Frustrated with display setting - late '08 MBpro

[fanger]

Hi Guys,
I'm slowly becoming sight impaired due to illness and I've had to reduce my screen resolution on my late '08 MacBook Pro from the optimal 1440 x 900 down to 1344 x 840 and I'm not happy with the result.
Everything is in soft focus - as it were.
I've tried mucking about with font smoothing and the like but the screen is soft as hell - I don't need my glasses to see that!.
Any bright sparks out there know how to make everything sharp regardless of screen resolution selected in display prefs.

I'd be very grateful.

Yours,

fanger

 

[Spyhop]

It's always going to look "off" if you want a less-than-native resolution to be interpolated up to the native resolution of the screen.

The usual method to retain sharpness is to run at so called 1:1 pixel mapping, which would have the image centered with a border of unused black pixels. But that would defeat the purpose, since what was being displayed would be the same size.

It's one of the trade-offs of TFT screens vs. CRTs, I guess. Same situation with TVs - playing games of old on a 1080p screen can look awful.

 

[Deleted member 651465]

Turn the display back to the native resolution!

Have a look at the accessibility options in System preferences.. much better for your problem

Screen Magnification

Enlarge the contents of your display at any time using Zoom, located in the Universal Access pane in System Preferences. Zoom lets you use the scroll wheel on a mouse, a trackpad gesture, or key commands to magnify the entire contents of your screen by up to 40x. Thanks to powerful Quartz rendering, text, graphics, and even video magnify perfectly without affecting system performance.

Use the Zoom dialog to set maximum and minimum values for instant zooming to a particular magnification. A preview rectangle outlines the portion of the screen that will be magnified when not zoomed in. The dialog lets you create custom key commands, and it offers three options for cursor tracking when magnified: keeping the cursor in the middle of the screen, automatically moving with the cursor, or moving only when it reaches the edge of the screen.

http://www.apple.com/accessibility/macosx/vision.html

 

[fanger]

Thanks guys.

fanger

 

[Draeconis]

Zoom is useful, but what OS X surprisingly doesn't have is an ability to make the system fonts bigger without compromising the native resolution. Something that Windows gets right(!)

 

[Spyhop]

I remember there was a bunch of noise about resolution independent UI elements way back before even 10.5 came out. Has it all been canned?

 

[Deleted member 651465]

I remember there was a bunch of noise about resolution independent UI elements way back before even 10.5 came out. Has it all been canned?

It was in 10.6 builds, but yes, it got pulled for some reason