Topic: Your Monitor it's Resolutions and You

[Tony]

How You Should Use Your Monitor

All of our monitors must pass the most rigorous safety and quality checks before being sold to our customers. The following guidelines will help you to use your monitor properly and avoid any of the health issues sometimes associated with extended monitor use at work or at home.

Make sure that your chair, desk and monitor are in the most comfortable position for you. Always sit upright with your back supported and use a footrest if your feet do not touch the ground.

Try to maintain a distance of at least 60cm between your eyes and the monitor screen. The monitor should be positioned between 15° and 50° below horizontal eye level. The monitor should also be tilted back so that the top of the screen is slightly further away than the bottom.

Avoid a strong light contrast between the monitor and the physical background. Adjust your monitor?s brightness and contrast to a comfortable level. Wherever possible, use dark letters on a white background.

Make sure your monitor screen is clean and wherever possible use an anti-glare screen.

Ensure your monitor is running at a refresh rate of at least 75hz to avoid eyestrain caused by screen flicker.

Take regular breaks and walk around occasionally.

If you are typing a document onto a computer, make sure that both the document and the computer screen are at the same distance from your eyes; try using a document holder.

During breaks, focus on something further away (approximately 6 meters) to rest your eye muscles.

Make sure you have regular eye tests as advised by your optician.

[Tony]

Display Resolutions

You will undoubtedly come across the term ?resolution? when you are comparing monitors. The resolution is simply how many pixels that make up the screen image horizontally by how many pixels there are vertically e.g. 1024x768 is a grid of 1024 pixels from left-to-right and 768 from top-to-bottom.

CRT Resolutions

The higher the screen resolution, the smaller each image becomes and the sharper the image may appear. So, to put it simply, the larger your CRT monitor screen size, the higher you will want to set your resolution to take advantage of it. For example, someone using a very large monitor to do complex CAD work may want to run it at a super high resolution of 2048x1536 in order to maintain the necessary level of detail and information on screen. Conversely, someone doing word processing on a 15? monitor will probably want to run it at 800x600 so that the font is large enough to comfortably read.

It is also important to note that the higher the resolution, the lower the refresh rate, as your monitor will be having to redraw more pixels each time the screen is refreshed e.g. 800x600 = 480,000 pixels whereas a resolution of 1024x768 = 786,432 pixels. If your refresh rate becomes too low (less than 75hz) then this will result in noticeable screen flicker and potentially lead to eye strain and an associated headache.

Each of these resolution rates has a standard name such as VGA (Video Graphics Array) or XGA (Extended Graphics Array). These standards were mainly used prior to operating systems like Windows that could run in a number of resolutions but you may still come across them.

LCD Resolutions

LCD resolutions are different from CRTs as they are fixed-matrix displays ? they have a set amount of pixels on each screen. This fixed grid of pixels is called the native resolution of the LCD and it is highly recommended that this resolution be used. By using complex algorithms to subdivide each pixel an LCD can be run in lower resolutions, but this will often result in blocky results and is not usually recommended.

Recommended Resolutions

Here are the standards, number of pixels and recommended resolution rates for each size of CRT and LCD:

Standard Resolution Number of pixels Mega Pixels Recommended CRT screen size Recommended TFT screen size
VGA 800 x 600 480,000  0.5M 15", 17" 10.4", 12"
SVGA 1024 x 768 786,432  0.8M 17", 19" 13.3" - 15"
XGA 1280 x 1024 1,310,720  1.3M 19", 21" 17.3", 18.3"
SXGA 1600 x 1200 1,920,000  1.9M 21"+ 19