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Due to my eyesight changing as I get older I thought replacing my main 19" monitor with a newer larger one would allow me to see text more clearly as I code.

A friend of mine advising a 24" monitor as a replacement and to use the old 19" as a secondary monitor for reference material. Alas all text on the new monitor is blurred. I have tried all resolutions cleartpye off & the cleartype tuner, and different font sizes but cannot get the quality of text to even match the older 19". Is this to be expected? or is there something wrong with my setup. BTW Im using XP SP3.

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  • Originally the question was asking other developers what there setup was monitor wise. But then I changed it at last minute to my specific problem. So you are right it’s really more of a superuser.com question.
    – Canacourse
    Commented Sep 3, 2010 at 14:20
  • Another tip for improving visibility of the screen would be to set the DPI higher. This keeps the same resolution but makes everything bigger; for example, a 16x16 icon would instead be shown at 24x24 perhaps.
    – nhinkle
    Commented Sep 5, 2010 at 0:17

4 Answers 4

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Yes, something is wrong.

Chances are that you are using a resolution that is different from the monitors native resolution. Find out what the actual resolution of the monitor is, and set XP to use the identical resolution.

If your new 24" monitor has the same (or lower) resolution than your old 19", then obviously there will be the same number of pixels on the new one, only they will be bigger. This would also look bad next to the old 19" screen.

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  • +1 for "same (or lower) resolution". I have a 14" monitor and a 24" TV. When I run monitor on 640x480, everything looks nice, but when I run TV at its highest resolution which is also 640x480, I can barely read any text and everything is very very blurry.
    – AndrejaKo
    Commented Sep 5, 2010 at 0:22
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not really a programming question, but: install new drivers for graphics card and for monitor.

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  • Not really a solution for what probably is just a wrongly set screen resolution.
    – Pekka
    Commented Sep 3, 2010 at 11:55
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Not a programming question, and this is even more than others not a programming answer, but here I go anyway...

As others have noted, the problem with the monitor is likely in screen resolution settings. But you can work on your vision as well.

Get your eyes checked!

Make sure the ophthalmologist knows you work with computers. As reading from paper and from a computer screen are different, you should probably be wearing progressive lenses or trifocals with focus adjusted appropriately for three different distances.

If you're noticing your vision getting progressively blurrier, you could also be developing cataracts, as I did a couple years ago. This is easily operable these days, and I now have better vision than ever, but still have progressive lenses and definitely need them for coding.

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Try setting the screen to its highest resolution and then experimenting with various DPI values. That may help.

You also need to compare quality of 19" and 24" screens. It could be that older screen is simply better than new screen.

As other have said, make sure you have newest drivers for monitor and graphics card. Maybe monitor came with some sort of calibration application that needs to be run first and you skipped a step during installation?

Another thing worth doing is to look for on-line reviews of that specific model and see if there are any known problems with it. Another good idea would be to try to find same monitor somewhere and see if it's blurry too. It could be that your monitor is defective and needs to be replaced.

This one may look too obvious, but make sure that you actually have a monitor and not a TV. TVs are made for viewing at a distance and monitors are made for viewing at close range.

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  • The highest resolution available is 1920 x 1080 This is also the recommended resolution for the monitor. unfortunately when i try to use 1920 x 1080 the image does not fill the entire screen and a 1 to 2 inch border remains.
    – Canacourse
    Commented Sep 6, 2010 at 11:27
  • Yes its a monitor.
    – Canacourse
    Commented Sep 6, 2010 at 11:27
  • @user31426 Ah, there we go! The entire screen part is interesting. Check your monitor's settings. If there is some auto adjust option, as there should be, run it when monitor is set to its recommended resolution. If that does not sole the problem, then the monitor is defective.
    – AndrejaKo
    Commented Sep 6, 2010 at 11:43

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