Do LCD monitors have a red tinge for small-sized font?

Just got my first LCD monitor (Samsung 932BW, 19" widescreen, 1440x900
native resolution and the only one where the text is sharp). I
noticed that some text has a red tint just to the side of the it
(i.e., like a red shadow). To reproduce it easily, I open Notepad and
fill a line with "l" characters which use the Tahoma font at 8-point
size. Between each ell is a red tinge. The tinge goes away after I
up contrast from 50% to 100%.

If I disable ClearType, the red tinge goes away but then the skinny
and non-smoothed characters are harder to read. There is a big
difference of readability between ClearType on or off. The widescreen
sized monitor makes fonts a bit more squat than for my old square
(4:3) CRT monitor (but then the CRT was old and a bit out of focus and
eventually died).

I've once had a laptop (a loaner at my prior employer) and I don't
remember seeing this red tinge. If I up contrast from 50% to 100%,
there seems to be a wee bit of green tinge to the character at 100%
but much harder to discern than the red tinge at 50% contrast.

I was considering whether to get a 19" widescreen (16:10 ratio) or a
19" square (4:3 ratio). The widescreen makes the characters smaller
because the monitor isn't as tall. However, I don't like buying LCD
monitors through the mail, like from newegg.com, because of their dead
8-pixel minimum to return the monitor and I don't want even 1 dead
pixel (and the store will take a return for up to 30 days if any
pixels are dead). Besides, the store's price with tax wasn't far from
the mail-order cost after including shipping. The next size up
(actually 2 sizes up to provide a real difference in height) and also
at 2ms response time was $100 higher, or more, and out of my price
range.

While I have alleviated some of the viewing of small text by using the
Large Fonts option in the desktop theme (although some settings had to
be reduced using Advanced option, like the titlebar text), there are
still plenty of applications that use a fixed font at 8- or 10-point
which at 50% contrast (and 50% brightness so I don't get eye fatigue
from too bright a screen). ClearType is almost a necessity to provide
smooth looking characters. Most 10-point font looks okay but the
smaller fonts tend to have that red tinge to them.

On Sat, 20 Oct 2007 17:51:11 -0500, "VanguardLH"
<VanguardLH@mail.invalid> wrote:

>Just got my first LCD monitor (Samsung 932BW, 19" widescreen, 1440x900
>native resolution and the only one where the text is sharp). I
>noticed that some text has a red tint just to the side of the it
>(i.e., like a red shadow). To reproduce it easily, I open Notepad and
>fill a line with "l" characters which use the Tahoma font at 8-point
>size. Between each ell is a red tinge. The tinge goes away after I
>up contrast from 50% to 100%.
>
>If I disable ClearType,

Oh, that's what ClearType does, you have to live with it or
not. If your LCD were using analog instead of DVI, and/or
it has a sharpening feature, these are two other things to
consider changing.


>the red tinge goes away but then the skinny
>and non-smoothed characters are harder to read. There is a big
>difference of readability between ClearType on or off.

Personally I think cleartype makes everything worse, but I
increase font size to what I want... and sometimes this
isn't an option.


>The widescreen
>sized monitor makes fonts a bit more squat than for my old square
>(4:3) CRT monitor (but then the CRT was old and a bit out of focus and
>eventually died).

If "squat" ends up the only problem after trying other
changes, then try a different font.

>
>I've once had a laptop (a loaner at my prior employer) and I don't
>remember seeing this red tinge. If I up contrast from 50% to 100%,
>there seems to be a wee bit of green tinge to the character at 100%
>but much harder to discern than the red tinge at 50% contrast.
>
>I was considering whether to get a 19" widescreen (16:10 ratio) or a
>19" square (4:3 ratio). The widescreen makes the characters smaller
>because the monitor isn't as tall. However, I don't like buying LCD
>monitors through the mail, like from newegg.com, because of their dead
>8-pixel minimum to return the monitor and I don't want even 1 dead
>pixel (and the store will take a return for up to 30 days if any
>pixels are dead). Besides, the store's price with tax wasn't far from
>the mail-order cost after including shipping. The next size up
>(actually 2 sizes up to provide a real difference in height) and also
>at 2ms response time was $100 higher, or more, and out of my price
>range.

I doubt anything Newegg ships has so many as 8 dead pixels,
and often you can consult the user reviews to see if others
had any dead pixels - if they did it is expected they would
mention it. Even so, it is no assurance of 0 dead pixels so
I agree you will have to buy from someplace with a better
return policy to get this level of choice/rejection.


>
>While I have alleviated some of the viewing of small text by using the
>Large Fonts option in the desktop theme (although some settings had to
>be reduced using Advanced option, like the titlebar text), there are
>still plenty of applications that use a fixed font at 8- or 10-point
>which at 50% contrast (and 50% brightness so I don't get eye fatigue
>from too bright a screen). ClearType is almost a necessity to provide
>smooth looking characters. Most 10-point font looks okay but the
>smaller fonts tend to have that red tinge to them.

Consider what must have to happen for "smooth looking
characters", when a character is composed of dots large
enough your eyes can see them. Only option is some sort of
sub-pixel dithering. On most CRT, there is an inherant
blurring from the focus and tube surface that takes care
this by automatically degrading the pixel borders, but not
on an LCD. On the other hand, more precise pixel borders
can have benefits too, when you want a very clear
representation instead of blurred pixel boundaries.

"kony" wrote in message
news:2rnlh3ll5a4qpccs3s8lk5p0h184rms00c@4ax.com...
> "VanguardLH" wrote:
>
>>Just got my first LCD monitor (Samsung 932BW, 19" widescreen,
>>1440x900
>>native resolution and the only one where the text is sharp). I
>>noticed that some text has a red tint just to the side of the it
>>(i.e., like a red shadow). To reproduce it easily, I open Notepad
>>and
>>fill a line with "l" characters which use the Tahoma font at 8-point
>>size. Between each ell is a red tinge. The tinge goes away after I
>>up contrast from 50% to 100%.
>>
>>If I disable ClearType,
>
> Oh, that's what ClearType does, you have to live with it or
> not. If your LCD were using analog instead of DVI, and/or
> it has a sharpening feature, these are two other things to
> consider changing.

In addition to the red tinging, I've also seen spectral highlighting
within the stroke of some characters (but not in all characters in
that spot), like a just barely noticeable light swipe of pink across a
part of a vertical stroke. To get rid of the tinge and very faint
spectral effects, I gave up on ClearType but that means skinnier
character strokes although sharper.

I had expected to hook up the LCD monitor using a VGA (analog) cable
because I read that the DVI cable was not included with the Samsung
LCD monitor. Although listed as optional, Samsung did include the DVI
cable so that is how it got hooked up (my ATI card have both VGA and
DVI outputs).

Although I selected the DVI input, the Sharpness control still
functions. I had it set at 60 (out of 100). Originally it was at 100
but it made the strokes too skinny. I can't see a change in sharpness
from 0 to 100 when looking at photographs (and one was a blowup of a
plant with fine hairs on the edges of its leaves). However, I
definitely do see perceptible changes in text at certain sharpness
settings (84, 72, 56, 40). 40 is a too bit fuzzy, 56 looks smooth to
my eyes for the tiny fonts but 60 looks sharper for the not so tiny
fonts.

Too many applications like to use 8-point fonts which is hard to read
but then they also choose grainy font styles that are especially jaggy
on the slant strokes. I don't know if that is something I can change
using a 3rd party utility, like maybe X-Setup, to let me change fonts
for more objects than what Windows offers in its lackluster Display
applet. The 10-point Tahoma font in Wordpad is sharp and clear and
looks about the same size as the text in the tree displayed in Outlook
Express but the font style used by OE for the tree text is much less
smooth. I also found Arial easier to read than Tahoma.

Don't know why Microsoft likes Tahoma as a default font. It squashes
together characters with loops in them, like "b", "g", "p", "q". I
chose Arial which makes the tiny fonts a bit easier to read. Both
fonts have almost the same overall spacing (Arial is a wee bit wider)
to try to avoid any problems with menus or fields having truncated
strings. In 10-point Tahoma, "do" looks like the character "8" on its
side with a vertical bar up the middle whereas 10-point Arial
characters are not so wide so there is better separation for faster
recognition.

>>The widescreen
>>sized monitor makes fonts a bit more squat than for my old square
>>(4:3) CRT monitor (but then the CRT was old and a bit out of focus
>>and
>>eventually died).
>
> If "squat" ends up the only problem after trying other
> changes, then try a different font.

While the Display applet, Appearance tab lets me choose font sizes, it
doesn't let me choose font size for everything. For example, nothing
changed there will affect the jaggy font that Microsoft chose to use
in the tree list in Outlook Express. Web pages also often specify a
font so nothing I do for configuring Windows will affect the web page
(other than increasing text size but that often won't affect text
where a specific font has been specified along with size). I might
find a 3rd party utility that lets me change more fonts of more
objects but some are fixed and I can't do anything about them.

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 03:14:03 -0500, "VanguardLH"
<VanguardLH@mail.invalid> wrote:


>While the Display applet, Appearance tab lets me choose font sizes, it
>doesn't let me choose font size for everything. For example, nothing
>changed there will affect the jaggy font that Microsoft chose to use
>in the tree list in Outlook Express. Web pages also often specify a
>font so nothing I do for configuring Windows will affect the web page
>(other than increasing text size but that often won't affect text
>where a specific font has been specified along with size). I might
>find a 3rd party utility that lets me change more fonts of more
>objects but some are fixed and I can't do anything about them.
>


If reading a small to moderate amount (per screen) of text
is paramount, consider a 5:4 ratio 19" LCD, and possibly one
without a hard coating so it's less reflective.

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 16:05:37 -0400 kony <spam@spam.com> wrote:
| On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 03:14:03 -0500, "VanguardLH"
| <VanguardLH@mail.invalid> wrote:
|
|
|>While the Display applet, Appearance tab lets me choose font sizes, it
|>doesn't let me choose font size for everything. For example, nothing
|>changed there will affect the jaggy font that Microsoft chose to use
|>in the tree list in Outlook Express. Web pages also often specify a
|>font so nothing I do for configuring Windows will affect the web page
|>(other than increasing text size but that often won't affect text
|>where a specific font has been specified along with size). I might
|>find a 3rd party utility that lets me change more fonts of more
|>objects but some are fixed and I can't do anything about them.
|>
|
|
| If reading a small to moderate amount (per screen) of text
| is paramount, consider a 5:4 ratio 19" LCD, and possibly one
| without a hard coating so it's less reflective.

I got an LG1933 that fits that description. Aside from it not handling
all video formats, I'm quite happy with it. Zero dead pixels, too (even
though I bought it from Circuit City which I've experienced a good returns
policy at on a couple past products, and believed I could return it for
another unit if there were even 1 dead pixel).

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