I covered the topic of running LCD monitors at their native resolution a little over a year ago. It is an extremely important topic that I’m going to discuss again today because of a phone call I had recently with a student from a previous CorelDRAW Unleashed Boot Camp.
This gentleman had spent over three hours on the phone with a tech support representative from Corel and they weren’t able to find out why the edges of rectangles were distorted. At the end of the call, the support representative suggested that he give me a call. That definitely made me feel good!
Anyways, I tried the steps outlined by the customer and I had absolutely no problem with the rectangle showing distortion. Plus the customer had both printed and laser engraved the rectangle and it output without distortion. It was very obvious that the distortion was a function of the monitor.
We checked the monitor’s settings and it was set to 1024 x 768 because his “eyes aren’t as good as they used to be”. Believe me, I understand that reasoning as much as anyone since I’m pretty sure bifocals are in my near future. I had him change his resolution to the native settings of his LCD monitor and the distortion was magically gone.
I just can’t stress enough that you must run your LCD monitors at the native resolution or you will have problems! The upside is that you are able to get more information on the screen at the higher resolutions. I run mine at 2560 x 1600 on a 30″ screen and absolutely love that I can have so much stuff available at all times. Or I have lots of extra room for designing, laying out documents or whatever else I’m doing at the moment.
While many have moved on to LCD’s, I still prefer CRT’s. One thing I notice right away is refresh rate. I can spot a monitor running at 60 HZ in a second, it drives me mental. FWICT, I don’t think this is a factor for LCD’s.
As for screen res, I’ve also seen people run 1024 x 768 on a wide screen monitor and when possible I quickly see if there is a more suitable res avail in the display options.