LCD's are now getting good in regards to brightness, contrast, pixel refresh rate, and viewing angle. But there's still one limitation in LCD's that will never disappear...
...Scaling...
Since LCD's have a set number of pixels, anything other (read:lower) than its native resolution ends up blurry. Some are better than others, but they all get blurrier to some measure. What cheezes me off the most, though, is when I have to play a game at 1280x960 on a 1280x1024 panel. I would much rather have small black bars on the top and bottom of the screen than have the image distorted just so I can fill the screen.
Thus, I have an idea that most manufacturers could implement... but I alone won't do any convincing. All I need you guys to do is to drop a line in here if your agree (and put in your own ideas, too), and I'm going to contact some LCD makers and reference them to this posting so that they know it's something actually in demand.
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Here's the plan. All they need to do is have a button on the bezel or an option in the OSD to toggle between 3 different settings:
Upmix
This will scale all input to full-screen, just as almost every other LCD today does
Widescreen
(assuming panel resolution of 1280x1024) 640x480 would evenly scale to 1280x960 (thus no blurring), and 1280x960 would remain as is.
Fullscreen
(assuming panel resolution of 1280x1024) The same rules from widescreen apply here, but instead of scaling (read: blurring) the image up to 1280x1024 to fill the screen, it merely crops small slices on the left and right side (useful when watching movies)
...Scaling...
Since LCD's have a set number of pixels, anything other (read:lower) than its native resolution ends up blurry. Some are better than others, but they all get blurrier to some measure. What cheezes me off the most, though, is when I have to play a game at 1280x960 on a 1280x1024 panel. I would much rather have small black bars on the top and bottom of the screen than have the image distorted just so I can fill the screen.
Thus, I have an idea that most manufacturers could implement... but I alone won't do any convincing. All I need you guys to do is to drop a line in here if your agree (and put in your own ideas, too), and I'm going to contact some LCD makers and reference them to this posting so that they know it's something actually in demand.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's the plan. All they need to do is have a button on the bezel or an option in the OSD to toggle between 3 different settings:
Upmix
This will scale all input to full-screen, just as almost every other LCD today does
Widescreen
(assuming panel resolution of 1280x1024) 640x480 would evenly scale to 1280x960 (thus no blurring), and 1280x960 would remain as is.
Fullscreen
(assuming panel resolution of 1280x1024) The same rules from widescreen apply here, but instead of scaling (read: blurring) the image up to 1280x1024 to fill the screen, it merely crops small slices on the left and right side (useful when watching movies)
