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Are There Affordable Low-DPI Large-Screen LCD Monitors?
jtownatpunk.net writes "As time goes by, I find myself supporting a greater number of users moving through their 40s and into their 50s (and beyond!). I notice more and more of them are lowering the resolution of their displays in order to 'make it bigger.' That was fine in the CRT days, but, quite frankly, LCDs look like crap when they're not displaying their native resolution. My solution at home is to hook my computer up to a big, honkin' 1080p HDTV, but that's a bit of a political risk in an office environment. 'Why does Bill get a freakin' big screen TV?!' Plus, it's a waste to be paying for the extra inputs (component, s-video, composite), remote, tuner, etc. that will never be used. And a 37-47" display is a bit large for a desk. So here's my question: Is there a source for 24-27" monitors running at 1366x768 that are affordable and don't have all of the 'TV' stuff? Or is my only choice to just buy 27" HDTVs and admonish the users not to watch TV? (And, no, just giving them big CRTs is not an option. Most people would rather stare at a fuzzy LCD than 'go back' to a CRT.)"
Euthanasia
Is it THAT hard to get Windows to use a larger font for everything? Wouldn't that address the issue?
What happened to zooming in to applications?
It's really just a monitor with speakers and a tuner. Why not solder on a terminator to the antenna in and be done with it?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Are there any affordable High DPI monitors? Back in the day you used to be able to find 17" 1600x1200 crts, which were wonderful. My laptop is running at 1400x1050 @ 10", which is also very enjoyable. Are there any flat panel desktop displays out there with the same density? I'd love a 19-22" display running at 2560x1600.
Because there is more to look at than fonts... like the 16x16 icons everywhere.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Affordable to you may be unfordable for me or unaffordable to you is perfectly affordable to Donald Trump.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Really this is an issue of software and appearance settings. On my Dad's windows Dell D680 the dot pitch is freaking tiny evenn for me but trying to leave that resolution at max and changing the font and icons sizes just doesn't work. I want a "zoom feature" for the OS. Hold ctrl-mouse wheel and resize EVERYTHING on the damn machine.
What about using the native resolution of one of the standard displays, but setting the default fonts larger?
Many monitors look good at exactly 1/2 resolution. Get a 20+" monitor with 1920x1080 resolution and run it at 960x540.
The question you should ask is "How do I change the size of fonts and icons on my computer?". Or, "How do I access the accessibility features of my operating system, specifically pertaining to visual settings?"
Because there is more to look at than fonts... like the 16x16 icons everywhere.
Isn't there a "large Icons" selection?
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Easy. Get a 30" Desktop LCD like the Dell 3007wfp and run it at exactly 1/2 its native vertical and horizontal resolutions (1280x800). You essentially get the same quality as if it were the native resolution (well, one to one mapping at least) and none of that crazy TV stuff. The best part is that if somebody with, well, "normal" eyes wants to use the monitor in its full 2560x1600 glory, they can simply switch the resolution.
I think the real problem here is that the software is rendering text way too small. Tons of websites out there insist on ridiculously tiny font sizes like 8 point.
Apple had at one point a plan to give OS X resolution-independent rendering, so that UI objects are always displayed at the specified physical size independently of resolution. That seems to have fallen by the wayside, but this is part of the correct solution--the other part is to alow the user to just say they want everything to be displayed larger at a specified ratio.
Are you adequate?
The link above the article was for LCD monitors.
This one looks nice, http://www.lge.com/us/computer-products/monitors/LG-led-monitor-W2486L.jsp
It is an LG, so a bit pricey and I have seen similar size HD TV with HDMI in at a lower cost.
For more models and pricing there is always New Egg
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Yes. To bad there isn't a Google Shopping version of lmgtfy.com
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Is it THAT hard to get Windows to use a larger font for everything? Wouldn't that address the issue?
In Windows XP, turning on the various "large font options" or telling XP that the screen's PPI is 120 instead of 96 really doesn't work out well in reality. You still end up with web pages where the fonts are super tiny because they were specified in "px" increments.
Not sure about Vista or Win7...
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
If you're on a Windows box, you can achieve the same overall effect by increasing the size of your icons and fonts. A quick tip for most internet browsers is that you can change the size of things on a web page by holding control and then using the scroll wheel on your mouse. This works for almost everything in Microsoft office as well. There are a lot of useability options rolled in there, believe it or not so I'd say take the 20 minutes to learn to tweak your OS and you can save the hundreds of $ you'd spend on a new monitor.
Just put a Fresnel lens in front of the display. It worked for WALL-E.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
And all sorts of business critical applications that use unscalable texts in the UI. Now you can blame the application for not scaling but usually just buying a bigger screen for the user is a lot cheaper than having the application fixed (if it is even fixable at all).
http://virtualize.wordpress.com/
The problem is there are several programs - mostly proprietary apps - that are set to ONLY work at a certain resolution. You can't change the fonts because of it. I too am interested in what answers come up for this issue.
...because if your eyes can't focus on the screen, everything's going to be blurry regardless. As long as the blurred area of an individual pixel on the rescaled display projects into an area smaller than the circle of confusion on your retina, it won't affect your perception of the screen's overall sharpness.
There is a preference for large icons, but not all third-party non-free applications respect it.
Don't know if the specs are good for you, but Apple has a couple of larger size monitors. From my experience they seem to be pretty good at multiple resolutions with decent clarity. Not sure if this is helpful, but it might be worth a look.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
If they used half resolution and a virtual desktop, you might be better off. The monitor ends up being a 2x Zoom on a normal desktop.
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
I have also solved this problem by using an LCD projector. One day when I left my glasses at home, I spent the day reading off the wall instead of my laptop.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Let's say you have a 1680x1050 LCD monitor. Try to set the OS at 840x525. The monitor will use exactly four pixels to display each pixel from the computer, so you'll still get a razor-sharp image.
Some of you will say that 840x525 is too small (resolution size, not physical display size), but it's a bit larger than 800x480 which is what most netbooks are these days. And given the number of netbooks sold, more and more applications should try to support 800x480, which means they should be okay with 840x525.
30 inch LCDs are available, with native resolution of 2560x1600. They're not cheap, of course.
If you need really big pixels for the vision-impaired, just run them at 1280x800 and there will be no artifacts (exactly 1:2 ratio), but still a tolerable resolution.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
All you need to do is give them one of these.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Finding myself in my mid 40's with a eye problem has affected work to a large extent. 20/20 all my life to end up with distorted vision in my right eye has led to a number of changes. First, went back to the huge Mitsubishi 2070 CRT. I find it clearer that the 19" LCD's. Second, received glare reducing glasses from corporate HR (gunnars.com) which greatly help glare issues with my wonky eye. Without the glasses I cannot work a full day. Third, installed a theme manager to try and darken the windows screen. For the most part this works except for the inability to darken Outlook backgrounds and still be able to read email.. Fourth, looking into a large LCD or similar which can display a high resolution (lots of real estate) with "large fonts"...
Fixer of things broken by people who really ought to know better
To get Windows? No.
(Display, Appearance, Large Fonts. Also Effects, Use Large Icons. This is for XP.)
The millions of shitty Windows applications that assume that everything is running using "normal sized fonts," on the other hand? That's the challenge.
Some of these applications actively ignore the Windows Large Font setting, so even if you set Windows to use Large Fonts, they'll still use the same too-small fonts they've always used. (Not sure how they do that, since I thought Windows just scaled the DPI up.)
Even better are applications that will respect the larger font sizes, but still layout everything as if they were using the smaller font sizes, so only the top of text in labels, buttons, textboxes, et al are visible.
Short answer: Yes, it should. No, it doesn't.
the standard solution I use is to change font sizes, icons etc, however this runs into problems on the web which aren't coded properly it would be very useful if the various OS's would have a range of themes with larger fonts, icons etc and some meta data that can be read by sites to adjust their output. this is an issue that is going to become ever more important
Many monitors look good at exactly 1/2 resolution. Get a 20+" monitor with 1920x1080 resolution and run it at 960x540.
If Windows' Display Properties doesn't automatically show a modeline for 960x540, how can I force this res?
Don't install antennae on the TV, or connect them to cable. It will then be impossible to watch TV on them.
The problem here is that the DPI is wrong not that the DPI is too high. Fonts are measured in "points", a point is 1/72 of an inch — yes a physical measure other than pixels. If the monitors DPI is wrong (or even better, you use Windows where the DPI is locked at 96 regardless of the monitor size) then it gets hard to read.
I have a 19' LCD at 1280x1024 in Linux which according to xdpyinfo has a DPI 85x85 so 10/72 of an inch is actually 10/72 of an inch on the screen.
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Since I'm going to assume getting a Mac or Linux system is unacceptable. You really are going to need to look at small televisions rather than monitors. Monitors will generally be designed to higher resolution (Again, right DPI means that a 19' 2560x2048 would be easier to read then a 1280x1024 due to nice clean curves and less antialiasing distortion) so you need TVs which are generally big and low resolution, can't really help with that though. On the other hand, you might be able to pick up some software that stretches the picture to native resolution (I know nVidia's drivers offer a software scaler to zoom low-res up to native but I found that looked more crappy then the one builtin to the monitor itself personally).
Reading glasses - they are cheap ($5) and available (Walgreens). Why everyone feels the need to solve easy problems with complex solutions, I will never know.
The newer versions of Windows have a "Change the size of text and other items on the screen" that scales fonts and (most) icons up nicely. KDE has a font scaling option too (and I'm sure other window managers will have that as well).
I think using scaling is a much better option than buying a low dpi screen (for example anti-aliasing looks waaaay better)
Not all applications honour the Windows Large Font settings (which often forces me to choose other software that does) it's quite frustrating at times.
crazy dynamite monkey
Windows supports multiple DPIs. Leave it at native resolution and use the lowest one you can find. This will make the fonts bigger and more readable. If that doesn't work set your base font settings higher.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
If you're on a Windows box, you can achieve the same overall effect by increasing the size of your icons and fonts.
Windows has preferences for large fonts and icons, but not all third-party non-free applications respect them.
Go tell that to the CEO who usually also falls in the same user/age group with regards to this particular issue.
http://virtualize.wordpress.com/
There are SO many assistance applications, magnifiers, and Os adjustments that asking for a lower resolution screen in a given size simply isn't required.
Also, telling someone to simply get a better pair of glasses is often a cheaper and simpler answer. Also, moving the screen closer to the user and using a smalle r screen also works (as the REASOn for a bigger screen is NOT making things bigger, it's to have more stuff on it!)
At the proper distance, a 17" LCS at 1024x768 is the same physical size as a 24" screen about 1.5 feet further away. Tell them to save $200, but a 19" screen, and see their eye doctor. They'll break even, and be able to read everything else better too!
If they're eyesight has fallen THAT far, then bigger print is not so much a concern, and it really is time to turn on the "assistance" features. (someone who's only 50 and can't read 1024x768 at arms length on a 19" screen wearing glasses or contacts also likely can't pass their state's eyesight requirements for DRIVING. I'm holding the daily paper up against my 22" screen (running 1200 vertical lines) and the text at arms length is BIGGER than the text in the newspaper as held at a standard reading distance (arms bent), and therefore even at the much higher resolution, should actually be EASIER to read than print... The text on my iPhone is less than half this size! If my parents could not read my screen sitting in my chair, I'd be asking for the keys to their car, permanantly, as they're no longer safe to have behind the wheel.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Please change your default Windows Font size (it's been possible forever; at least as far back as Windows 2000, and probably back into the 3.x days). Some things look good, most things break in unseemly ways. I try doing that every few years, all the way back to my 21" 1600x1200 monitor, but back away from it each time due to incompatible apps.
/frank
I tried it again this year - hooked up a PC to my 47" LCD HDTV running Media Center. Realized that I couldn't read text from the couch, so I increased the system font size to make email, etc legible. And Microsoft Windows Media Center, published by a company that really should be doing this kind of testing, took it's already 1" tall font, readable by a legally blind dog from 50 feet away, and blew it up even larger, breaking the screen layout in unusable ways.
And, so, I went back to the default system font size, again. I'll try it again in a few more years, but I just don't expect it to ever work the way a user wants it to work.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Sure, you can change these things, but most apps are meant to be run at a typical resolution and don't look nearly as good otherwise. You also spend half your day fiddling with the resolution to get it just right.
I use this with Firefox on my "primary" laptop, which has a 15" screen and a 1920x1200 resolution. It's cool that FF remembers the setting for each page. It's annoying to have to set each page. Sadly, when I dock at work, I use a 24" monitor and then everything has to get set back (thank goodness for ctrl-0).
I used to complain about Macs connecting monitors only at a given resolution (CRTs)...it's clear they just favored old people. Now that I'm old I see the logic, not that I agree with it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Larger fonts decrease viewing space
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As usual, it's New Egg to the rescue. You can search monitors according to pixel size. The largest pixel sizes give you a resolution of 1920x1080 at 28" (~$370). There are also some even larger screens at lower resolution, but I don't know how big you want to go. They have large format screens - 32" at 1366x768, but those seem to be quite a bit more expensive (~$950).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824254043
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16889252035
Personally, I prefer a 4:3 ratio on my screens and those have become very hard to find.
Q: "Why does Bill get a freaki'n big screen TV?!"
A: "Because Bill doesn't bother the IT guy with stupid questions like this one."
Apple uses 512x512 files for icons now, Gnome has used large images and vector graphics for icons for a while now. I'm pretty sure vista used large images for icons.
There's no reason why increased dpi should make things harder to see. It's a failure of UI designers to not be scalable for user comfort.
So I suppose that a pair of $9.95 reading glasses from Wal-Mart is out of the question, huh? I use a 1.25x pair which is about perfect for looking at a computer screen (which is normally farther away than a book or magazine would be).
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Or at least glue them up.
You're not paying extra for the connectors, you're paying less for the lower resolution. Just get a TV like the Insignia NS-L37Q-10A.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Upgrade to Windows 7 and use the improved High DPI settings. It works wonders.
I can attest to this solution (for me anyway - yes, an annecdote!). However, they are only $1.00 each in a pack of 3 at the local dollar store. My wife bought about 12 of them and we have them all over the house. I generally don't use them - not using them now, but there are times where they come in handy. Works equally well for reading that small print on pill bottles as it does for the smaller stuff on a computer monitor. Especially when some designer is getting "artsy" and puts some kind of variegated gray background behind small text.
If they're running Windows, there's a "DPI" setting under DisplayProperties->Advanced->General. This ostensibly scales the entire desktop. Personally, I'd rather have a huge display, but your politics may preclude supplying them.
Worse still, many Windows applications aren't written well enough to manage anything but "standard" sized fonts and have been known to crash when system font sizes are tweaked and manipulated. I haven't seen this lately, but have experienced it before and was the source of much head scratching for a long while.
In any case, even if the symptoms aren't as extreme as a crash, there are still often problems with apps that don't know how to scale.
So move to an OS which uses vector icons...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Because there is more to look at than fonts... like the 16x16 icons everywhere.
If you choose a dpi setting that a "reasonable" multiple of the windows system standard 96 dpi the icon scaling is "acceptable". For instance, windows suggests 120 dpi as a next step up which is 1.25 * 96 dpi. I would try 1.5 * 96 or 2.0 * 96 for a very hi res monitor and the guys with the coke bottle glasses because things definitely look better with a font drawn larger at the screens native resolution.
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
It was in the office at the computer I noticed one morning I couldn't properly focus any more when close up to the computer screen.
That same day I went to the supermarket and got some 5 Euro reading glasses and everything is back in focus.
We use 15.4" laptops with a HD screen, yes the pitch is small but with the right glasses it's no problem what so ever.
As a matter of fact, decreasing the resolution might make the font large enough for me to read but I'd still suffer a very uncomfortable loss of focus.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Isn't there a "large Icons" selection?
Just hold control with the desktop selected and scroll the mouse wheel up.. voila! Changable icon sizes (in Vista and 7)
And then start complaining to software vendors when they write crappy software that only supports the standard DPI. There are plenty of technologies out there to help developers write UI's that scale properly with the Windows DPI setting (ie. WPF for the .Net devs out there).
AccountKiller
It's not my intention to troll, but with KDE4 on Linux everything is vector graphics and scales percentage wise to a resolution instead of Windows XP where everything is just fixed size and looking horrible when scaled up.
So if you are running KDE 4.3 for example on a low resolution screen (try a full screen Windows game in Wine and kill it from a terminal and switch back to the terminal where X is running and you can see very tiny windows, icons and fonts untill you go to the controll center and set it to run on your native resolution) everything scales down. On higher resolution everything scales up. This, for me, is a major advantage over Gnome = 2.2.8 on very high resolutions.
I am amazed at why Windows still doesn't do this. Maybe it's for the better to buy a large standard definition Plasma screen. It would eat up about as much power as a large, low-DPI CRT screen and if you can still buy it it is very, very, very cheap. Think about 299 USD...
Here be signatures
Apple had at one point a plan to give OS X resolution-independent rendering, so that UI objects are always displayed at the specified physical size independently of resolution.
I think they still have that plan, but the engineering was delayed in shoring up the iPhone platoform...
However, you can use this today in most apps for OS X. You install the development tools, and then run /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/Quartz Debug.app - there's a menu option under Window for "UI Resolution" where you can set a scale. Most OS X apps after a restart obey the set scale, since they are all using the Cocoa text rendering... it also works with images.
That may well be a good option for people who are having eyesight issue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And there is another problem; applications nowadays are made for larger resolutions. A netbook for example, like the ASUS EEE PC 900, has a resolution of 1024*800. Almost all applications out there do not even fit on it!
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You change the things that matter, not the resolution. Change the font size, icon size, and widget sizes where possible. I wrote a post on making OS X usable for my father, but the same types of mods and more are possible on Windows. You just have to locate them all. For my own vision problems, I just insisted on a 30" monitor, set at its native HIGH resolution, and increase fonts and icon sizes as necessary. Get a pair of glasses set to the correct distance - in my case 26" from my face to the monitor. Making OS X more usable for seniors
Just because an HDTV has more stuff on it doesn't mean it's more expensive than a same-res same-size monitor without those things. Thanks to economy of scale, it costs more to not have the extra tuner, RGB, etc. stuff built in.
Buy the cheapest unit that does what you want. You can ignore what it has that you don't need.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I've noticed this option doesn't cross the minds of some IT guys, but how about letting the users do what they want?
If they want to look at an awful non-native resolution on their LCD, why don't you shed your single tear about the waste of technology and let them go about their business? Does it actually affect you in the slightest?
What you describe basicly is called a cheap TV.
These already have a DVI or HDMI or VGA or SVIDEO or COMPOSITE or ETHERNET input for use with a computer.
Shouldn't this do it? The cheap models often have a "low" resolution and carry some HD Ready sticker.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Then hit Ctrl+= a couple times and zoom in on the page. Or specify a minimum font size in the browser's prefs (the former tends to work out better in most browsers).
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
There's really only a few pixel densities manufactured today.
0.282mm to 0.285mm (19" 1440x900 or 22" 1680x1050)
0.270mm (seen in 24" 1920x1200 displays)
0.243mm to 0.248mm (19" 1680x1050 or 22" 1920x1080)
Personally, I find the 0.245mm pixels to be too small, with the 0.285mm pixels to be just about perfect for me. Then there's the 15.4" Thinkpad display that is 1680x1050, that has really really small pixels (around 128ppi or 0.200mm).
There is an Acer 27" that is 2048x1152 with reportedly 0.291mm pixels.
Basically, when monitor shopping, you need to look at a particular resolution (such as 1680x1050) and then make sure to buy the displays that are the upper end of the size range. The 1680x1050 glass is currently sold in sizes that range from 19" to 22". Your older users will be a lot happier with the 22" 1680x1050.
Or you could go looking for 24-26" 720p TV sets which are typically 1360x768 and have very large pixels. Of course, the small resolution will quickly become a bane to future users.
All of the smaller 1080p TV sets are all 24", which is only a pixel size of around 0.270mm. So the 22" 1680x1050 displays with 0.285mm pixels are a better choice.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
So don't do that. Use high res and draw things bigger instead. High-res is actually easier for people to see, not harder. And everything's vectors these days anyway, so you can draw things bigger.
I found that doesn't work in Outlook 2003. Imagine that - MS Outlook for frack's sake!!
Unfortunately, particularly when you have a stable full of legacy proprietary crap, the fact that it is the UI designers' fault isn't too helpful.
In many of these cases, your options are either:
1. Hire a team of software engineers, lawyers, and corporate necromancers to dig up all legacy applications and make them resolution independent. This costs $$$$$$$$$ even if it is possible.
2. Buy bigger monitors.
Ummm ... Sit closer?
PS I love my 30" monitors.
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Logan's Run will promptly remedy that issue! :)
Wanting a low DPI monitor is the absolute wrong answer to an important question - how do we make our computers easier to read if we don't have good eyesight?
Sure, low DPI monitors will make everything look large, but the correct solution is a vector-scalable desktop environment. I want more DPI crammed into my desktop (to make it closer to my laptop), not less. The higher the DPI, the less we depend on hacks like antialiasing and sub-pixel font rendering to make our fonts appear smooth.
Once you obtain a monitor of appropriate physical size and reasonably large DPI, the problem is entirely within software. Windows XP had somewhat limited options, though you can play with font DPIs and such. Older versions of KDE and GNOME used bitmapped images for icons, making them ugly if you scale them. Newer versions (at least of KDE) use SVG everywhere. Then it's a matter of finding themes with sufficiently large buttons, scroll wheels, etc. A little work, but relatively do-able in Linux. Hopefully newer versions of Windows also provide more flexibility here, or perhaps with some add-on software. I haven't tried messing with Mac OS X's accessibility options too much.
That said, there are always issues. Emacs for me doesn't grab the DPI setting from GNOME to set its font size, so when I dock my laptop and X reports a DPI change, my fonts also change. I have some code in my .emacs file to detect the system DPI and set the font to something reasonable, but I haven't yet tested it in docked mode yet.
But the bottom line is that we've reached about the limit of reasonable desktop screen sizes. These screens are also pretty cheap (much cheaper than similarly-sized CRTs ever were). That means that the source of improvement is in native resolution, viewing angle, color accuracy, etc. I'd absolutely love a 300 dpi monitor and have antialiasing need to do little or nothing to make my fonts look spectacular. Phone screens are getting there, then will come laptop screens, and hopefully in a few years we'll have 200 dpi+ monitors as the OSes will all support scaling everything appropriately.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Since we're talking about Windows-land, it's worth mentionning that Windows Vista and Windows 7 both automatically scale icons to fit the display you're using, this way the icons take up about the same amount of physical space on screen, regardless of the size of the screen you're using. (as long as your screen properly reports itself to plug&pray).
I'm not sure what the issue is, though... if you want to buy somebody a 27" monitor, and are happy with 1366x768 resolution, then buy a TV. It won't cost you anywhere near as much as a 27" computer monitor will cost (besides which, if you specifically want the lower resolution, good luck finding a computer monitor over 17-20" that doesn't come in 1920x1080).
But if you're in Windows-land, updating to either Vista or 7 would solve the "large fonts and icon scaling" issue without needing to fiddle around with the graphics settings.
Now that I'm over 50, I'm starting to want bigger screens because of presbyopia, as opposed to merely because I ought to be able to get more pixels on my work machine than I had back on a Sun-3 back in 1987 (Finally fixed that this year :-) For the most part, because my vision issues are still mild, I fix the pixel size issues with glasses, because I'm running Windows on my main work machine and can't just tell it "make everything bigger", like we did with NeWS Postscript-based displays.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Tell them if they have a doctor's note they can have a 27" TV, but the antenna port, HTMI ports, video input ports other than for the computer, etc. will all be epoxied over.
Internally, bill the cost to ADA-compliance.
OK, I realize this is a less than ideal solution but if someone gets pushy, that's a solution.
By the way, if the users aren't complaining about fuzzy monitors, don't worry about it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Just make the fonts bigger.
Ingredients: Turkey, Mechanically Separated Turkey, Water, Salt, Flavour.
I could do this on Sparcstation 1s using NeWS windowing. (You could even do that on Sun-3s if you had 8MB of RAM.) It was a Postscript-based windowing system, and What You Saw was really What You Got.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Netbooks are almost always 1024 by 600 these days.
Start / All Programs / Accessories / Accessibility / Magnifier
This will magnify the area around your mouse without too much impact on everything else. Best case scenario: No need for a new monitor. (Maybe a second monitor just for the magnification?) Worst case scenario: It does nothing to help you and you've spent no money to find that out.
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Does the Pope shit in the woods?
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
This is exactly it. KDE4 works just as well on my tiny eeepc as on my 22" LCD as on my dual-screen setup.
Basically, if you cannot see anything because you are using inferior technology and basically propose fixing an inane system (windows/mac with their unscalable UIs) with an inane setup (let's use the LCD for a resolution it is not made for!) your problem is not technological...
Go live in the now: this is The Year of the Linux Desktop, where Stuff Works As It Should (most of the time). Hell, if you are desperate for windows, you can run it in vmware, full-screen, and use the magnification effect of kwin to solve your resolution problem the best possible way.
3. Move the monitor closer to the user.
4. Glasses
5. CTRL++
6. Not all LCDs are created equal. Panel quality makes a big difference. I went out and bought a pair of nice Samsung 260Ts (26"x1920x1080) and all of a sudden, everything is nice and crisp again.
7. Get them to stop looking at so much pr0n. Or at least give their eyes a break from the screen every so often.
Control Panel
Display (Properties)
Settings
Advanced
General (tab)
Display (section)
DPI Setting
"If your screen resolution makes screen items too small to view comfortably, you can increase the DPI to compensate. To change font sizes only, click Cancel and go to the Appearance tab."
So my solution is to hand out reading glasses to the older users I support? That doesn't seem like it will go over well...
Should I preface that talk with them by saying "IANAO""?
Run linux. Run windows in vmware. Use the magnify effect of kwin to solve your tiny fonts problem. Now, you use the correct resolution of your LCD, have scaling as good as possible, and crash protection.
Once more linux/KDE saves the day.
Just hold control with the desktop selected and scroll the mouse wheel up.. voila! Changable icon sizes (in Vista and 7)
Cool, I didn't know about this (I scaled my icons DOWN, by the way). Now do you know of a way to make that ridiculously wide window border narrower plz, thx?
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
when you can go to Circuit City ?
Yours In Astrakhan,
K.T.
No one has sold an 800x480 netbook in 18 months. All of them are 1024x600 or 1366x768.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Windows and OSX both have extensive "Accessiblity" features that you really need to research.
Ah, the young so often speak with authority about things they do not understand. The problem is not about vision correction, its about aging of the eye, loss of accommodation, etc. On a side note, just remember when it comes to anything physical it is all down hill after you turn about 25, eyes, reaction speed, healing, stamina, etc.
Well actually, most netbooks run at 1024x600, at least the ones with a ~9" or ~10" screen size. Some of the newer ones with ~11" screens are even 1366x768. Only the very earliest netbooks with the nigh-unusable 7" screens had the puny 800x480 resolution.
That's not to say 840x525 wouldn't be a workable display size, but personally I know I find any display with less than 1024 pixels across rather irritating to try to use.
In fact, both Vista and 7, if Aero (i.e. DWM) is enabled, will scale up any application when you raise DPI. If application is marked as DPI-aware in its manifest, DWM will let the application handle that itself (by enlarging fonts and using scaling layouts); otherwise, it will apply simple bitmap scaling to the composed window bitmaps.
For instance, get a 27 inch at 2560x1440 and set the resolution to 1380x720, thus every pixel on the screen takes 2x2 pixels on the monitor. This gives you a sharp picture at resolution that is easy to handle for aging eyes.
I'm pretty sure vista used large images for icons.
Vista UI guidelines require providing icons of sizes up to 256x256. All stock OS icons follow the guidelines, and, to the best of my knowledge, so does all MS software released after Vista.
32 inch TVs with 1920 x 1080 resolution are available for under $500. I don't think they will play any TV without an antenna, so that's nothing to worry about. Only problem is that in the cheap price range, you only get VGA (poor quality) or HDMI, so you might need a DVI-HDMI adapter on top.
Otherwise, Dell has a nice 27 inch 1920 x 1200.
Indeed. Heck we have one application we got recently where it can created custom database fields, but if you create more than the screen will hold they just go off screen - they don't even have the decency to display a scroll bar. Just inaccessibly off screen.
As a result we had to bump all users of that app up to 1024x768 minimum. Now, personally, that's pretty low anyways (I run my 17" office LCD at 1280x1024), but a LOT of the older users complain at anything higher than 800x600. And in this case increasing font sizes won't help - it'll just push the info back off screen again.
I think we're eventually just going to have to look into getting them some big honkin monitors to compensate. 1024x768 might be small (to them) on a 17" screen, but on a 24" screen I'm betting they won't complain.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Because crappy software doesn't scale properly. I have a 1080i TV running 1920x1080, and I pumped the DPI setting to 200% so it was readable. About half of apps don't scale at all so they don't work. Of those that do respect the DPI, most of them do something dumb like scale text but not the rest. So text that is baked-into an image is unreadable. And many of them scale the text but not the available space, so the button should say "Cancel" but it says "Canc" showing only the top 1/2 of the letters.
I foresee a future version of Windows that has an option to "emulate" a lower DPI and just pixel-scale the application. One day we will all have 300dpi+ screens. Those old apps that assumed 96 DPI will show the size of a postage stamp unless they are scaled-up by the OS.
You may need glasses, my friend. This is what happened to me. Changing the res on monitors, trying to buy lower res LCDs. Finally went to the old eye doctor. And yep, you guessed it, time to start wearing glasses. All this bullshit magically stopped being a problem.
While they are not perfect, an easy fix for this is to change the DPI settings in the operating system. This makes everything larger without compromising sharpness. For windows, XP does support this, though it can be kinda crappy and not uniformly supported between programs. However Vista/7 changed the video driver model to natively support these higher DPI settings and should work much better. I would imagine OSX has similar support - and probably even linux though i've personally never checked.
Is there a display adapter that actually provides 840x525 resolution? And an LCD that will sync to it? In theory it should be possible, but I have never seen that.
I am currently running Windows XP on this laptop, an older 1600x1200 15" laptop. That is 133 DPI, or "139% of normal (96 DPI), according to the braindead custom DPI slider in Display Properties|Settings|Advanced|General|Display (ugh).
Setting DPI to 133 (or even the default "large size" of 120) results in many non-scaled elements like tiny bitmaps in properly-sized windows, inaccessible text (and text entry boxes) that extend beyond the borders of unresizable windows, multi-line text that exceeds the readable single-line space that is dedicated to it, And no, there is never any way to access (scroll to, "highlight" to, etc.) content that is obscured in this manner, often even if the window is resizable.
Things are slightly better in Vista and newer for Microsoft applications. But third-party applications continue to be garbage in this respect, even non-legacy Vista- and 7-aware programs from established big boy commercial software publishers.
Linux is absolutely excellent with scaled screen elements in comparison, and OS X is heaven in comparison. Windows is simply built on a development culture and legacy that allows things like this to happen.
Never mind, I found it.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
Somewhere in the Windows Vista control panel garbage is a setting for cranking up the size of fonts which includes buttons and dialogue boxes and stuff. I did this on my 40" LCD at home running in whatever-by-1080 resolution so that I can read text from the couch with a wireless keyboard and mouse. It works mostly okay, but because software apps don't scale up with the increased font size, you end up with some really strange looking dialogue boxes and some other unexpected behavior.
The fancy buttons on the top of the Chrome browser window, for example, don't respond to clicking at all. Obviously they're expecting a click at some location on the screen and Windows is drawing the buttons in a totally different place. Its okay if you know keyboard shortcuts (like windows key + m to minimize), but still annoying. Would drive me nuts if it was my work PC.
No. In fact, high dpi mode kicks in automatically for monitors, and can be scaled as needed. Most people, however, only know to "make resolution smaller for a bigger picture."
In win7 (and possibly vista, though it may be through a different path), just press windows key, type "small text" and open the "Make text and other items larger or smaller". Choose a size (100, 125, 150%). In vista you reboot, in win7 you log out and back in. Ta da! scaled up everything at native resolution.
The LCD would sync with 1280x1024, but the OS should be doing the 2x zooming via the GPU. Ideally with all anti-aliasing settings disabled.
If I understand right, the issue is not so much DPI per se, but font size. Windows XP was notoriously bad at ramping it up across all OS apps/finctions and across all 3rd-party apps. I hear 7 is much better, as is Linux. I don't know about Macs. I konw for a fact that MS and Apple have an "accessibility" department, that mainly czters to disabled users but should be of tremendous help.
If I were you, I would investigate in that direction, instead of looking for a very expensive specialty monitor.
Or, on the contrary, you could play the multiples game, and try and test a 1900x1200 display @ 950x600 ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
So my solution is to hand out reading glasses to the older users I support?
No. But recommending a visit to the opticians to any users who complain of bad eyesight would be a good idea, regardless of age. Are you planning on getting comfy sofas for those that don't like the office chairs too? If there's a genuine medical need for special equipment like a larger monitor then of course it's good practice to provide that where it's economically viable to do so. But that's after they've sought medical advice and can support a need for special treatement. The reason you need to worry about other staff asking 'Why does Bill get a freaki'n big screen TV?!' is because you don't have a good explanation for it. That should tell you evrything about the situation.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Some of these applications actively ignore the Windows Large Font setting, so even if you set Windows to use Large Fonts, they'll still use the same too-small fonts they've always used. (Not sure how they do that, since I thought Windows just scaled the DPI up.)
Windows does scale DPI up, so if you request a font with size specified in points, you'll get a proportionally larger font. The problem is that you can also request a font with size specified in pixels, and that, by definition, won't scale with DPI.
Similar problem in fact exists with CSS, where pt will scale, but px will not (which is why, if you're ever using px to specify text size in your CSS, you're evil, and in Hell you will be blinded and then forced to surf Flash-based websites for eternity).
Vista and 7 mitigate that problem, somewhat: they require every application to specify in its manifest whether it's "DPI aware" or not - it's opt-in, so you if you don't tell it that your app is aware, the default is that it's not. Note that this means that all pre-Vista applications are not DPI aware.
DPI aware apps,work the same way all apps did in XP and before - they get true DPI values reported by the OS, and have to adjust text size and window layout accordingly themselves. If they do it right (and hopefully, if they claim to support it in their manifest, there was some effort made to make it work right!), you get proper vector scaling. Ideally, if they use some sane UI framework with proper reflowing layouts - e.g. Qt or WPF - it "just works".
If an application isn't DPI aware, then, as far as it's concerned, it always runs at 96 DPI - the OS lies to it. Window manager then takes whatever the application rendered to its window(s), and scales that up using the usual bitmap scaling techniques. This isn't nice looking, because you get the usual pixellated and somewhat blurry picture as a result, but at least it is enlarged to the desired size - so you can read it with poor vision - and it always works correctly with any application.
Of course, this is meant to be strictly a legacy app support feature; all new applications should be DPI-aware. Also, users can opt out of this, and fall back to XP behavior (and risk badly written apps not handling non-standard DPI settings properly).
So in other words, there's still loads of third-party software which doesn't support such large icons, may never support such large icons and will only cause trouble at high resolution?
Actually, I'm dealing with just this problem lately. Its not so much that my eyes are going (although now that I'm 45, I find I do prefer larger text) its that I am working on a project that is supposed to be used from across a room. There is a very large set of program in both the Windows and Linux worlds that are incapable of working on a desktop running at 640x480 or even 800x600 resolutions. I've even found ones that can't be used at 1024x768.
One might think that the answer would be to go to a much higher resolution and then tweak all of the various menu- and font-size settings to make things large enough to read. This also doesn't work as those exact same programs often seem to have hard-coded assumptions as to font sizes and one regularly discovers menus which only show the first 3 characters of each entry. Plus, many windowing systems don't seem to provide the kind of user settings needed to configure things for this kind of environment.
While one can (and I do) blame the authors of these program for sloppy coding, there are a very large number of such programs, which can only lead me to think that the OS APIs for handling this stuff in a clean way are far too cumbersome to use correctly.
Just get them iMac 27" machines and they will be happy!
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Windows Vista and 7 do this too. Applications can set a flag to tell the window manager that it is high-DPI aware, and get nice big sharp windows. Apps without this flag are rendered at 96dpi and scaled up to avoid any issues with dumb programs.
Samsung SyncMaster 2343BWX and Dell SP2309W are two very cheap (around $230) 23" monitors with 2048x1152 resolution. You can run them at 1024x576 with razor-sharp picture.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
It won't really cause trouble because of icons - for those places where OS needs a scaled icon (e.g. desktop, taskbar, toolbars, window title), if one isn't provided, it will simply scale up the largest one available. There are other ways an application can mess up on high DPI, but Vista/7 provide a hack for that, which I've described in my other post in this discussion.
I get closer every year... except that there's nothing in Linux that fills the niche of MS-Access. Which is superb at working with one-off, different every week, data has a lifespan measured in days/weeks, data sets. Plus we can shove the MDB directly into a version control system where it lives with the rest of the project files. No need to run a database server, just checkout the MDB, open it up and all the queries, reports and tables are there for inspection and viewing. And I can copy/paste to/from a spreadsheet where it's often easier to make certain types of changes or analysis. Or I can yank data from different data sources (ODBC, other MDBs) and merge it all together for analysis (being careful not to join a local table against a remote ODBC table).
ooBase is a joke in comparison.
All of which is the pretty much the same reason that I'm not using a Mac... I'm not interested in spending the majority of my time running inside a WinXP virtual window.
But yes, modern web browsers are a lot better about letting you zoom the entire page (including images) then was the case back in '02-'03 when I first started working with 126-128ppi laptop displays. Back then it was a lot uglier. Telling Firefox/IE to not use font sizes below a certain size would almost always break websites with overly aggressive design elements. Or there are fun UI dialogs where the buttons/text end up missing entirely or overwrite each other.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I'm the first post to suggest a projector?
Its really not that expensive, compared to salaries, ADA lawsuits, etc.
Also, you may need one for yourself, for "evaluation" purposes (not lan parties and lunchtime movie theatre, no not that)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Most of the extra cost of a "TV" over a similar-spec "monitor" is not the extra connectors, its the cost of the NTSC/ATSC tuner. There are lots of units out there that are marketed as home television sets, but don't have any tuner (and therefore cannot legally be called "Televisions" or "TVs"). Without a cable box (or satellite box or external ATSC tuner) no television watching is possible. A lot of these units are fairly inexpensive; you may be able to find some at prices less than similar-sized LCD computer monitors, but you might need adapters to connect it (VGA to component or DVI to HDMI).
As soon as others realize no TV-watching is possible on these sets they shouldn't complain about the old guy getting a "big-screen TV". If people are going to complain simply based on size (because their own monitors aren't 24-27 inches) then you're going to hear complaints no matter what.
Not to mention the fact that 'Large Fonts' are actually not that large if you're sitting more than a foot from the monitor. Personally I like to sit about 3 feet from the monitor, partially because this means I have notes on my desk between me and the monitor.
And large fonts are not that large because nobody writes software to scale properly - that's partially why Gmail is such a breeze, there's the implicit assumption in (good) web development that you cannot control fonts.
Just hold control with the desktop selected and scroll the mouse wheel up.. voila! Changable icon sizes (in Vista and 7)
I found that doesn't work in Outlook 2003. Imagine that - MS Outlook for frack's sake!!
So there is a feature in windows Vista and Windows 7 That doesn't work with Outlook 2003. Have you tried Outlook 2007, which was released along with Windows Vista and 7?
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
Well, yes. But I'd say the same of 1680x1050...
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Why is it not allowed to be a TV? 720p TVs are cheaper than large high-resolution monitors. From this week's Best Buy flyer:
http://www.bestbuy.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?sku_id=0926INGFS10117350&catid=23244&logon=&langid=EN
Is $300 higher than you have in mind? Isn't this exactly what you are asking for?
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
The web-browser solution? A little plugin called NoSquint. It remembers your customized zoom-level per domain, and lets you zoom text *and* images at *separate* percentages. Like I read slashdot and facebook at 170% text/normal images, but gmail at 160%, and IMDB at 100% text/180% images [due to their tiny images]. It's nice to have it remember, and not have to spend a lifetime zooming back and forth.
My display? A sharp aquos 52-inch HDTV @ 1920x1080. I've been doing TV-out since 1995, and this is by far the best set-up.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Hey wait a minute! Now that you are mentioning 96dpi... if you have an ATI card under Windows and not just the ATI driver but also the Catalyst Control Center... There is a DPI option somewhere! Maybe you do not even need to buy a new monitor! :D
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I find it hard to believe that your data has a usefull lifetime of days or weeks. Your 'Report' may have a useful life of days or weeks, but your data should have an indefinite (or at least multi-year) lifetime. Using access 'reports' or, god forbid actual tables, as your base data repository is usually bad. for anything other than mom and pop shops. Even then, it's still bad. Oracle has a free version of it's database, Microsoft has SQL Server Express Edition, then there's pgsql, mysql, etc etc etc. Access must die a fast, horrible death.
And KDE is balls slow on older hardware. We're looking for a reasonably priced solution that can run on a cheap machine with a cheap monitor. There's no technical reason it can't be done, it's just that no one seems to be manufacturing it.
I am not sure why this is a troll other than the obama comment. I know several dozen 50-60 year olds who know they need glasses that reading glasses don't cut it anymore and refuse to go to an eye doctor for proper glasses. They can barely drive, can't read signs, yet they refuse to go to the eye doctor as they might actually have to wear glasses.
fear of being uncool, is deeply ingrained in them.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Are you really this stupid or are you just trolling ? I'd really like to believe you are trolling and that people stupid enough to spout crap like your post get run over playing in the street prior to reaching puberty...
I've found out that whatever resolution you currently use becomes your new minimum. Any lower resolution feels too small because of habit.
console and huge font, windows not needed at all
slashwhat?
Works equally well for reading that small print on pill bottles as it does for the smaller stuff on a computer monitor. Especially when some designer is getting "artsy" and puts some kind of variegated gray background behind small text.
There's your solution for people that don't want to use reading glasses. Keep an extra pill bottle and properly label it "cyanide" in small print...
So you have badly written software that can't cope with the low resolution that the short-sighted old users insist on having on the small screens you give them?
Where do you work? :)
What harware are we talking about when we talk about a cheap machine? Do you already own it or not?
What software requirements do you have? I mean: IE websites, flash, MS Office files, whatever... ?
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Most of my friends and I have instinctively migrated to smallish "720P" LCD HDTVs for our computer monitors. By smallish I mean 27"-32" and by 720P I mean 1360x768 native resolution. You push them to the back of your desk to relieve farsightedness and regain the ability to use your desk. They have an ATSC tuner in them, to boot.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
But if you're in Windows-land, updating to either Vista or 7 would solve the "large fonts and icon scaling" issue without needing to fiddle around with the graphics settings.
Yes, upgrading your operating system seems like the best way to do the least amount of fiddling around.
(/me rolls eyes)
Whoops - didn't read fully before posting. No this is under XP. I don't know about VIsta or VII.
Would you rather be sent to "Carrousel?"
Take me where I cannot stand...
...from your sock-puppet account? How elaborately antisocial.
This brings up a good point. A couple of years ago there was an employee where I work who was having ergonomic issues with their workstation. The complaints were valid and one of the solutions turned out to be a flat panel, LCD monitor. The lesson that the rest of the staff learned was that if they complained about ergonomic issues, they would also get LCD monitors. Soon enough a team had to be formed to deal with all of the ergonomic complaints coming from the staff.
30", not cheap, but... in theory, that'll perfectly scale.
I have the opposite problem - servers located on various off site locations, and often no monitors around, so I have to bring my own when needing console access - I really wish there was some cheap small VGA/DVI monitors around I could bring, or even better - a usb dongle with VGA/DVI+keyboard/mouse input, and some app to turn my eeepc into a console - why havent anyone done this yet?
That's easy! Switch them to Linux, where the devs weren't too shortsighted to realize that it would be a good idea to make everything on the desktop scalable. I run at my native resolution, which would make things a bit small for me, but all I have to do is set the monitor DPI to a higher value than actual, and everything appears at a nice, easily readable size.
Do you considder Enlightenment for example badly written software? It's the option windows that do not fit vertically on a low resolution screens. It's everywhere; from Windows to Firefox and from MS Office to whatever software you can think of...
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Get a display with the highest pixel density you can find then run it at a resolution that is lower than native, but still at the proper aspect ratio.
What I've seen from this with my coworkers is that they often are horrible at selecting an alternative resolution. If your monitor's aspect ratio is 16:10 then it will likely look like crap if you choose a 16:9 resolution and worse if you select 4:3, yet I see people do that. 1366x768 is junk and you'll be hard pressed to find a good monitor that will show that aspect ratio well.
I've found that a monitor with a native resolution of 1680x1050 is passable when running at 1440x900. Someone who doesn't have great eyesight to begin with probably won't notice any problems with the image on that setup. Likewise, I'd imagine that a monitor made to run 1920x1080 could probably run this or 1680x1050. I wouldn't use those resolutions, but I also don't want to rip my eyes out if I sit down at a computer setup like that for a few minutes.
Well, you know, it would help if every web site in the world didn't set their CSS to render main body text size at 66%, often at less than 100% black. Just to look "cool" and "web two-point-ohey".
I set my browser font size for the default text size, not for the headline size. So stop using it as the headline size.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
but it's a bit larger than 800x480 which is what most netbooks are these days.
Wha-huh? Where do you buy netbooks?
I don't think I've ever seen any less than 1024x600.
Comment of the year
I have a computer hooked up to the DVI input of a 4:3 CRT TV set. This set only supports 640x480 resolution with a 4:3 signal.
ATI's display configuration window is about 500 pixels high. If I ever need to change the settings, I have to blindly tab/shift-tab to press the OK button.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Step 1: Get a Dremel Moto-Tool and a few carbide cutting blades.
Step 2: Cut the antenna jack(s) off the back of the TV set.
Step 3: Watch people try and fail to pipe the DTV signal into the TV.
Regarding to the using-a-TV solution, one thing worth noting is that unlike monitors, they don't usually have a tilt mechanism. That may be bad for ergonomics. You might end up needing to buy a separate stand which has it.
By the way here is a nice DPI calculator I found one day.
That, and that means that they intended to write like an idiot.
it can created custom database fields
Just inaccessibly off screen.
Either that, or IHBT, IHL Let's see him moderate anonymous coward into oblivion.
I never did understand why many people cant grasp the concept that system font size is independent of screen resolution. You'd think they'd notice the stupidity of buying a 30" 2560x1600 monitor then running their whole desktop at 1366x768 but noooo....
Another point: why would you ever buy a 1680x1050 monitor? they cost practically the same as a 1920x1200 monitor but can't display HD at native resolution (1290x1080). Even if you currently don't think you'll ever need to watch HD, wouldn't it be sensible to cough up the extra 99 cents and buy a 1920x1200 just in case?
Vista/Windows 7 can scale-up icons if needed, they just look ugly. Unfortunately, there's no good way to cope with that. Microsoft doesn't have a time machine, nor do they have the authority to force all third-party developers to up their icon sizes.
In general, I think they handle DPI changes very well-- certainly incredibly well compared to XP, which frankly sucked at it. (XP generally upped the text size, but left everything else alone, so you ended up in a world of readable text but miniscule icons, and text that ran off the right-edge of windows.)
Comment of the year
Reading glasses - they are cheap ($5) and available (Walgreens).
Why everyone feels the need to solve easy problems with complex solutions, I will never know.
Yeah, why design or buy a tool that is convenient and pain-free to use when we could just make every human being strap a different tool onto their face.
And why do these exist when Walgreens carries a simple solution for this problem, too?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
One thing to remember, is that alot of operating systems allow you to adjust the display DPI setting. Windows by default uses 96DPI, but you can easily bump it to 120 (even in xp). Also , windows 7 supports changing the display settings from "smaller" to "medium" (125%) and large (150%), though i've never tried them myself
on the 'large display' side, one of my colleagues just picked up a sony 32" lcd tv for $399 USD from amazon, that's 720p (i assume 1280x720 or 1366x768) for his home, second tv, but this would easily work for those the desiring large screens with higher resolutions. Also consider the low end/off brand LCD tv's too, as those are getting even cheaper.
dw.
This is one area where OS X lags behind. Sure you can zoom, but if you use a 27" or 30" display, the menu is just as small as on a 13" macbook. As much as I love other aspects of Mac usability, I'm still hoping that tomorrow they'll have the same scalability for large displays that windows and linux have today. My parents are getting old now, and they're both finding this particular aspect of computing a problem. After quite a while, I estimate that about 80% of computer issues my mother has are related to her difficulty reading what's on her screen.
Google "TV Magnifier" and you'll get several options. They're big flat magnifying lenses you can place in front of your monitor. They might be awkward on your desk, but if not, they're much less than a custom LCD monitor. They suck for multiple viewers, but at a workstation should be fine.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
What OS were you running Media Center in? XP?
Try changing the DPI in Vista. It finally scales up the entire app, not just the fonts, and works much better. (Icons can still get jaggy if they're scaled-up.)
Comment of the year
It can do it, but it sucks in XP.
However, the higher DPI settings in Vista and 7 work GREAT. I have my mother and grandmother, as well as a few people at work, using it.
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
Your best bet might be buying a more expensive monitor that has a really high resolution, and then cut it to 1/4. For example, my 30" has 2560x1800. If you set it to 1/4 (ie, you won't lose any precision due to pixels not fitting), you can do 1280x800, which is pretty close to what you'd like. To lose so much resolution makes me cringe inside though. As other posters already mentionned, Windows 7 will scale all apps when you adjust DPI, and for example, my Firefox is set to a default zoom of 130%. This is because otherwise most sites are a thin 20% bar in the middle of the screen!
Religion is the best example of mass psychosis
You're right, this is not always a workable option. As mentioned by another poster, it is the application's fault for not scaling properly, but what do you do about that?
Where I work, there are in excess of 40 users all swapping desks around. Some use a higher (native) resolution because it is sharper, others run with the lower (non-native and fuzzy) lower resolution because it is larger and they are an ageing user base.
Increasing the font size causes more issues than it solves in almost 99% of my experience.
I'm 59, and have been running a 17 inch CRT at 1280x1024 & usually have 4 -6 apps open at any given moment (just got a hand-me-down 19 inch widescreen (about 1360x 900). And, yes I do wear glasses. Meanwhile the 28-ish kid who does miscellaneous stuff (one application at a time) sometimes runs her 21 inch widescreen at 800x600. Her desktop icons look like beer coasters.
Now, get yer clodhoppers outta my garden, kid.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
800x480 is pretty close to a good phone's resolution...
"... this is The Year of the Linux Desktop..."
I thought that was 2004? Or was it 2005? Or 2006? Or 2007? Or 2008?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Quite a few have mentioned using a full HD tv and just throwing away the remote.
Why not go the distance and buy a full HD (or better) projector and just setting the screen size to something you like? Most of them can handle quite large angles when adjusting for keystone effect.
This kind of reasoning is exactly why nothing ever gets fixed.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824254026 - $310 delivered.
It's also very bright which helps with depth of focus. It's so nice I purchased two.
Why? because reading glasses are the proper, high performance solution that also happens to be low cost. Large, low resolution monitors are not only expensive and demanding of desk space, they are lower in performance.
The only reason not to use reading glasses when they are necessary in a work environment is vanity. There is no "convenient and pain-free" tool that will solve every older worker's presbyopia problem except proper eyesight correction.
It was twenty-or-so years ago today.... So back in the late 1980s, I was using Gosling's NeWS on Sun Workstations. It could fit on a Sun3/50 with enough RAM, though it was happier on the SparcStations that came out in ~1989 and following. It was a Postscript-based windowing system - What You See Really Is What You Get. :-) Everything Just Worked (except when it didn't, in which case it crashed and died in ugly ways, but most of the time it worked, and the debugger was really cool.) For example, if you wanted to print something on a laser printer, you got the same fonts, rendered at the correct resolution, no jaggies required. The psterm terminal application we used instead of xterm didn't do anything special to iconize; you just shrank it to use a 1-point font, which is 1 pixel on a typical Sun workstation screen of its day, and anything happening in the window continued to work live, so you could see things scrolling by.
It later evolved into Java, which you may have heard of
My supervisor was in his early 60s and kept switching eyeglasses to talk to people or look at his computer, so we just cranked his font size to 24 points and he could read everything.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Just use a projector! ^^
No, seriously!
You can't go much more low-DPI than a projector, can you.
There are many geeky solutions, like projecting it on the back of a surface (e.g. using the paper that they use for those DIY multi-touch tables), lowering the brightness of the projector, etc.
I'm sure that way you can build yourself a nice giant screen with up to HD resolution, but very low DPI. It's entirely possible, that you can fill your whole viewing angle with it then. :D (IMAX effect)
Which should be really impressive in games!
One tip: Two half-HD projectors are (much) cheaper than one full-HD projector. :D
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Most of the cost of a large LCD TV is the display panel, not the multiple video inputs. Besides, it's probably more efficient to manufacture just large-screen TV LCDs with low pixel density than manufacture them and large-screen computer LCDs with low pixel density and lacking consumer video inputs.
Great. Now point me to some modern software (or hardware, for that matter) that can run with IRIX.
Not everyone is helped by reading glasses. I myself suffer from keratoconus and while I can manage right now because I still have 1 good eye in the future having a display that displays everything sharp should enable me to keep doing my job. There are some technical crutches already there which help, zooming and switching to "negative" view on the mac help but why shouldn't technology be adapted to work well for an aging population ? It's a big problem and not getting the attention it deserves.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Actually, the more general solution on Windows is to increase the DPI setting for the display, which scales up more than just text. This works fairly well from at least Windows XP.
Speaking as a 45 year old who has just had to buy his first pair of reading glasses, I absolutely concur. Not only do have these devices fixed usability problems with my computer display, they also fixed the same problem that was manifesting itself with the rest of reality.
Well, I'm talking about my experience with KDE 4.1 when it came out and I was still using a 2.8 ghz Celeron with 1.5 gigs of ram. Before the 4.1 "upgrade" Amarok was decently speedy and Kolourpaint was fast, sleek, and quick-starting. KTorrent was also my preferred BitTorrent client. (I ran a mix of KDE and Gnome.)
After 4.1, there were several issues that made me ditch it entirely:
Firstly there were several glaring feature regressions in Amarok that brought it down to feature parity with Rhythmbox, and Rhythmbox is still lighter than even Amarok 1.5. Amarok 2.0 was much slower starting, and generally clunky than 1.5.
Secondly, Kolourpaint now took as long to start as Inkscape, and drawing a line with the pencil tool caused my CPU to spike to something like 25%. A cursory inspection on my new Core 2 Quad box seems to indicate that this is fixed in the latest Karmic - so it may be one of those things that came from KDE4 being pushed out to users before it was really ready.
It also seems like the amount of crap you have to load to run KDE programs has ballooned - I'm not entirely sure. Regardless of just how much its memory footprint has ballooned, it has, and Gnome in contrast is sleek, responsive, and works out of the box with a comparably minimal memory footprint. You can also pick and choose elements of Gnome that work for you, rather than being forced to load the whole runtime.
My original statement may not have been entirely accurate if you're running the whole KDE desktop on something other than Kubuntu, but I don't really have the patience to install a new distro and configure all sorts of stuff when I know that I'm unlikely to give up Fluxbox + gnome. KDE is generally less responsive, and I wouldn't expect that even if I find its memory footprint is comparable to Gnome without Gnome involved.
Some WMs allow you to move and resize windows by holding a key (e.g. Alt or 'Super') and dragging with the mouse, which might allow you to make the window larger than the screen. I wouldn't want to need this regularly though.
There are a few things missing from this argument. Everyone seems to focus on wide-screen monitors. Agreed it is an issue, with new laptops running extremely high resolutions. Our company (very large user base) purchases 4:3 ratio laptops. 1400x1050 and above are sometimes too small.
The real issue is with our call centre. We run dual-head with 19" HP LCD screens, which are native 1280x1024. For a majority of users (who are over 40 years old) this is too small. Most have great eyesight, however for the length of time and work they perform this can become tiring. So most of the time each screen is running at 1024x768, we all know how fuzzy this can look. At the end of the day I find this fuzziness more tiring than a higher resolution, but that's me.
Using very large wide-screen monitors is not an option. It yields less working space and once again the overall resolution is too high. I would love for there to be a lower resolution 19" or 20" monitor on HP catalogue but that's not a reality. We have some 17" monitors but once again these are 1280x1024 and are being phased out.
I loved my old 17" CRT. It would run any resolution up to 1280x1024. 1152x864 was where it was happiest and that was the perfect resolution for my eyes and the screen size. Every resolution was sharp - I understand the mechanical differences between CRT and LCD - I just wish it weren't so.
Are you really this stupid or are you just trolling?
You mean there's an actual difference between the two? Interesting hypothesis, but I've yet to see any data to back it up.
which is totally what she said
Correction: It is Ctrl-Minus, not Ctrl-Plus. Ctrl-Plus makes fonts bigger, not smaller in common browsers. And Ctrl-zero puts it back to default.
Table-ized A.I.
My bifocals would like to have a word with your simple five-dollar solution. :P
Running LCDs at non-native resolutions only looks bad because it requires interpolation. However, if the non-native resolution you choose is exactly divisible into the previous resolution, then there should be no need for interpolation. So one solution would be to buy a very high-res monitor then run it at 1/2 resolution. This isn't exactly affordable, but newegg has a 30" monitor w/ native resolution of 2560x1600 for $1200. So you could run that at 1280 x 800. Every "pixel" in 1280 x 800 mode would be made up of four native pixels. They also have some 1920 x 1200 ones for about $290. Those you'd have to run at 960 x 600, which might be too restrictive for normal use.
"Guideline" is incompatible with "require".
That is cause you are not using the right setting. Text size does exactly that, makes all text bigger. You want to change the DPI setting, which will make text, icons, menus, etc. bigger but will not effect Media Center...
We've encountered this kind of problem at my work-site. Newer "wide" screens don't have a small-enough resolution setting that fits the aspect ratio and shows older apps with sufficient font size. One has to either live with small fonts or a wrong aspect ratio. Windows font-size settings fix some apps but screw up others. Ideally one should be able to control it per application rather than OS-wide. It's a hammer when we really need tweezers.
Table-ized A.I.
Windows programs can either let Windows handle things like the minimize, maximize, and close buttons or it can do them itself. Microsoft Office applications have ALWAYS done these themselves, rather than let Windows do it. Their reason is to give Office the latest-and-greatest look and feel, even on older versions of Windows. The downside is that older versions of Office have the older look and feel, even on the newest version of Windows. If you understand why they think this is a Good Thing, please post here because it makes little sense to me. Sure sets a poor example for the other Windows developers.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I'm sitting in front of two 27" LCD HDTV's (3ms) from Hanns-G that I got from CostCo for $700 total including shipping.
I guess the real question is what is your idea of affordable?
My work will only typically spend $150 on a monitor, and generally only Planar at that.
Except you generally don't, some kind of scaling gets applied so you don't infact get perfect sharp double size pixels in my experience.
Also, I haven't seen a 480p netbook in a long while? only the 7" models were that crap res, and pretty much been phased out long since. all the 9" ones are 1024x600
If there's a genuine medical need for special equipment like a larger monitor then of course it's good practice to provide that where it's economically viable to do so.
On a related note apparently reading text that is too small does have its downsides:
Readers were asked to read under six especially demanding conditions known to cause eye fatigue. These were: reading small text sizes; reading low-contrast gray text; reading with a light source behind the reading material to cause glare; reading from too close a distance, which causes the eyes to point inward towards each other (convergence stress); reading from variable focal distances (accommodative stress); and reading while wearing glasses that simulate an astigmatism (refractive stress). While people were reading under these extra stressful conditions, we measured the activation in the orbicularis oculi muscle with a sensor placed 1.25 cm below the eye. Readers reported eye fatigue after reading under each of these conditions. Small text sizes, low contrast, glare and refractive stress all resulted in increased activity in the orbicularis oculi, while convergence stress and accommodative stress did not, though after reading in these two conditions, readers are more likely to report headaches and pain coming from behind the eye. Stressors such as small text size and glare are reported as irritation on the front of the eye.
My personal experience relating to computer screens is that growing up I had CRT, until my mid-twenties when LCD started becoming affordable. Up until I was about nineteen I did not know about changing resolutions on my screen and thus ran in Windows native resolution (which in the case of 95/98/XP seemed to be 60hz). I suffered from frequent migraines that would start with flashing lights in-front of my eyes and end with two days of such blinding headache that I was unable to do anything buy stay in bed, inside a dark room, and during the first day I would throw up at least once. Several days after such an episode I would feel like I was serious hungover. Turning the refresh rate up to 100hz effectively cured me over night, I did not have another episode until my late twenties when I played console with a mate on a CRT TV an entire evening.
Perhaps a bit of a digression there. But do not underestimate the importance of a good screen and a comfortable text/gui-size; undue strain on your eyes can significantly reduce the quality and quantity of your work.
The Long Now Foundation
The control and scroll wheel trick still works in Outlook for actual reading of messages though I think. Same with Firefox, IE, and a few other apps.
I think making OS graphics more vector/bezier based would be a good idea though, so that everything can scale nicely to any screen. 3D computer games have always been able to scale well to any size of screen, it's a bit sad that it's taken this long for an OS to do the same. It's one thing that Vista got right, I was quite impressed when I heard about that feature, but I didn't know if they'd actually implemented it until reading one of the comments above.
We could do with this for both large *and* small screen setups. I don't have any issues with reading text yet myself, but I hope that by the time my eyes start failing, that all displays will be easily customisable..
which is totally what she said
My Toshiba Portege M200 (Tablet PC) has no scroll wheel. And it has 1400x1050 on a 14" screen -- I'm going blind here! Thank goodness for "Ctrl +"
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Changing the DPI was one of the first things I tried on Vista, and found it badly broken.
When the mouse pointer was outside a window, the pointer location was reported to the window incorrectly. This meant that when dragging a scrollbar, you had to be careful not to stray outside the window, or the scrollbar would jump.
Hopefully this is fixed by now.
A similar disappointment was that the screen magnifier still showed everything pixellated. I had expected it to re-render a lot of stuff at the new resolution.
"Guideline" is incompatible with "require".
You're correct. I actually thought that "Certified for Vista" logo requirements include unconditional high DPI support, but to my surprise, they don't, and nor do the requirements for "Certified for Windows 7". The latter (warning: XPS file) has an advisory paragraph on high DPI, which recommends supporting it, but stops short of requiring that:
Today you can readily buy a laptop or flat panel display with a 170 high-dots-per-inch (high-DPI) or higher. As high-DPI displays become more prevalent, applications without high-DPI capability will range from ugly to unusable, depending on the application and the DPI.
Thus, upgrading your application to high-DPI displays is becoming increasingly necessary, and doing so brings important advantages: images look better, and text is crisper and more legible. Text on a 200-DPI monitor is as clear as a printout from a laser printer. Overall, writing high-DPI applications is easy: Do not make assumptions about the DPI, and avoid things that do not scale well, for example, bitmapped graphics and fonts. In high-DPI applications, you need to pay attention to four general areas:
- Text and fonts
- Images, for example, graphics, icons, and cursors
- Layout
- Painting
And then gives a link to a detailed document (PDF) explaining what exactly the issues are, and how to handle them correctly.
That said, the presence of that paragraph is notable already, and I for one hope that it becomes a mandatory requirement for Win8. Properly scalable UI is way overdue, especially when Linux of all things has it for ages now.
My theory is that users don't realize that "resolution" doesn't mean what they think it means, and programmers fear the added difficulty of DPI independent GUI programming. I would hope that most people realize that adding a blur filter (low DPI screen) to another blur filter (poor eyesight) does not equal sharper images.
A similar disappointment was that the screen magnifier still showed everything pixellated. I had expected it to re-render a lot of stuff at the new resolution.
How can it do that with an inherently bitmap-centric architecture?
For true resolution independence, we need proper vector graphics. Linux is heading there rapidly, what with SVG icons everywhere, and dynamic layouts from the get-go. I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable on OS X, so I cannot say much: on one hand, I've heard that the display system is based on PostScript, which means vector graphics... but then I've also heard that it doesn't quite handle UI scaling in practice. Wonder if it's true, and if so, what's the reason for this deficiency.
On Windows, WPF mostly does it right, and there are WPF applications that are fully scalable - e.g. Expression Blend, which is written in WPF, and uses vector images throughout its UI.
But Win32 applications aren't easy to develop like that - the APIs themselves aren't very good at dealing with high DPIs, and the only natively supported vector image format is WMF/EMF, which is fairly lacking in features. So they do it the old-fashioned way, and Magnifier has to deal with them, too - in fact, it mostly has to deal with them, since they make the majority...
There is a clearly articulated goal in MS development tools and frameworks in the last few years (since Vista) to advance resolution independence and flawless UI scaling, so it will happen eventually. But because of all the legacy cruft, it's that much slower than it could've been.
Except most netbooks are 1024x600, and many are 1366x768.
IMHO, darkening your display is the wrong thing to do if you have bad eyes. You should just try to find the proper brightness that allows you to work with a mostly-light-grey background.
A dark background forces your eye to open up the iris, reducing depth of field, which in turn makes exacerbates focusing problems. Changing focus from the edge of the screen to the center becomes a problem in a dark environment. Don't believe me, take a photo of your screen with a digicam in both settings and see how well that works out.
Also I suspect that working in a dark environment throws off that thing in your brain that tells you when you should be sleeping or awake (it uses a pickup from the optic nerve, I forgot what it's called).
Hey, that happened to me too! I haven't had a crazy tunnel vision / blind spot / flashing lights throw up migraine since I switched to an LCD monitor at the office, but I always knew I hated refresh rates at 60 (or below).
I work in games so looking at screens running less than 30fps or with wildly changing framerates is also an occupational hazard, but that just makes me barf, doesn't cause migraines. It's kind of a pain in the ass though. When I play (console) games I try and stay well back from the TV if there are framrate or camera issues, especially if the FOV is too narrow.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
"Reading Glasses - The High Performance Solution!"
THL phish sticks
If so:
SAMSUNG 320MP-2 Black 32" 8ms HDMI Large Format Monitor 1366 x 768 450 cd/m2 4000:1 - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001328
1995 for me when it was already better than Win3.11 or 1998 when enlightenment gave you a more usable and better looking interface than MS Windows 7.
It's really the applications that matter anyway.
It is not that simple. I am 46, and I already have bifocals. I still have trouble with the computer screen. If the bifocal is strong enough to work well for reading and close-up work, it is a little too strong for the computer screen. If the distance section is good for infinity, it is also not right for the screen. A larger screen further away would work, I would be able to focus on it, and it would be large enough to see. I suppose I could try trifocals.
If you need to have larger fonts or display... you're not cool enough to use a Mac. Actually, I had this problem with my mother--the default DPI on the all-in-one macs is quite high and there isn't any easy scaling software. I don't think there is a high-contrast color scheme on the mac either. One of the reason Windows is "bloated" is that it need to support a huge variety of monitors and color schemes. Most of the icons come in small, medium and large -- and in a variety of color schemes.
"I find it hard to believe that your data has a usefull lifetime of days or weeks."
You didn't take the time to *gasp* read what was written prior to you childish trolling, did you?
If there's a genuine medical need for special equipment like a larger monitor then of course it's good practice to provide that where it's economically viable to do so.
"Good practice" and "economic viability" don't enter into the equation. It's the law. As it should be. You can't simply say "Well that costs money, so no." That's unlawful discrimination. Now not everything can or needs to be accommodated, but easily rectifiable things must. Even if you think that it's "too expensive," it's the employer's responsibility to search out equally effective, less costly options, and "must also consider whether funding for an accommodation is available from an outside source, such as a vocational rehabilitation agency, and if the cost of providing the accommodation can be offset by state or federal tax credits or deductions. You must also give the applicant or employee with a disability the opportunity to provide the accommodation or pay for the portion of the accommodation that constitutes an undue hardship."
But that's after they've sought medical advice and can support a need for special treatement. The reason you need to worry about other staff asking 'Why does Bill get a freaki'n big screen TV?!' is because you don't have a good explanation for it. That should tell you evrything about the situation.
You do have a good explanation for it: "Bill can't see."
Honestly, if you're worrying more about some pathetic gossiper versus your responsibilities under the law, and a civil society, you have more problems than having to make a CostCo run.
BTW those "cheap" $5 reading glasses will make your eyes worse as each eye will be slightly different. Don't get all thrifty with your eyesight, that's false economy, bite the bullet and go to an optician.
How about arranging a decent vision plan for your employees so they can afford the glasses they need? Not to belabor the obvious, but if your employees are having trouble reading a 22" monitor two feet in front of their faces, the problem isn't the monitor.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Not everyone has a problem that is so easily remedied. The people I've seen that need these things already have inch thick glasses.
Don't be so cavalier about something when you don't know the specifics. Because you're comment sounds like some jackass telling someone in a wheelchair that there doesn't need to be a chair lift, because "the stairs are right there."
You still end up with web pages where the fonts are super tiny because they were specified in "px" increments.
In the case of high-res monitors the web browser should virtualize the pixels and treat them the way units like inches and em's are until the web specs realize the futility of using pixel offsets (maybe they already have?) to do layouts across the range of devices web pages are to be viewed on. It might work to redefine 1px to be a whole number of pixels closest to 1/96th or 1/72nd of an inch on the output device. Then sites that use px for layout and font sizes would still align in most cases but would scale up for hi res monitors.
Now that I think about it, I'm fairly sure Firefox must virtualize the px value to do it's entire web page zooming thing. I don't think Firefox is picking up and using the system dpi value to change the default px value and font size "un-zoomed" though, which would be nice.
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
Indeed, it's LOWER than the Droid's resolution.
I work at 1440x900 and in Gnome there are some applications with windows and dialog boxes really big, cannot see all the fields sometimes or the OK/Cancel buttons are hidden because they are too big.
There are some windows like that in GIMP and actually need to enable more desktops so i move the windows between two so i can actually can click "save".
They are not reading glasses in the classical sense. They are 'computer-screen-glasses'.
You should tell your ophthalmologist or optician that you want lenses to read a computer screen that is about 60 cm away (measure your normal distance). A book or newspaper you read from a distance of 30 cm.
It means that you have to buy special glasses for computer-work.
If you do a lot of computer-work it is really worth it. It saves your back and good spirit.
Most ophthalmologists and/or opticians are not aware of this. But they know about the problems of performing classical musicians reading their score.
At half resolution (1024 x 768) it'll look great. Sure its a little less desktop but you're accommodating their handicap.
I tried doing something similar with my HTPC connected to a 40" 720p display two years ago. Installed Ubuntu (7.10 probably), everything looking nice. Then I enabled the nvidia driver, and suddenly DPI-awareness or something adjusted all fonts down to 3-4px size. After all, 5mm letters should be readable, right? (On a 40dpi display, the answer is obviously "no"...)
It's not just applications either - the feedback form on Twitter is fixed height and scrolls with the page; you can't actually click send on a Netbook without reducing the font so you can barely read it.
It's sad that webdevs seem to have forgotten screen resolution.
And are you sure that's not caused by something else? I have been running KDE since 4.1.x and it has a few plasma crashes once in a while and a few minor annoyances but nothing like what you describe. And I don't see that memory consumption you talk about, with 1gb RAM and many "useless" services active, including experimental plasmoids and my other apps like firefox and so, I only touch swap when using Virtualbox.
I use Kolourpaint to draw quick diagrams during brainstorms and I don't see it behaving like you say, using a tablet or mouse. Are you talking about Krita maybe?
Also your system is faster and has more RAM than my own, so I can't really see what is wrong there. Maybe you are using a very bad install, or messed up somewhere?
If not, I'd say you are exaggerating to make a point of Gnome being better. You speak exactly like a friend that talks about conspiranoias and tells really exaggerated stuff, when he's sure no one around knows that topic, to make himself sound smarter.
I mean, you can say KDE4 sucks, but the moment you mention the "rival" your credibility kind of goes down. No offense though, maybe it's not your intention.
Although I agree on the Amarok 2 being garbage.
You are comparing Windows XP (released in 2001) with KDE 4 (4.0 released in 2008).
;)
I honestly don't know much about Windows, because I don't use it, but your comparison made me doubt if you really know what you are talking about.
Microsoft has got a couple of newer versions of their OS, latest of them is named Windows 7, which I heard does a many things better than it's ancestors, also having many UI improvements.
Yes.
The "windows" font is tiny and cant' be changed.
If you go to "large fonts" then some buttons disappear out of frames and you can't click them.
I have no clue why that *ONE* font can't be changed (you can change everything else in the system-- even icons).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's not a question of bad eyesight but of bad design by windows.
The system font is increasingly small and can't be changed.
All they need to do is fix that issue and then this wouldn't matter. A 3000dpi moniter is great if it displays letters a reasonable size but not if it displays them 13 pixels high regard less of the resolution.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The last time I had to use 800x600 or even 1024x768 to fix a broken machine it was non-stop scrolling, both axes, just trying to get to some websites and troubleshoot and change settings at that resolution.
You say apps "should try to" support 800x480? Well, I say they don't, and neither do websites without massive scrolling. One day vector graphics will be ubiquitous and this will be a non-issue, but we're not there yet.
Yes, the scaling in Ubuntu and Kubuntu was impressive. Windows (even Vista and Win7) miss little things, but Linux doesn't.
To the original poster: I have a 23" Samsung 2343BWX - it supports 2048x1152, 1360x768, etc.; I find 1360x768 to be blurry, but when I showed it to my parents (which are actually still on a CRT), they were impressed and said it looked totally clear. Might be worth looking into.
Note: My vision is quite good. I can see the dust on the screen, and I can read text from about 6 feet back.
Interesting how EyeMagazine.com talk about eye strain yet their text is smaller than the comments on /.
Doesn't work in for all OS/GPU/Monitor combos. I tried setting a custom resolution in XP, and my videocard got quite grumpy. :P
But yes, that's perfect, in theory. I've often thought games should have that option(half-size), so people with horrible videocards can play in 1024x768 -> 512x384 glory.
Hey dude, I'm 43 and have far better eyesight than you or about 90% of everyone in your age bracket. I have 20/10 vision which makes me a prime candidate for jet pilot. Over the past years my eyesight degraded to 20/15 vision and I found a doctor that was able to correct my vision back to my eagle:eye 20/10 with a set of glasses.
Even in my degraded state I'm in the top 25 percentile.
Yet I have seen many 20 something fresh college grads that cant handle real screen resolutions and run a frigging 21" monitor at 1024X768. The youth today are blind as bats.
On the other hand, I find it entertaining that nobody has said, "move the monitor closer" What is it with the monitor phobias and everyone wanting it 3 feet away?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
My problem is that my 24" 1920x1200 widescreen LCD is the only thing that I can see without glasses.
I need glasses to read close up. I need glasses to see far away. But I can see the screen perfectly clear.
Moral: spend you life glued to the screen and your eyes will adapt (to nothing else).
Actually, I am both short-sighted and long-sighted. My screen just happens to sit at the happy midpoint.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Ok, How about moving the monitor closer instead of the retarded 3 feet away that most people have?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If the application doesn't have a large icon stored, Windows will automatically upscale the largest it can find. A bit blocky, but it still accomplishes the same thing. To even consider lowering your resolution to make icons/fonts larger is moronic.
You know what I love about OS X on a large display?
"Hmm, I want to use the menu." *One-handed mouse marathon ensues as the mouse cursor hops across the screen* ... waiting ... *click*
Same basic problem with Windows, really. But OS X is worse due to the brainfucked mouse acceleration.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Overprotective yuppie parents making their kids sit 8 feet away from the T.V. or else their "eyeballs will melt". Which might have been good advice if they had a projection TV, but it wasn't good advice if they're trying to play NES on a 13-in TV.
Using the Google Chrome browser and pressing Ctrl+ to scale the font when needed might do the trick - if the main problem is with the web.
Like in the movie Brazil!
Yes, actually, it is.
If you crank your DPI or change (radically) from the default font size the layout in a variety of crappy programs and crappy websites all goes to hell.
And this is one of my main frustrations with Windows.
I'm 41. I wear glasses, have since third grade. I have very good corrected eye sight. I can read things on paper that are very small and signs far away that my wife says, skeptically, "you can read that?"
But the great thing about high resolution screens should be high resolution, not little bitty.
I want nice sized letters on the screen - ones that look about the same size as the letters in a hardcover book held in my hand - with excellent resolution, smooth curves, and pretty serifs.
But with Windows, at least, the only thing that truly, truly works is the default sizes, and on a high resolution monitor, the default sizes are tiny.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
That is possible, in theory. Do you know of an OS that does this? I known Windows XP and OS X don't.
I'm guessing #5 means "use zoom in your browser."
You are hopelessly naive if you think that works well.
I use a lot of web sites and web-interfaced tools (like Rational ClearQuest) where, if you are not at the default zoom, things don't work at all. Like, the words somehow magically aren't in the fake edit boxes. It's shockingly bad.
Also, try using that to zoom on Slashdot in IE8. It ain't pretty.
So I still have a CRT monitor next to my brand new laptop, and when I can't read something, I drag the window over there.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Control Panel > Display > Appearance
1. Font Size = Extra Large
Control Panel > Display > Appearance > Advanced
1. Icon Size = 48
2. Font Size = 12, Bold
3. Icon Spacing(Horizontal,Vertical) = 64
"OK" & "OK" and exit out.
fair enough... To be honest though, I'm pretty happy with a 32" TV at 1920x1080 (1080p) native. Works well, most new video cards support games well at that resolution, and it's big enough to enjoy without squinting. I'm in front of a 42" now, and honestly wish I'd gone with a 32. though a 1080p 32" is a bit more expensive than a 720p, at that size it's a pretty decent balance. 720p on a 27" is probably okay too, but I like at least a horizontal of at least 800 lines for web browsing.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
I think that recent NVidia drivers all support custom screen resolutions. I would guess that ATI drives do as well. I had to do this once when a customer had an early widescreen LCD whose resolution didn't match any VESA standard, at least, not a common one.
My 3 year old 17" laptop is 1920x1200. For longest time couldn't find high def screen for my desktop machine.
The solution isn't a low resolution monitor, its setting windows up properly.
Most netbooks these days are 1024x600 at least.
It's sad that employees have to complain to get computer equipment that will obviously carry healthier benefits for them regardless of whether or not they're suffering now.
It's like saying all employees should get cheap, shitty chairs until they complain about back problems.
Surely better productivity outweighs the cost of getting these screens?
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
A beautiful, matte screen 24" monitor with 1920x1080p, no TV. Usually can be found for about $250.
In XP you could change the DPI setting of the screen in advanced settings. If I remember correctly, switch from 96DPI to 120 DPI was good enough. I did it many times for elderly friends and everything worked and looked nice (contrary to changing font and icon size preferences, and of course, setting screen resolution to anything but native).
For those who already have to wear glasses, there are always bifocals -- I got Varilux progressives when I was 20, and have had far less headaches since.
Great idea! I took my glasses off (I'm nearsighted) and moved the monitor to about 8 inches away. I'm now cramped over the keyboard with my shoulders hunched up.
Perfect solution. I should be in the hospital for back, shoulder, and repetitive strain injuries in about a month. Thank you! I never thought of this.
And this will be GREAT for FPS gaming!
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
They really do work well although they can be a pain getting used to if you've been spoiled and could go without glasses for 40 some odd years.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
So rather than ask manufacturers to design products that meet consumer needs, we should ask consumers to meet product designer's needs. Gee whiz! My whole concept of the economy has clearly been up-side-down!
Interesting this (parent) got modded troll but not the one saying how it must suck to have such shitty vision.
The fact is that there IS no one-size-fits-all solution. But the original author is trying to do his best, and a large-sized, comparatively low-res screen would help a lot of people.
And while I wouldn't have used the same analogy, I agree with the parent: not everybody has the same problem, one solution won't cure all their problems, and a lot of commenters are being rather insensitive.
If you don't HAVE the problem and don't think it's a real problem, perhaps you really just don't know enough to comment intelligently.
Somebody please mod parent up, at least take off the troll label. Thank you.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
It will either be display modes or graphics options. I haven't done it for awhile however I did use it on Windows XP. It automatically recognizes the screen and adjusts itself, but you have to right click on your main display and tell the computer what you want to do. Lean Muscle X
1. everyone seems to be discussing "Windows" solutions? wtf 2. no one actually addressed the OP's request for hardware?
You claim that you have a problem supporting the older users, with declining eye vision. Yet, you seem to care more about office politics, instead of finding the best tool for the job. The idea of having a large monitor in the office, is really just a mental block, especially by those that don't need one. Chances are, if a person actually needs larger sizes, they could get a Doctor's note to support this.
I have declining vision, due to an eye disease.
I bought a HDTV/monitor 3 years ago, a 37" LCD monitor. At first, it seemed gigantic, compared to the 19" LCD screen I had at the time. After a while, I realized how easy it was on my eyes, and to get work done. I no longer needed my monitor just inches away from my eyes, to see my computer desktop clearly.
A standard LCD monitor, up to 24", typically has approximately 100 PPI (pixels per inch), which is just fine for those with good vision.
The 37" LCD has 59 PPI, and my current 52" LCD monitor has 42 PPI, and is 4 feet from my eyes. .
I was once advised to buy a 30" LCD screen, which cost $1200 at the time. However, this is even worse for the money. It is 120 PPI in native resolution of 2560x1600. However, if used at 1280x800, it simulates 60 PPI, but a 37" is much cheaper.
There are a lot of different sizes of monitors, from 15" to 65" LCD. The 37" seems like the best value for the money, and cost as lost as $500.
You can try other sizes, like a 28" for about $380.
Until the person who needs the larger monitor can see it with THEIR eyes, you won't know for sure.
After using the 37" 3 years ago, I will never go back. Those that are too cheap to buy the proper size, can just live with lower resolution, or the strain on their eyes.
However, I warn you about not looking for the proper solution, just to avoid office politics.
There have been many lawsuits over ergonomics in the work place. The monitor is part of that issue.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
Please share. :)
Well, my display is 1280x1024 and I get 640x512 as a resolution option.
WHY would you do something like this? Wouldn't it be much easier to just get a display with a lower resolution?
The whole point of getting a high resolution display is to have more room - increasing the size of everything to make it readable, which kills the whole space advantage, is just stupid when you could've saved money and bought a cheaper display... Sure, Full HD is just geekier than 1366x768, but if you're having trouble reading the screen at that resolution, what's the point?
If you can't read standard sized fonts at a certain resolution because they're too small, do you REALLY think you're going to see a difference in movies/games/porn?
"You mean there's an actual difference between the two? Interesting hypothesis, but I've yet to see any data to back it up." - by somersault (912633) on Monday November 16, @07:15PM (#30124078) Homepage Journal
There is you little mental case freak, and you're the biggest troll around here, providing the evidence thereof, below.
(In YOUR trolling you have performed recently, you gave away the fact you are a mental weakling and defective in the brain, here:)
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1438984&cid=30107250
THE ADVENTURES OF "MENTAL BOY":
"I myself needed to go on pills a few years ago for depression, and I had an episode of OCD, I know it's not pleasant to have mental issues." - by somersault (912633) on Sunday November 15, @01:33PM (#30107250) Homepage Journal
Evidence is above (somersault alias "mental boy")
" I don't have any issues with reading text yet myself," - by somersault (912633) on Monday November 16, @07:15PM (#30124078) Homepage Journal
Sure you do, you little mental case freak, and you're the biggest troll around here, because you razzed others on their writing style, and said you found it unreadable.
Just providing the evidence thereof, below, where you were harassing others about writing style and you told them to use paragraphs as well (which you clearly do not yourself, in one of your many "schizoid personas").
(Also, in that same "attempted trolling" of yours, performed recently, you gave away the fact you are a mental weakling and defective in the brain, here:)
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1438984&cid=30107250
THE ADVENTURES OF "MENTAL BOY":
"I myself needed to go on pills a few years ago for depression, and I had an episode of OCD, I know it's not pleasant to have mental issues." - by somersault (912633) on Sunday November 15, @01:33PM (#30107250) Homepage Journal
Evidence is above (somersault alias "mental boy")
APK
P.S.=> How do YOU like being trolled now, "mental boy"? apk
What's the problem? You should still be able to outrun them...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Interesting this (parent) got modded troll but not the one saying how it must suck to have such shitty vision.
Well I can answer that. There's an ongoing campaign by some segment of mods to mod down ever single post of mine. (Thus my .sig) They've been doing it for a month now. Don't take my word for it. Read my comment history. Every single one, regardless of content has been modded down by griefers.
I expect this to be modded down as well. Yet, I still have "excellent" karma.
It's going to take than some punks to drive me off of a website I've read for 11 years.
See what I mean? I already emailed scuttlemonkey about this.
I found 19" LCDs filled this niche quite well - the Philips 190 series, for example, had the exact same native 5:4 resolution as the 17" 170 series - 1280x1024. This very low resolution gave a wonderfully cheap solution to some clients who were in the senior demographic.
Though it might not work for you as these don't meet your size nor aspect ratio requirements.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
My father in law has been using an ugly display for a couple of years now. It's probably a result of an incompatibility between the VIA integrated graphics and the monitor's resolution. It bothers me a lot (when I need to service his PC), but he doesn't seem to care (I asked him). So even though to your eyes reducing the screen resolution on an LCD monitor is a travesty, I'd suggest that you ask the real users. You may be surprised to find out that they don't care. That will allow you to buy normal monitors. If you need to service them, just up the resolution to native.
Other thoughts:
Eyesight will vary between people, so I assume no single solution will be good for all. I think that getting users' opinions would be the best to get a feel for it. You might want to keep a couple of solutions at hand to show users and let them choose what's good for them.
I assume that for some the solution of working at quarter resolution (960x600 on an 1920x1200 screen) will be okay. While a height of 600 isn't optimal, it's become somewhat of a standard on netbooks, so it's apparently usable in some cases.
TV's are a good solution, and you may be able to get a service electrician to disable the TV tuner. I had that done once to a CRT TV, and it's probably possible to do on LCD's too, for someone already familiar with fixing them. Taking away the remote may be good enough, though.
To the best of my knowledge, most netbooks are 1024x600.
Make your own damn LCD monitor and stay off my lawn you damned kids!!!!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Most netbooks are 1024x600. My mobile phone is 800x480.
I don't have any IE at hand but I zoomed on /. in Firefox, Opera and Chrome and it does look good. Both text and images are scaled and that has been at least since 2007. I'm writing this into a zoomed in text area and I see no problems with the text. Could you post a link to some of those web sites you're having problems with? I'd like to check them with my browsers. Assuming that zoom shouldn't break web sites if one breaks you could open a bug to the browser development team (probably even MS allows that).
It was January 2009 for me. Actually I should have switches long time before as I lost memory of when it has been the year of the Linux server for me. Compared to now it was a pain to use a Windows client to develop web apps running on Linux. I finally switched when I realized that all the software I was using was available on Linux, from office applications to development tools. I made a check for existence of drivers for my scanner, printer and webcam and bye bye Windows.
Now that we talk about accessibility, does anyone know if Win7 has an easy way to invert the screen colors?
I am thinking something among the lines of what is possible with Compiz Negative function (activated by pressing SUPER+M, or WIN+M).
That function is the only useful functions I have found in the Compiz collection of useless gadgets, BUT it is a complete life saver!
Unfortunately the Windows XP equivalent is the darn "high contrast" theme (ALT+SHIFT+PRTSCRN) which is *not* what I am looking for (I only want to invert the colors and no to change the desktop properties).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Why dont you just buy any normal run of the mill high dpi monitor and adjust it in the OS. All modern OS:es have support to run the actual graphics in another dpi then the monitors dpi. Then you don't just get big pretty pictures, they are supersharp to.
I've found the Samsung 2693HM 25.5" @1920x1200 to really help my tired old eyes. It comes out to around 88dpi / .29mm, was very noticeably easier to read than a top of the line 24" @1920x1200
Why not just increase the text size. Win7 has this option under Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Display. And it's aptly titled "Make it easier to read what's on screen". Older versions of Windows have this option in Display Properties -> Advanced Options. Mac and other OS must be having this option too.
You might want to look at the Acer X193W+ - 19", 1680x1050. I have one, and it is pretty awesome - especially when looking at photographs or playing games.
Are there any affordable High DPI monitors?
Context, dumbshit. Your response belongs in one of the other threads, not in this one.
Here, in this thread, pwnies asked about high DPI displays. You jizzed your "dump" comment in there just to look like some kind of life-winner on the internet ("I throw out monitors better (?) than what you're into"), totally spacing out on the point of the post. Simply fucking amazing.
For the love of god, just buy the poor bastards a new monitor and a new chair every decade and this kind of crap won't happen.
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
What about free regular ophthalmologist visits and glasses to those with blurry visions?
2011. The year Gnome decided Linux will never be on the desktop.
As someone with poor enough vision to have to deal with this every day, let me tell you: Icons are the least of one's problems with many applications. It's the use of tiny fonts -- the sort that used to be seen (heh) only in legal disclaimers that vendors didn't want you to read anyway -- and applications that don't allow that font size to be increased. (I'm talkin' to you Mr. Java programmer!) I thank $DIETY that I can use Linux for much of my work and on that system, font re-sizing is a snap. The Windows workstation that I have to use already has the font sizes in IE cranked up to max and it's still a huge strain to read the text in many of the web-based applications I need to use. Hmm... and yet we keep hearing that Windows is supposed to be the better desktop.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
What I can't understand about the awesome resolution independence of KDE4 (been using 4.3 for a month or so now) is their stubborn refusal to actually get widgets to scale sensibly. The fact that every desktop element is scalable is well cool, but it's not polished overall - on my two main workstations (2x 20" 1680x1050, 1x 24" 1900x1200) I have shedloads of desktop real estate and I'd like a big fat taskbar... but if I raise it to double or triple height, the clock scales in height *and* width, so that you end up with a colossal clock taking up 20% of your horizontal taskbar space. At least the clock in XP was sane enough to add extra information (day, date). If anyone knows of any workarounds, I'd kill to hear them.
Secondly, my laptops - one has a very nice 11" 1360x768 LED screen; vertical real estate is at a premium. However, the KDE4 taskbar wastes a shedload of vertical space by insitsting on having curvy corners for all the app placeholders, and if you have a double-height taskbar you still have space wasted with gaps to seperate the text from the curved edges. I've looked high and low for options to turn the curves off, as well as for themes without an obsession for putting curves on everything (I swear, within five years "usability" experts will have us all using perfectly circular buttons for everything).
TLDR: KDE did a great job with a scalable UI (and most apps follow the guidelines well), but it needs alot of polish before I'd call it completely ready for prime time or crotchety power users like me that dislike young whippersnappers on their lawn.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
"Move the monitor closer"? Do you not understand what presbyopia is? It means that the person can't focus close. It is a natural tendency that begins in most people over the age of 40. Enjoy your near-focus while you have it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I then read more than 200 reply posts about changing font size in Word, Safari, and Firefox along with non-specific posts telling the poster to go out and "buy something," but not saying what. Unbelievable.
Here's my best shot at answering the question as asked:
Research the Hanns*G 28" monitor for about $336. (with 3-yr warranty)
If you set the monitor at 1280*1024, the "stretchiness" of characters at 28" may give you the visual result you sought when requesting 1366*768.
Source: http://www.amazon.com/Hanns-G-HG281DPB-Widescreen-LCD-Monitor/dp/B000TJV9KW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1258467065&sr=8-1
Good luck
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
GNOME uses vector icons.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
If the application doesn't have a large icon stored, Windows will automatically upscale the largest it can find.
If the application doesn't tell Windows to draw a larger icon or upscale an existing icon, Windows doesn't upscale it. I'm talking about toolbar icons seen in an application's own window, not the icons for applications and documents seen in Windows Explorer.
Windows 7/Vista allow you to set a global DPI value, and everything scales to that. Text, icons, window decoration, everything. Some older apps struggle with it but most are fine.
XP is a lot more limited, but Windows 7 and Vista have both made big improvements in this area.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
[_] And slashdot is pretty when it's not zoomed?
[_] So don't use IE.
[_] I use curl, wget, and lynx, you ignorant clod!
[_] In Soviet Russia, slashdot zooms YOU!
You don't have to use the browser-based zoom if you're in X. Ctrl++ (outside the browser window) scales up the whole desktop. Your browser still thinks it's rendering 1:1, so everything is still "pixel-perfect" in terms of the browser's physical placement of elements. Give it a try. You can also set your virtual desktops (since you can have more than one, each with as many monitors as you can connect to your box) to be larger than your physical desktops, and scroll around.
And for those times you're really stuck, if someone else has a badass monitor on another machine, forward the apps' display there. (do that with Xeyes and tell people you're "keeping an eye on them while they work" - you'd be surprised at how many fall for it :-)
I am not him, but if I had mod points I'd moderate you into oblivion just for the lulz.
No.
This is a corporate environment. Why on earth do you think I'd be able to switch my OS, even if I wanted to?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Go to your local grocery or drug store. Ask for "reading glasses". I hope this helps.
Yes, I use them. They're great.
Yeah, why design or buy a tool that is convenient and pain-free to use when we could just make every human being strap a different tool onto their face.
Well, they make reading glasses now *without* it sharp metal spikes that poke into your head now, so the whole pain things isn't an issue. And, yeah, I can see how picking up a pair of glasses that live next to your computer is a lot less convenient than forking the whole monitor industry to support low res monitors which will probably cost the same as 200 pairs of reading glasses die to low volume.
And the Rogaine versus hat analogy was better than you thought, although not in the direction you intended. It also appeals to vanity- people can't deal with baldness the same as they can't deal with wearing glasses, even if it's just when reading.
Where do you work? :)
Must be the same place I do, because I deal with this same issue all the time. I had a pair of Dell monitors which wouldn't scale below their native resolution; despite them being nice 23" monitors I tried them at 3 different users' desks before I found one who would use them.
3. Move the monitor closer to the user.
You don't have any users, do you? ;)
if you use a 27" or 30" display, the menu is just as small as on a 13" macbook
Uh, that's exactly how it should be. Something that is 1cm on one screen should be 1cm on another screen, irrespective of the size of the screens. If you want everything bigger, then override the display DPI setting and apps will automatically be scaled to compensate.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Unfortunately I have no mod points... had some for a while but I never found anything to use them on before they went away. Oh well. Good luck with this. Things tend to work out in the long run.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
I'm 42 and for my games PC, graphics PC and general house PC I have a huge 21 inch CRT monitor, a 19 inch and a 17 inch respectively. I use them because they give a sharper more 'colour true' image and they use less power than a plasma TV. If your users won't 'go back' to a CRT because they're worried about their (status) image yet insist on struggling with fuzzy displays, why don't you stop wasting time with the display and focus on the user's stupidity/noobiness ?
Seriously, age isn't the issue for old PC users. It's inflexibility, conservatism, ego and basic overall stupidity. (It's also the issue for most other PC users as well, mind.)
Becasue young whippersnapper, one of the effects of ageing is that you can lose the ability to focus on things that are too close. (I hear the opthamologists are pushing a new type of laser surgery that can "soften" the cornea to regain thet close-in focusing ability)
From personal experience - I have 20/20 vision, but when I found myself somewhere north of 40 I found I could no longer read 6pt type because I had to hold things at nearly arms length before I could focus on them. And as a codemonkey, I needed small fonts so I could keep as much code onscreen as possible. Reading glasses can help with that, but they screw up regular distance viewing something fierce (resulting in nasty headaches etc.).
This was also a design flaw in the original Mac. Older folks had no use for the darn thing becasue the monitor was too darn small to be useful for them, and as it was an integrated unit, there was no option for an external monitor.
Now get off my lawn.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Your reactions tend to speak worlds about you and your insecurities in regards to your obvious addiction to the happy pills you are still quite obviously on and probably dependent on for your existence and emotional well being. Please, do yourself a favor, and drop an entire bottle of them so we can get some peace here and not have your foaming mouth loony toonz reply have to come belching forth at us normal people here. Normal people, so you are aware of this, are not addicted to happy pills as you most likely are. Your reaction gives that much away.
The same people who complain that their mouse is defective because it can't go any further - and they can't figure out to pick the thing up and move it back? Yeah, been there, done that.
Move the monitor when they're not there, an inch or so a day. They'll never notice.
I-Inc makes a 28" HDMI/DVI LCD that's 1920x1200; great for my aging eyesight: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000WOL3B4.
Why yes, it actually is. Reading glasses not only work on computer screens, but also on: newspapers, magazines, phones, and reports!
Has been there in Ubuntu since the very beginning. People just have no idea what it means or does. But really, changing the DPI in your OS is the best and most correct answer to this question.
Ever tried compiz' Enhanced Zoom Desktop plugin? You can zoom in and out on your desktop with your mouse wheel and the Win key, and maneuver around and type in the zoomed desktop. Very handy for using my 32" CRT TV attached to my stereo rack computer by S-video from the couch 5 meters away. Or at least it was until changes to xorg made it impossible for me to install the crummy fglrx proprietary ATI driver on my onboard video adapter (which doesn't have 3D radeonhd support). Now I have to sit close or use VNC from my laptop. Hmmm, KDE4 seems to have a magnifier plugin for Desktop Effects that is similar.
I suspect Windows 7 and OSX must have something similar?
When you work for a non-profit it's hard to come up with money for things like LCD screens when the CRTs are working just fine. I guess it's all pretty irrelevant now that the staff has been reduced by 50%...
I've often been bemused at the horror that some people express when it's suggested that maybe they need glasses. I've been wearing glasses for most of my life, 27 of my 31 years. So I'm pretty used to them and they rarely ever bother me in any way.
Normally it seems to be a cosmetic concern. For instance when I deployed I got the ChairForce to issue me some hideously ugly prescription sunglasses. I can't wear them now as they got scratched to hell and back and my prescription is different now. But I wore them constantly. A woman I knew that deployed at the same time complained constantly about having to choose between everything being blurry but bearable brightness or sharp but painfully bright. When I suggested she get some glasses like mine she seemed genuinely disgusted at the idea of wearing such unattractive glasses.
This is easy and requires no new hardware. On Windows Vista: 1) Right Click on Desktop 2) Select Personalize 3) On the Left hand side, select "Adjust font size (DPI)" 4) Select a larger size and press ok (or you can use the button below to customize the DPI) Now you can enjoy your high resolution and actually read everything! There are other options to make the icons bigger, but the important thing is the font.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
You didn't really post what affordable is. To me that's any screen sub $150 and right now there have been alot of offerings this month... 2 weeks ago there was a surge of 24inch viewsonics @ 149 ea. last week I bought 2x 22 inch asus's for $133 each this week i've seen a 24 inch for 199 viewsonic, and a 22 inch viewsonic for 149 watch newegg, zipzoomfly, tigerdirect, woot, slickdeals, bensbargains, fatwallet and life hackers gadget listings
..just because you can, doens't mean you should...
To even consider lowering your resolution to make icons/fonts larger is moronic.
I wish this were true. Try running with large fonts for awhile and cranking up the font size in your browser. You'll find all sorts of things that don't work very well with them. In fact, to enter this reply I had to use alt-minus to resize down this page as otherwise half of the text was overwriting the other half. Most apps haven't been tested very well with large fonts. I do run like that rather than set the pixel resolution down, but it's quirky to say the least.
And to all you morons saying "get some glasses"-- just you wait. When you get to be 40-50 your focus range degrades until you have to have glasses for close, for distance, etc.-- why do you think they have bifocals/trifocals/progressives? And the problem is, by the time you get your new super-progressive lenses, you're eyes have already started to shift their prescription, so that halfway before your insurance will allow you to get another pair, your prescription is out of whack. You'll start dragging your glasses out to the end of your nose in order to change the focus for closer work, and small print is really hell. Either you have to put it right up to your bloody nose without your glasses to be in focus, and then you're in so close you're blocking the light and/or you have to move your head (or the object) right to left in order to read it all, or you try to use your glasses and have to hold it 2 feet away in order to be in focus and then it's too small to make out at that distance.
Large fonts help a lot, though I wish more apps were thoroughly tested using them. I suspect many of those apps have been programmed by the morons posting about glasses here...
"Uh, that's exactly how it should be. Something that is 1cm on one screen should be 1cm on another screen, irrespective of the size of the screens."
I find this really a strange idea. When I move from a 13" TV to a theater movie screen, the image would have to grow in extent as it grew in size. Really, we mean to put all the image extent on the screen we use--as the screen grows smaller, the image grows smaller, but it's all still there.
Fixed system fonts seem to fit the mold you describe, but they do not match any expectation derived from my reality. Where else in life does vision scale in this way, with unchanging size? Or worse, with unchanging size for part of the image?
I am among those who want physically larger screens carrying the same amount of information as small screens. I wear gradient lenses of substantial power now. And I run my browser at 150 - 200% magnification to reduce eyestrain. For me, the system fonts at 640x480 are still comfortable. Higher resolutions reduce those system fonts to "invisible." And yes, I run old equipment, too.
Maybe we need a video driver that lets us split the screen into areas of differing resolution so we do not have to depend on applications to handle the system font issue properly.
Microsoft's magnifier acts like a magnifying glass one cannot look through and diminishes the screen size for context at the same time. I really dislike that solution. Like many people, I expect a cylindrical lens on the line of text, or a circular lens on the screen. That's from using lenses in real life.
Except, that's not how it is on OS X. As the DPI increases, the size of the object shrinks. My 17" MBP has smaller fonts and icons than my friend's MacBook.
...you could go into the display settings, find your WYSIWYG sliding ruler and set it to a larger DPI. that'd take care of your problem quite cheaply and quickly
Well, in IE, when you zoom, the grey bar stuff on the left gets article text underneath it.
That's right, underneath it.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Actually, even XP will do this as long as the application programmer hasn't specifically chosen for this not to happen and has designed the layout properly. The only real problem with setting a higher DPI on XP is the start bar (etc) icons and that can be fixed with registry tweaks.
No, XP doesn't do bitmap scaling. It scales the fonts if their sizes are specified in points (but application can specify them in pixels). Also, a bunch of WinAPI UI functions (such as CreateDialog) use units that are derivatives of font size, so if you use those, then you get scaling layouts, too. The problem is that it's only a very limited set of functions, and there are many more which only work with pixels; those won't scale in XP, unless you compute pixel values from default UI font size yourself.
It doesn't scale whole GDI Windows as bitmaps, no. However, a DPI aware application does scale all your controls, including some bitmaps on XP (like image boxes), if the application is setup correctly (also, WinForms makes this a fair bit easier). Note that you need to set a few properties here and there for this to happen however.
There are also registry settings that allow you to adjust various image scalings for the system, like the scale of the task bar icons.
It doesn't scale whole GDI Windows as bitmaps, no. However, a DPI aware application does scale all your controls, including some bitmaps on XP (like image boxes), if the application is setup correctly (also, WinForms makes this a fair bit easier). Note that you need to set a few properties here and there for this to happen however.
In case of WinForms, it's WinForms itself that does it, and not the OS. If you wrote stuff using Win32 API directly, you'd know that e.g. CreateDialog is DPI-aware by itself, but SetWindowPos is not; and, in general, most other API calls are not. So you have to manually listen to DPI-change system notifications, and (re)calculate pixel coordinates for your UI accordingly. In other words, the application needs to be DPI-aware, otherwise it won't scale on XP and earlier.
On Vista/7, any application will scale, DPI-aware applications will just do it properly :)
I suggest they get glasses otherwise what you want is a called a standard multimedia projector. These will usually give 800x600 over 50 to 100 inches. That's pretty low DPI.
I'm sure your users with Documented cases of limited vision will appreciate your sending them to get reading glasses.. They will be sure to tell their lawyer that funny joke!
Do you tell your employees in wheel chairs to just carry their own folding ramp to get into the building?
The original question is very valid. I have met people with severe, uncorrectable eye problems. One guy is a very gifted programmer, runs a 21" CRT at 800x600, and sits less then 12" away from the screen to see it. He can't use an LCD, both because changing resolution makes for very sucky text, and because sitting that close to the screen on a monster screen, you start to see the problems with viewing angles on LCD's.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
No whipper snapper, I'm way north of 40. My genetics give me non damaged vision so I'm having zero problems with focus. and yes, move the damn thing closer old geezer, you can use your bifocals to read the screen easier....
And I'll get off your lawn as soon as I can remember where I left my walker.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You're talking about what is quite possibly the worst website in terms of usability since myspace, and you're bitching that they don't respect low res screens? Why don't you post a fucking twitter about it.
My point was; it's not just limited to applications; nor just limited just to Twitter. Twitter was simply an example. A lot of websites have this usability problem with DHTML popups on Netbooks because of the limited height.
netbooks are 1024x600
some smartphones are 800x480