What does increasing Screen Refresh Rate do?

[Mark42]

The I-Inc 19 inch LCD monitor I just bought bothered me because it did not form text well. The letters are not uniformly formed. Some parts of the letter is thick, others thin, and it varies from one letter to another, from one line to another.

No adjusting would solve the problem, until I raised the refresh rate from 60hz to 75hz. Things look much better. But I wonder what affect this will have long term?

 

[Boomyal]

Re: What does increasing Screen Refresh Rate do?

Should have no effect Mark, as long as the 75hz is withing the operating parameters of the monitor. Your manual should tell you. IMHO, you should run them as high as they are rated for. Some monitors come with a CD that sets the ideal Hz automatically. Otherwise you are dealing with the OS drivers and need to adjust things manually.

If you set it too high, it'll go nutz!

 

[Gary H NC]

Re: What does increasing Screen Refresh Rate do?

Usually the higher the refresh rate the better for your eyes. 75mhz is about the norm for a 19 inch screen.
Its the speed that the video card refreshes the pixels on the screen.60 mhz is usualy used on the old 15 inch screens.Also the better graphics cards or chipsets will let you turn the rate up higher...
I hope that made sense...8)

 

[Mark42]

Re: What does increasing Screen Refresh Rate do?

I don't understand why increasing the refresh rate makes the text appear better. I am typing this at my office looking at an IBM 19" LCD that is running at 60hz and it looks better than the I-Inc monitor. But then again, these IBM's cost $400. The I-inc cost $120 after a $50 rebate.

 

[Vlad D Impeller]

Re: What does increasing Screen Refresh Rate do?

Mark, you may have stepped on the answer to your question.

 

[Mark42]

Re: What does increasing Screen Refresh Rate do?

Vlad, what are you implying? That price can have an effect on performance? That you get what you pay for? You can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear? You can't judge a book by its cover? I bought a pig in a poke? Look before you leap? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME? ? ? ? ?

d

 

[roscoe]

Re: What does increasing Screen Refresh Rate do?

You can't make an E-Tec out of a West Bend. 8)

Also, try turning off text smoothing.
Sometimes it does just the opposite.

 

[Mark42]

Re: What does increasing Screen Refresh Rate do?

Ok, here is the fix. Thanks to Roscoe's suggestion to turn off text smoothing (can't do that in Win XP the same as in win 2000 or older). His suggestion prompted me to do a search on font smoothing and found that windows XP has issues with LCD monitors unless Clear Type fonts are used.

So I check under Display, Appearance, tab, then Effects button. On the Effects window, check the "use this method to smooth screen fonts" and select "clear Type" as the font method.

It really cleaned up the jagged edged and blocky looking font. Apparently if your system was set up to run on a CRT, then the default is "standard". When you switch to a LCD, standard does not work so well and Clear type needs to be selected.

So the problem is not really with the cheapo monitor at all, its with an incompatability when switching between CRT and LCD.

Also in the same article from the Microsoft archives, was a mention that numerious ATI video cards will/may need updated drivers too.

Even though I got the nice font back that I wanted, I'm going to download and install the lastest driver from ATI for my Radion AGP card.

So you really can get a silk purse out of a sows ear. 8)

 

[Gary H NC]

Re: What does increasing Screen Refresh Rate do?

Make sure you uninstall the old ATI drivers first. I have had issues with my Radeon card and new drivers..
Usually if its working fine i don't mess with the drivers

 

[i386]

Re: What does increasing Screen Refresh Rate do?

Now I'm gonna have to fiddle some more. My boss bought a couple of cheap LCDs and they type has always looked like crap. I've adjusted dang near everything I can think of.


BTW,

Refresh rate (or vertical refresh rate) is a CRT thing. The phosphors in a CRT start to dim immediately after being energized. Because of this, the electron beam refreshes vertically from top to bottom at a given frequency ( number of occurrences in a given time). Naturally, faster is better. You can actually see this if you look at a CRT with a video camera.

AFAIK LCD monitors don't require refreshing. But if it works, by all means. 8)

 

[Mark42]

Re: What does increasing Screen Refresh Rate do?

Installed the new ATI drivers and command center software. And like Jimmy said, you do have to uninstall the old software first.

Now it is working like a champ. Sharp, clear, crisp fonts.

The graphics look much sharper with the ATI drivers, but the biggest improvement in fonts was the change to Clear Type fonts in WinXP.