Laptop screen resolutions

[subgenius]

My boss just got a Dell D800 Latitude laptop to use for presentations, and his screen is a 15" widescreen WSXGA+. The native resolution on it is something like 1680 x 1050, and when surfing the web, hardly any of the graphics are crisp at all. I tried switching the resolution down to a more normal 1072 x 768, but things still look stretched or blurry. Is this something I can fix? The laptop is essentially worthless if we can't show our work (we're an ad agency) to clients, and most websites are designed for either 800 x 600 or 1072 x 768. I've never had a problem switching from one resolution to another on the desktops I've used, so I figured laptops would be similar. So do I need to try to exchange it, sell it, or is there a way to fix this problem?

 

[Ionizer86]

The thing is that laptops have set pixels (as do LCDs) so you can't off-scale it to something like 1024x768. The resolution you're talking about is probably 1400x1050, right? That makes it 4:3 instead of 1.6 scale. In that case, the next best resolution that'd work well is 700x525. Sorry if the screen real estate looks limited but that's the way it is.

 

[subgenius]

 

[subgenius]

I'll have to confirm the lowest resolution tomorrow, what's the point of companies like Dell even making screens that are useless to the average computer user? Plus, I do freelance web design, and trying to design for different monitor sizes and different resolutions is hard enough, but with all the higher resolution screens on laptops, I wouldn't know, and probably wouldn't bother, to design around them. Thanks for the response, and anyone who has additional info about why hardware manufacturers feel the need to make such a jump in resolutions, please feel free to respond because it just seems like a huge gap when some people still use 17" CRTs with an 800 x 600 resolution.

 

[wjsulliv]

In general when laptops only came in screen sizes of 14.1" and smaller they had native resolutions of 1024x768 or 800x600.

Now that larger screens are available companies have raised the native resolution beyond 1024x768. In order to maintain the ability to see crisp images you should maintain the same ratio that the native resolution uses.

When you consider pixel technology this approach makes sense... If I stretch 800x600 resolution over 1024x768-pixel screen, every square pixel of data has to cover 1.28 square pixels of screen. How do you cover .28 square pixels of screen? You have to estimate what color best approximates the desired color of that pixel, which results in fuzziness.



However, the best rule of thumb when designing websites is to remember that the smallest common denominator among screen resolutions is 800x600. So design for 800x600 and you will know everybody can see properly.

 

[Gunbuster]

Set it back to native res. and reset font size back to normal, I bet it is set to large

 

[rainypickles]

isn't there a lower widescreen resolution? on X1000 xga, the resolution is 1200x800 IIRC. maybe that would help? that might stop some stretching.

 

[WobbleWobble]

I'm sure there's a way to disable screen expasion. It'll give you the crisp 800x600 resolution or whatever you need, but it won't stretch to the whole screen and leave a lot of it unused.

That's the problem with LCDs, it only looks good at its native resolution if you want to utilize the whole screen.