Brighten it up, make it legible, be a child of light
15 January 2009 - Filed under Life Outside Work
My eyesight cannot handle fine print well. It is with a bit of sadness that I have a few gripes, which I am sure are shared by many, about the screens of modern laptops. First, they are glossy, which quite frankly renders them useless under lights. Second, because they pack in a high resolution in such a limited space, the text becomes infinitesimally small. Also, text tends to be fuzzy, weak, and far from crisp while colours appear unnaturally dull with a slight blueish bias. Common in many of the laptop screens I have experienced.
Why O Why?
I have yet to see a standalone LCD screen that is glossy. As such, I don’t understand why laptop screens have to be overwhelmingly glossy these days. OK, I do occasionally apply a solid black wallpaper and use the screen as a temporary mirror but there’s got to be a better industrial logic behind the gloss than that.
Tip No. 1: There isn’t one.
Not that I can do much about the gloss anyway, since all the laptop manufacturers seem to have killed off the non-glossy option. One rare exception is Apple’s new top-of-the-range 17-inch MacBook Pro that does give the option of a non-glossy (“matte”) screen for US$50 extra, not available with any other model, any other make as far as I know. Anti-glare has become such a rarity – or luxury – for no apparent reason as far as laptops go.
Tip No. 2: Choose right next time you buy a laptop.
As for exceedingly small text and dense screen resolutions, all consumers can do is choose the sort of screen that gives the most comfortable text. The mainstream 15-inch widescreen with a 1280×800 resolution seems to be the sweet spot that gives the most legible, comfortable density of pixels (dots) particularly for text. Smaller screens keep the same resolution resulting in denser text and images which makes you squint, and larger screens come with ridiculously high resolutions (1440×900 or even 1920×1080, i.e. “full-HD”) which again result in denser text and images per square-inch. I really miss the 4:3 non-widescreen non-glossy 1024×768 resolution 14-inch laptop screen that was mainstream only 4-5 years ago.
Tip No. 3: Consult the Wizard.
Thankfully, though, I can do something about text that tends to be fuzzy, weak, and far from crisp and also colours that appear dull with a slight blueish bias. Most Windows XP and Vista laptops have ClearType enabled and that’s what does the “font smoothing.” In 99.9% of cases, your eyes enjoy more comfortable, easier-to-read text with ClearType enabled. The side-effect of this is that it sometimes overdoes the smoothing to a point where text, particularly fine print, loses its detail and crispness. As a result, it needs to be fine-tuned. Download the ClearType Tuning Wizard, install it, run it, and try the different degrees of ClearType until you have crisp text on both white and dark backgrounds. Trust me, it does make a substantial difference to the viewing experience.
Tip No. 4: Then God commanded, “Let there be light.”
To fix up the colours, open the program that controls your display (whose name begins with NVIDIA, ATI, or Intel) and look under Colour Settings or something to that effect. Before you do anything, try subtly increasing the “gamma” of all three channels and the screen will brighten up instantly with the slight blueish bias gone. If you can find an item called “digital vibrance”, play with that, too, to put more life and saturation into colours. The truth is, unless you work in a publishing or design-related field, the exact values of screen gamma and other settings should be set to what’s most comfortable to your eyes, and not what the industry standard or factory default dictates. I don’t suggest you fiddle with individual colour channels (red, blue, green) or brightness/contrast, though, unless you need some serious correction.
Tip No. 5: Ambience counts.
Another tip is to brighten up the overall ambience with a relaxing, natural, pastel-toned high-resolution wallpaper image with not too much detail or disturbance. 5 minutes of googling will find you at least half a dozen.
Tip No. 6: You guessed it…
One last piece of wisdom which I’m rather reluctant to let out is: get a Mac. It still doesn’t do anything about the gloss, but Apple screens are inherently better, smoother, more real, and more vibrant with colours and text. Mac OS X employs its own font-smoothing (anti-aliasing) mechanism, which is quite different than Windows’ ClearType. If you want to check out at least the text side of things without buying a new computer, install Safari for Windows and see how the same Web site is rendered differently in different browsers. To be fair, though, with the right method and amount of screen tuning, your Windows laptop can be something much more pleasing and ergonomic to look at.
2009-01-15 » JK