, leaving more and more useless white space, while using an exponential increase in video ram and monitor bandwidth/scan time.
Perhaps the real application of a technology like this is not for using the properties of LCDs to fake more pixels, but in rendering low-resolution 1024x768 screen on a high resolution 3072x2304 screen with anti-aliasing and proper kerning, and other smoothing techniques to make it as crisp as any piece of paper. This could make 2D cards require an extra bit of logic on the silicon, but the benefits could be many.
I'm sure 3D graphics would benenfit too, considering how anti-aliasing could make the "low" resolution of 1024x768 look fine (the Voodoo5's FAA makes lower resolutions just as good looking as higher resolutions withouth FAA). Instead of worrying about larger memory usage by video cards, you could just work towards a fixed target, and let the monitor's increased resolution + the logic on the card do full screen anti-aliasing without as much special logic as the Voodoo5 employs, and it'd look crisper because you actually have those extra pixels to use (instead of just relying on the eye to average the shades of adjacent pixels).
Just a thought
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I obviously have nothing blatantly new to add to this topic since I have read all these posts which make me feel like I am lost in a nerd maze. But, from an idiots view...I expected more. I of course have your basic crt, so anything on these cleatypes is a loss for me, and I am sad about that. I would be so happy to have something that helps the headaches and blurred vision I get from spendig my life in front of this screen. I couldn't care less who's company developes, rips off, or copyrights it. Anything to help my poor failing eyesight would be welcomed.
And many men were wearing codpieces in the shape of rocket ships, in honor of the Big Space F*ck-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
...that low-pass filters (exactly the same ones that are used in traditional antialiasing) work better on LCDs if sampling is done separately for three channels with taking phase shift between grids of red, green and blue pixels into account. While explanation of the reasons, measurement of difference between "most perfect" filtering and low-pass filters, and demonstration may be interesting, the idea itself is rather obvious and hardly can be considered a great triumph of human thought.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
"Now this comes across with what sounds like samples made using the exact algos that MS is touting as their great new innovation"
MS spends $5 billion a year on research and development. They had to try show something.
I find it incredible that for all that R&D money spent over the past several years, the most innovative thing they've managed to come up with is a rehash of an Apple technique for rendering fonts (oh, yes, and the dancing paperclip). The mind boggles at how little incentive there must really be at MS to innovate if thats the best they can do.
Text is just 3d surfaces with a very simple view matrix.
The basic problems with doing this are:
1) I don't have an LCD screen, so I don't care.
2) Latest laptops run at 1400x1000 resolution. As you get towards 200 dpi, the benefits of this go away.
3) It takes 3x as long to render, plus another chunk of time to filter after, and hardware that does anti-aliasing to begin with, and anti-aliases with variable support filters.
4) X11 doesn't yet handle alpha channels, this would be a priority.
Ok, so CT apparently looks good, and is therefore an asset on LCD's. Any thoughts on whether other groups (Apple, Linux people, Be, Transmeta etc...) will work something like this into non-MS systems? My impression from previous posts is that MS can't claim exclusive use of the technique, only their particular algorithm.
My other question is this: where can we go from here with CRT displays? Are there better algorithms out there than what's currently and commonly used for anti-aliasing (ala Adobe Type Manager, etc)? If so, why haven't we seen them yet, and when can we expect them?
Yea, I know it is kind of mean to harp on a system that is older than I am, but I think it is ridiculous that X is so far behind in modern display technology. (It is also ridiculous that we are still using it after so many years, but that's another story.) Coming from the all anti-aliased all the time world of BeOS, I notice that X has really poor font handling. If you read any of the FreeType docs, you'll see constant bitching about how X really doesn't provide any font support worth a damn. While X just recently got integrated truetype support, and is still far away from having anti-aliasing (which even Windows! has) Microsoft is introducing new technology to make fonts look even better! Aside from these small scope issues, this fact points to larger problems with the X architecture. It just wasn't designed to be extended cleanly. As such, X (at XFree86) still doesn't have genuinly usefull things like DPS and anti-aliasing. This is yet another reason that X needs
A) A huge, major rewrite.
B) To be replaced with something else.
Berlin looks very promising. True it uses CORBA for its API services, which sacrifices speed, but even at the beta level that it is in, it already has nifty features like anti-aliasing support, and a totally cool imaging model. Also, it is designed to be extended cleanly.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yessir, this is a troll, and you should probably moderate it down so that I don't offend any intellectually challenged people.
I'm curious why people can't just accept something new for what it is? This is pretty neat, don't you think? It certainly helps with readability problems on LCD displays.
Do you have to attack it just because it's from Microsoft? Can't you for once just admit that Microsoft does indeed build some pretty cool stuff and make it available to the public. You know what, I'll bet that they are even going to bundle this technology into their OS! (How utterly shocking! Maybe we should call the DOJ and complain?)
Yes, Apple did something very similar, but in a very different way for a very different purpose with a very different effect.
One might as well say "But isn't there already prior art existing in the Atanasoff-Berry computer" because they used digital calculations.
Sheesh.
I looked at it on my primary surfing system, an Acer TravelMate 720 series laptop PC with a 1024x768 active matrix color LCD. Looks beautiful. It'd look even better on Nintendo's Game Boy Color, where the red, green, and blue vertical stripes are even more pronounced.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Whether Microsoft Research will be a long term fixture among top industrial research labs remains to be seen. It's also unclear whether Microsoft Research will be any more successful at technology transfer into products than other labs. Apple, for comparison, used to spend a lot of money on research (Gates was bragging publically he didn't have to spend any, he'd just take Apple's results) but disintegrated within a couple of years when the company wasn't doing so well.
With their wealth and promise of stock options, Microsoft has had an easy time luring away people from other research labs until now. Losing so many good people has been pretty bad for those other labs, as you can imagine, and that has given Microsoft Research the reputation of begin a raider (in line with the generally aggressive stance of Microsoft).
Does it actually look like a significant improvement to you?
Cooledit (an editor for X11) uses a similar technique to this, which also should result in sub-pixel resolution of anti-aliased type on LCDs. URL: cooledit.sourceforge.net
wow.
I triple-boot, be, winBLAHs, and Mandrake. someday I'll have darwin, probably running X, to add to the mix.
A better filter for text would be a cheapo box filter. The worst it can turn a 1-pixel black line into is two .5 lines that are adjacent. Adjusting for the screen gamma (their examples *do* do this) will make a much more "even" result than this fancy filter (and would be dozens of times faster). In particular the thin lines would all appear to be much closer to the same weight (it is also necessary that the original binary image have lines of even thickness).
The "cleartype" I think looks somewhat sharper because it uses this simpler filter. You can also see dithering artifacts all over the white area to the right, so I believe they are rendering at 3x width and then translating this to the rgb values of each pixel, but using something like error diffusion to keep the average total color rendered "gray". I think they should reset the error after some number of pixels of solid color because your eye will not see this:
RGBRGB.....RGBR
as more red than this:
RGBRGB.....RGB
This would get rid of the dithering artifacts on the right.
In any case it actually is an innovative idea. The truth about innovative ideas is that they seem quite obvious once somebody thinks of them. It also means that it is almost impossible to stop real "innovation" from being used by everybody, since just seeing the output provides enough information for the innovation to be recreated. In fact I would expect this to appear in lots of commercial and free products quite soon.
The microsoft demo page doesn't work on my Sharp Actius because I've got a BGR screen. How stupid is that?
Besides, this ClearType also requires a color display adding to the battery draw...
*sigh* Come on, If your going to flame microsoft at least have a point.
This technology is not ment for grey scale devices. It was developed for there color devices, so or course it isn't going to be usefull on a grey scale device.
And can you honestly say it's easier to read a 160x160 reflective grey scale that it is to read a color display at twice the resolution.
And considering that pocket pc devices are already color, battey draw is kinda irrelivent .
I'm not pro microsoft or anything. But when people post comments like this, it's silly.
Also, like most things, microsoft might not have come up with the original idea. But, they seem to be the only people who are acctually using it.
look here. This will better help to understand of what we are speaking, what is interesting about it (and what is old news).
Hey, this is funny.
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There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
So now they're claiming to have invented ClearTape? Make's you wonder what else they're going to lay claim to?
I think I make it much easier to read anyhow.
Something else of interest, the jornada 545 (the 12bit one that was supposed to be 16bit), ff I remember properly, has the lines horizontaly (imagine a normal LCD rotated 90 degrees).
I think they might be using something like cleartype, but instead of sub-pixeling the pixels next to each other, they sub-pixel the pixels on top/underneath each other. Which would improve serifed fonts like Times alot. The usaly thin serifs help guite the eye along the line, but on computer screens, they are too big and acctually make it more difficult to read.
I approached this paper hoping that there would be some interesting innovation which the press had missed in the scramble to accuse M$ of stealing the Apple/Woz original idea.
Unfortunately the only point of this paper is to describe the displaced filter for each of the color components to correlate with the displaced color components on the display device, this is exactly what has been announced before. There is really nothing noteworthy about this other than to describe in detail how unoriginal the idea is.
When talking about Microsoft Research, don't give a pointer to Microsoft. This is almost like confusing, say, NASA and U.S. Government (here or here).
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Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
Bitmaps captured from laptop screens with cleartype are going to be messed up if you view them on a different kind of monitor, but I guess this isn't as much of an issue for PocketPCs. They should, however, consider having cleartype rendering being optional so that people can get useful screen captures for web sites etc.
I think you'll find that Nifty Doorways has this feature.
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Peter