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General discussion

Eyesight not great - what screen size should I get

Sep 24, 2004 10:26PM PDT

I am in the market for a new laptop and love the wide screen laptops. However, I find that the high resolution makes the text difficult to read. I thought about lowering the resolution but I've been told that lowering the resolution from the native setting will affect the display quality. True??

I currently have an old IBM A21M with a sreen resolution setting of 1024 * 768 and am comfortable with this.

Thanks

Discussion is locked

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Re: Eyesight not great - what screen size should I get
Sep 25, 2004 12:46PM PDT

Scrreen size is relative:

What's your apps: eg if you use GreenBrowser you can blow up text to really large type...

on the otherhand you might want the benefits of say what I have a 17" Toshiba and then use display under control panel for lower res which mags everything and the xtra screen real estate is the factor that makes it a go

I love the Tos and currently have the resolution cranked up to 2048X1536... not bad for a laptop. I also get yearly eyeglasses specific for computer use

You might also want to consider virtual screens..microsoft offers a free "tweak one" consisting of 4 screens for free

Tos far better than the Dell I had a couple of years ago

My sys 1 yr old model P25-S507. Refurbs are avail. Great machine used approx 10 hrs per day and 17" laptop screen equiv I believe to a 19" desktop monitor

Don't believe you'll experience any problems with so called "native res" personally have found that a bunch of hooey...native res on this is XGA -WXGA to be precise- but obviously i'm not experiencing any problems...remember Tos makes LCD's not many do including Dell.

bye the bye test your screen and look for burned out pixels. Mine's perfect to this day

hope this helps...have had laptops since Radio Shack 100 in 1984.

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Re: Eyesight not great - what screen size should I get
Sep 25, 2004 7:05PM PDT

Probably the IBM notebook LCD you had in the past was only a 14.1" LCD or smaller.

If you get one of the excellent 15.4" widescreens (Pentium M Centrino) and stick to the standard XGA resolution (1024x768 widescreen equivalent is 1200x800) you should be fine.

Yes, an LCD will not look as good dropping to 800x600, etc as it has only 1 native resolution.

However, 1024x768 is now the standard for web pages, etc so get the largest LCD screen you can (17" is great is you will use it as a desktop replacement but too large and heavy unless you buy the 17" Apple powerbook which is only 6.9 pounds but over $2500)

Checkout the Toshiba M35S456 with Trubrite or the HPZT3000/Compaq X1000.

Also, you can increase the font size without changing the default resolution if necessary.