blurry display, cant figure out why

J

jdsamstuff

New Member
I have two computers connected to one display, a magnavox lcd that allows for 1440x900. The first machine is an lenovo thinkpad x61 tablet running xp and this works fine; text, icons are crisp. The second is a HPm8200n desktop running wondows 7 and has a gigabyte video card and is connected by vga. When using this, the text is slightly blurry making it very difficult to use for much time. It's off just enough to cause problems on the eyes. I have tried differnt screens and it's basically the same. I have tried without the video card and it's the same. I have tried calibrating the screen fonts with clear type and it's the same. I have tried different screen resolutions.

Can someone advise me on what could be causing this blurriness and if its possible to address it?

Thank you.
 
VGA is a fairly low resolution interface. If you can use an HDMI cable between the two, I'm sure you will get a much better picture.
 
Thank you for the reply. I have tried this, to no avail. It's like there is an issue with the resolution so icons/text looks slightly hazy making it very hard on the eye.

It's odd because the laptop with I guess worse hardware produces fine looking icons and text.

Any idea appreciated!
 
The main cause of poor text has to be resolution. VGA gets a bad rap, it's not that bad. I'm probably stating the obvious but to ensure the monitor does not resample, the graphic output and the screen display have to be equal pixel by pixel. Whatever the graphic output is set to, the monitor must show it at actual size, not stretched to screen. It's nice if you can fill the screen but if the results are lousy there's no choice. One assumes the graphic output resolutions are those supported by the card, not custom values.

If the monitor is 1440x900 then the horizontal resolution of the graphic output must be less than or equal to 1440 and the vertical less than or equal to 900. If there are black bars, tough luck. If they are larger and the monitor is set to show actual size, you won't have all of the page visible.

The Magnavox is a TV, not PC monitor? I downloaded a manual at random. That model had PC input setting but the screen resolution choices were 4:3 or Fullscreen. It's not clear what Fullscreen meant but it sounds like stretching.

It may be that the Thinkpad output happens to match the Magnavox. What resolution is the output from the Thinkpad and is it stretched to fill the Magnavox?
 
Many thanks for the detailed reply, and I should apologize for not giving you the additional information that I have tried both the HP-desktop and Thinkpad laptop connected to an Asus VW266H scree (via VGA and HDMI, by factory installed video, and via the gigabyte video card for the VGA) and get the sameoutcome.

I would have thought that this is a windows 7 issue, but the HP machine had Vista on it before and had the same issue. Maybe it's a Win7, Vista issue?

To try to focus on a specific issue: the text on the desktop icons is just slightly blurry like the white of the icon text has some different colors (red, silver) in it.

Thanks again.
 
Ok so another piece of the puzzle is when I do not use the ultrabase to connect the laptop to the screen I get similar blurry graphics. So it seems as if the X6 ultrabase somehow improves the graphics or changes the settings (I checked to make sure resolution is set the same) to make the screen output look much better. Does this seem reasonable?
 
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