In The Guide on 12 July 2004 you replied to my question regarding web pages being displayed in a small font size. The problem still persists, so I have sent you copies of a number of screen shots of various web pages to demonstrate the problem of small size that do not fill the screen, and another two websites (The Canberra Times and Virgin Blue) which fill the whole screen. The display resolution is at 1440 x 900. If I set the resolution to 1024 x 768 the print quality is distorted and is not crisp.

Thanks for emailing me the screen shots, as I now understand the problem much better, and now know the resolution and monitor type. The resolution you are running is 1440 x 900 which is for widescreen monitors. Now that I realise you have a widescreen monitor, I can tell you that this isn’t so much a problem, but a result of using a widescreen LCD monitor.

LCD monitors have a native resolution, which is the optimal resolution at which the display runs. When the resolution is set at less than the native resolution, the clarity of the picture is not as good as when the monitor is run at the native resolution. On the old fashioned CRT monitors, the image is ’sprayed’ onto the glass at which you look. On the other hand, LCD monitors display by individually switching on and off liquid crystal cells. When the LCD monitor is being run at its native resolution, the monitor uses one crystal on the monitor per pixel. However, if you use a resolution lower than the native resolution, the image will not fill the screen. So, in this case either a black frame will be placed around the image (that is, for those crystals that are not being used) or, as is more common, the image will be scaled upwards to fit the display size. In this case, more than one monitor crystal is being used to display each pixel. This results in image distortion and makes the image look fuzzy.

Now that we have covered the basics of resolutions for LCD monitors, and the reason why you lose quality when decreasing the resolution to 1024 x 768, let’s deal with your particular question. Most web pages are designed to be viewed at the more common resolution of 1024 x 768. At this resolution, most web pages will neatly fit the display. However, you are running at a resolution much higher: 1440 x 900. Coupled with the fact this is also a widescreen resolution, you will find that most web pages do not fill the whole screen and are displaying somewhat smaller text and graphics. However, some web pages (i.e. Canberra Times and Virgin Blue) have been designed to scale the page to fit the Internet Explorer window size. As the window is much wider at the 1440 x 900 resolution, the web page is being vertically scaled quite a bit. While this won’t distort the image, it may result in the page looking sparser than it otherwise would. So, there isn’t much you can do about the decrease in size, as this is really just a result of having a widescreen LCD monitor. I know quite a few people who don’t like LCD monitors because the high resolution strains their eyes, and decreasing the resolution doesn’t help because it results in distortion. However, there is a procedure you can try. Internet Explorer 6 has the ability to scale on systems which use a higher resolution. Have a look at the article msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/highdpi.asp for details on how to enable scaling. Some manufacturers who ship systems with high resolution LCDs are enabling this feature by default. If you still have problems after activating scaling, in Internet Explorer go to the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Internet Options’ and click the ‘General’ tab then the ‘Accessibility’ button. Tick ‘Ignore font sizes specified on Web pages’. Click OK and click OK. Then, should you experience jagged images, go back into the Internet Options and click ‘Advanced’ and under ‘Multimedia’ untick ‘Enable Automatic Image Resizing’.

For anyone considering purchasing an LCD monitor, I strongly recommend you test the monitor first to check if the high resolution display is to your liking.