I'm visiting my dad whose eyesight is getting pretty bad. He's currently using a 20 inch NEC monitor (that's actually extremely good) but he just finds the text far too small to read in most games these days. I just installed Sacred 2 for him and he can't see it, and lowering the resolution only makes the text blockier. He mostly plays WoW but he's starting to have trouble reading the text on that as well, and even seeing the icons on the minimap.
So does anyone have any recommendations on a very large monitor? They start to overlap with small HDTVs once you get to 26 inches and above, but presumably those are fine for PC display. I've found one 26" Samsung T260HD HDTV Monitor at the local store which seems reasonably good although the 1920x1080 resolution might defeat the point somewhat. Larger (or lower native res) is probably better.
I don't have a cheap recommendation, no. But I can recommend a 30" screen without hesitation. I use one at work and one at home and there are absolutely fantastic. I have a Dell at work and an Apple at home so I don't think brand matters all that much. Just having that much space to work in is fantastic.
One potential issue with a 30" monitor is that IIRC their DPI is actually smaller than most smaller monitors because their resolution is so high. So potentially everything will show up even smaller than normal. I ended up getting a 27" which has the same resolution as a 24", except it's bigger and therefore easier on the eyes.
I've got a Dell 2707 and I've been very happy with it.
I've only just got it up and running and not had a huge play around with it, but I found plugging the laptop into the 32" Sony Bravia TV to be surprisingly good in terms of quality, it's been many years since I plugged a PC into a TV so my expectations were pretty low, but I wouldn't necessarily discount looking at using a TV, especially as you want to run a lower resolution than optimal for that size monitor too.
If your dad finds game text too small then he'll need to turn down the resolution to less than native anyway, so I don't see how a monitor's native resolution figures into this.Originally Posted by krayzkrok
If your dad's got the deskspace: I use a 37" 1080p Westinghouse HD monitor (predecessor to this one I think). Text size is not an issue. :-) If that's a little too big, I think there are 32" 1080p HD monitors. You could step down to a 720p HD monitor, though that might be TOO low-res. EDIT: the advantage to an HD monitor vs HDTV is it omits the tuner, which saves you some dough.
EDIT 2: you said lowering the res doesn't help, but what about upping the DPI setting?
Depending on what his current monitor's dot pitch is and what the new monitor's dot pitch is, he might not need to change from the native resolution. I specifically chose a 27" because it was a larger dot pitch than my previous 19" monitor. If I had gone with a 24" it would have been a smaller dot pitch than my old monitor.
Depending on what monitor he's using now he could get upwards of a 10% increase in text and image size with a new monitor with larger dot pitch while still using the monitor's native settings. Of course, depending on how much trouble he's having that might not be enough.
EDIT: yeah, basically what unbongwah said.
I'm going to second (third?) the vote for an HD monitor - Any of the under 30" TVs will be 720p instead of 1080p, so they'll have the best (in this case, lowest) pixels per inch, so everything will be bigger.
Combine that with upping the OS dpi to 120 from 96, and enabling a zoom level or three on Firefox, and he'll be in good shape.
Thanks for the tips. On the desktop things are fine because I can change the text size / DPI, but in games this ability seems very limited. WoW is one of the exceptions and I'm thankful for it, and it seems an "oversight" that more games don't consider this. But perhaps I'm missing something obvious. This is the first time I've really had to deal with this. It also makes me realise how tiny those minimap icons can be, and how it's often not possible to make them more visible.
Chris, I'm making the assumption that there's a trade-off between screen estate and native resolution - higher resolutions need correspondingly larger screen estates to be equally visible compared to smaller screens with lower native resolutions, if I'm making any sense.
I've no idea what the dot pitch of this monitor is, but I doubt a 10% increase in going to cut it. I've always eyed those 30" Dells (and the Apple Studio displays) enviously, but now that 37" Westinghouse looks ideal for this. Whether I can get one here is another question...
I say go for a really big hdtv. The size coupled with the low resolution makes for a really good solution. Text on a 36"-40" at 1080p is huge.
I would advise against a 30" monitor because as mentioned before the resolution is so high (4 megapixel compared to hdtv's 2 megapixel) your father will still have trouble reading text.
I'm basing this on prices in my region, where a 30" dell is the same price as a 46" Samsung hdtv
But... why do you insist on running games at the monitor's native resolution? It's true that games typically don't support larger fonts at the same resolution but surely you can simply lower the game's resolution? What's the problem?
If he has an older monitor, it might have a terrible scaler (which wouldn't be the case with a newer one).
Sure, but in that case you can have the graphics card driver do the scaling.
A 30" 2560 x 1600 Dell monitor is $1300. I bought my 37" 1920 x 1080 monitor for $600.
If he knows his dad is going to run it at the lower res all the time anyway, why spend twice as much on a smaller higher-res display?
It's not an oversight. Coding an interface that can elegantly handle any arbitrary text assuming any arbitrary size is an amazing colossal pain in the ass.
A 30 inch display is big enough you can run it at half-resolution -- 1280 x 800 -- every pixel is doubled and it's pretty cool.
But a 32 or 37 inch TV is so much cheaper. Even 720P 32 inch would probably be great.
Perhaps "oversight" was more of a pun than a point, but pain in the ass or not it's something that can be fixed at the desktop and popular application level but not yet in most games. Given the target demographic for games that's obviously not surprising, but as the demographic widens with gamers getting older it might get more attention.
Chris, I'm probably not explaining it very well. True, lower resolutions usually result in larger text (not always, Sacred 2 keeps the text size the same but uses less pixels) but the legibility is generally poorer than native due to the scaling. We've spent the last few days going through the various games installed on his hard drive, and that is what we've been finding. Maybe we have an unrepresentative selection of games on here, or the scaler on this monitor is poor. The ideal solution would be the clarity of the native resolution on a larger monitor that gives a good compromise between size and DPI.
Anyway thanks for everyone's suggestions.
Definitely try disabling your monitor scaling and using your video card drivers to do it first. Modern scaling algorithms are pretty good, but monitors usually cheap out on good chips to do it.
Yeah, definitely try driver scaling first, and try to find an even 2:1 ratio in both dimensions to eliminate scaling artifacts. I'm often running games at lower than native resolution to scale up small UI elements, and usually that works quite well.
Sacred 2 actually makes the text smaller in terms of pixel size when you select a lower resolution? Wow, that's amazingly retarded. They went to the effort of making their text display scalable... in order to make it LESS legible!
No sorry, I was wrong to say "less pixels". I was trying to say "blockier and more pixellated" but it's clearly just poor aliasing at lower resolutions that makes it harder to read - it's the same physical size on screen.
Okay, in that case try driver scaling with different resolutions and see if one is legible.
Don't forget GPU scaling is BROKEN if you have a HDTV and NVIDIA cards.
It's less to do with legibility, more to do with edge sharpness. Persons who want or need sharp edge boundaries prefer to set their desktop resolution to the native resolution of the monitor.
...and then whine that they can't read anything because all their nice sharp-edged text is only a sixteenth of an inch tall.
GPU scaling + check that you have the exact right aspect ratio for your screen should give you decently sharp text. 1280 x 720, 760, 800 -- it's easy to pick one that's just one notch off. I love how Valve games have a pulldown that lets you pick the ratio first.
Zylon, I'm going to assume you're not being a dick and directing that at me. My dad is diabetic and consequently losing his eyesight. He's legally blind in one eye, and the other isn't far behind. Despite his age he still loves playing PC games, and one day when you're old and blind yourself you might bitch about the same shit that doesn't seem an issue when you're younger.
Seriously!
I'd never gotten it working more than once, then no amount of rebooting worked. Then I was without Internet for a while now, and during that time scaling worked. Every time!
Today Win7 decided to boot up in non-native resolution, and scaling was broken again. So it was working as long as I had no Internet o.O
Zylon is just being himself.
I just put my 30 inch monitor into 1280x800 mode. The text doesn't look as sharp as it does on the 32" 720P LCD in our bedroom.
I'd find him a big 720P TV set and get a video card with HDMI output. (Unless the set has DVI.)
Wow. Uh. If there's anything we can do to help ease your childhood trauma, let us know. *backs away slowly*
Zylon is serious about monitors. SERIOUS!
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