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There was a time when people ditched their perfectly fine 8 bit LUT based graphic cards and computers for 24 bit true color ones. It made life much easier for d
by jws 5y ago
There was a time when people ditched their perfectly fine 8 bit LUT based graphic cards and computers for 24 bit true color ones. It made life much easier for developers. All the effort to manage a color palette within a program, and to try to do something reasonable to support more than one program on the screen at a time just went away, not to mention the choices around dithering algorithms. It was glorious.
Roughly speaking, we’ve had 25 years to get sub pixel vector glyph rendering right, and it still is consistently wrong in many places.
It is a clever hack whose time has come and gone, I will not miss:
- fails miserably if you rotate your screen.
- only works for horizontal text. Anything rendered at differently angles looks different.
- forces a different spatial resolution for brightness and color, in one axis but not the other.
- sensitive to the monitor’s physical subpixel layout. You really can’t rely on an end user to tell you the right answer after they plug in a monitor.
- color fringing is a thing, more so for people with better eyesight. Some people see it, some don’t.
- difficult to reconcile with high dpi printing to make sure what you see on the screen approximates what you are going to get.
- it’s hard to know if the person you send this too will see the same thing you do. Different platforms, renderer, and hardware means they may see something differently.
So, it was pretty good for horizontal text on a monitor where you knew the subpixel pixel order and you got everything right so it approximated the eventual printed output. But its time has passed.
Hand down that monitor to someone’s video game or media watching needs and if you deal with text, get a high dpi monitor.
- rr808 5y agoMuch easier? most work I do is black and white.
- jws 5y agoI miss monochrome for programming. I had a 19” portrait monochrome CRT back in the day. Still maybe the best monitor I ever used. Never had a color fringing issue!
- Plasmoid 5y agoYou can buy eInk monochrome displays now. You might be interested in them (https://shop.boox.com/products/mira https://shop.boox.com/products/mira) .
- rr808 5y agoI didn't even mean that. I mean I have a color screen but the pages are usually white background with black text or black background with white text.
- marwis 5y agoMeanwhile I'm happy with perfectly crisp text rendering in Windows at arbitrary DPI and had to abandon Linux because it looks like shit on 27" 4K.
- Osiris 5y agoI have 4 4k monitors connected to my Linux machine and they all look fine, even in vertical orientation. However, Windows is far superior when it comes to fractional scaling.
- marwis 5y agoWhich is exactly the problem. I can't stand Linux/Mac style scaling. At my preferred 1.25 or 1.5 it just looks terrible.
- Nullabillity 5y agoI'd still take occasional antialiasing failures over common HiDPI scaling failures, any day of the week. Antialiasing wins hard in terms of both severity and frequency. If a program has broken subpixel antialiasing, it may be slightly more annoying to use for long stretches of time. If a program has broken HiDPI scaling, it's completely unusable with a monitor that requires it. > - only works for horizontal text. Anything rendered at differently angles looks different. Anything rendered at non-90° angles is going to be annoying to read anyway. It's not like there's this magical world of 78° text just waiting to be discovered, if only we could get rid of all subpixel antialiasing.