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Old December 27th 17, 08:10 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-8
Paul[_32_]
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Default New Acer monitor problems

Tim Slattery wrote:
We just bought a new Acer CB281HK monitor for my wife's Win8.1
computer. It's a 28" screen and is in some ways (particularly
rendering photographs) really spectacular. But it seems to have a
problem with text.

Text - menus, dialog boxes, the titles under the desktop icons - is
rendered extremely poorly. We've been through the ClearType tuner
(it's *really* bad with Clear Type turned off) and it helps some, but
it's still pretty bad. I haven't found any information at Acer's web
site, except for somebody complaining about the same problem.

Also, text in menus, under desktop icons, etc, etc, is really
small,and we've been unsuccessful in finding out how to make it
bigger. She seems to have figured out how to make the icons bigger,
but the text is the same size.

Can anybody help?


First of all, a 4K purchase is a "research project".

It's not "pick and pay", especially when mixing such displays
with older equipment. If you were buying a new computer
the same day as the monitor, then (if you're lucky) it
might come close to "pick and pay". A particularly economical
PC purchase, might still not have the right video output.

You must make sure "all your ducks are in a row" before purchase,
to prevent hair loss when it's all set up and blurry in front of you.

*******

4K 3840 x 2160 === from a spec web page

Hi-DPI (it's 2X of an HD monitor at 1920x1080).

So you're driving it with the wrong video card and it's
not running native for starters. It's blurry from resolution
scaling (the monitor input board scales up pixels for the number
on the screen). ClearType won't fix that. The monitor is
multisync, meaning you can drive it at non-native resolutions,
but it doesn't have to look "nice" when you do that. Not
like a CRT used to be able to do when used multisync.
CRTs looked a lot better over a wide range of input conditions.

Only certain interfaces will support 4K at 60p. There are
certain HDMI and DisplayPort standards that will work. Older
video cards might not be well equipped for the job. You may
not necessarily be able to find a $40 video card which
adheres to one of the nicer standards. You might have to
go upscale a bit on a video card purchase to drive it native.

Have a look through Wikipedia in the HDMI and DisplayPort
sections for details. VGA can't go that high, and VGA
typically stops at 2560 or so (the VGA spec is unlimited,
but DACs don't go that high). The dual link DVI won't
go that high either.

DVI dual link 2560x1600 at 60Hz
VGA 2560x2048 or so (maybe),
it's a function of 400MHz DAC bandwidth
HDMI 2.0/2.1 3840x2160 at 60Hz === Wikipedia has a table
DisplayPort =1.2 3840x2160 at 60Hz === Wikipedia has a table

MHL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile...efinition_Link

Once it's running native, then you can convince the
OS and applications to use a decent number of pixels
to represent stuff.

https://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...ows-8-1-a.html

Some early monitors consisted of two panels, and you could
drive it with two cables from a dual-head video card. There
was one IBM monitor product, you drove it with four cables,
so there have been some kooky solutions to the resolution thing.

And that's not necessarily the end of it. I think applications
like Firefox, might have a preference related to HiDPI. As
some of the geometry calcs Firefox does are suspect, and it's
bound to do something stupid.

Paul
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