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I just bought a 23" widescreen LED monitor for my Windows PC, I always use CRT monitors, it is the first time for me to work on a LED monitor.
I am a low vision, so I always increase DPI.
Is increasing DPI harm the LED monitor?
Thanks in advance.
خالد محمود
Posted 2016-11-13T13:16:42.610
Reputation: 37
17
Increasing your DPI makes your display items look smaller. I believe its entirely a software setting and shouldn't damage anything.
Changing your resolution results in terrible display quality on LCD/LED monitors. Depending on your OS, its typically a better idea to change your display scaling and font settings to fit your needs.
Increasing Display scaling literally goes "render 1 pixel as 2x2 pixels" and as far as your monitor goes, its still rendering the same resolution.
None of this would damage your monitor or shorten its life (and most modern monitors won't show unsupported resolutions anyway) but its not the best way to ensure readability.
Journeyman Geek
Posted 2016-11-13T13:16:42.610
Reputation: 119 122
1It makes them bigger. He's got a "low vision" problem. – Hans Passant – 2016-11-13T15:06:28.390
8Yeah, I think we have a terminology issue here. increasing your DPI would make things smaller. Decreasing it makes it bigger. Unless he's talking about DPI scaling... – Journeyman Geek – 2016-11-13T15:08:17.537
Not really, he's increasing the DPI of his monitor, not of the images he displays. Just try it yourself, easy to see. Pun intended. – Hans Passant – 2016-11-13T15:13:55.780
11No, increasing Dots Per Inch makes more dots fit in an inch of length, therefore implies smaller dots. – loa_in_ – 2016-11-13T16:22:30.810
4@loa_in_ Increasing the DPI setting makes the system think the dots are smaller, therefore it draws everything with more of them, making everything bigger. The actual size of the actual dots can't change because it's a physical property of the monitor's design. – David Schwartz – 2016-11-13T18:01:02.600
Note that dpi stands for dots per inch. In the old days to make elements consisting of a fixed number of pixels look bigger people decreased the dpi of the display making the same number of pixels cover a larger area by reducing the resolution ie from 1280x1024 down to 1024x768. However if you can tell Windows that your monitor is a higher dpi display it should interpret that as your screen has small dimensions and it needs to make elements bigger and make them consist of more pixels, hence making things look bigger. – BeowulfNode42 – 2016-11-13T20:46:44.667
LED LCD and OLED monitors all have in built scaling mechanisms to resize the input to their native resolution. This scaling makes things a bit blurry and is why it is best to have your resolution set to the native resolution for that screen, and let the OS know to draw things with more pixels if you want them to be bigger. Windows now uses a % scaling factor to do this. – BeowulfNode42 – 2016-11-13T20:50:58.343
I think I've seen a GPU that allows you to set a higher software resolution than the display can support - the viewport then pans to wherever the mouse pointer is - or, it could scale as well via software setting. – John Dvorak – 2016-11-13T22:06:09.237
Many logical dots might just map to single physical pixel and then blend or overwrite each other. Sub-pixel rendering as we know it is a thing for almost 20 years now according to Wikipedia.
– loa_in_ – 2016-11-14T00:23:54.3975
Some of the discussion seems to reflect semantic differences. Just to avoid confusion in terminology, on LED and other flat panel displays, the pixels are fixed, manufactured in a specific physical grid. Everything is displayed using those pixels.
If you change resolution or scale the image, you're just mapping what gets displayed onto those pixels (or using fewer of them). You can't damage it by changing what you display.
Changing DPI is really only changing how the content is mapped to the physical pixels. What would be a single pixel at the native resolution might get interpolated across multiple pixels to make it look larger, or detail that would be displayed in multiple pixels at the content's native resolution "averaged" together to squeeze it onto fewer pixels.
fixer1234
Posted 2016-11-13T13:16:42.610
Reputation: 24 254
-6
It's not harmful in most of the cases, but - instead of CRT monitors - where simple but efficient electronics was just shutting down the tube when it was an unsupported mode, in LED monitors there are no such a simple fail-safety. In 90%+ cases no unsupported settings will be displayed to you to tweak, but sometimes it happens, especially on laptops(as of my experience). So - just check the monitor's manual and - if there's no data - just write to the support. I did it once with my ACER monitor: the support was very quick to reply to me with full hardware specs including the chips used list!
Alexey Vesnin
Posted 2016-11-13T13:16:42.610
Reputation: 565
3It is not harmful to the monitor to change any settings in Windows. Settings that aren't supported by the monitor aren't available. – Christofer Weber – 2016-11-13T13:20:54.967
24a LED has no DPI, because it's just a lamp – phuclv – 2016-11-13T14:25:29.010
1heh. That's why my answer has LCD/LED. Technically most common LCD monitors now are TN with LED backlight. Older monitors would have CCFL backlights, and higher end monitors would be IPS or VA LEDs.... – Journeyman Geek – 2016-11-13T14:29:01.887
1@fixer1234 Answer? – wizzwizz4 – 2016-11-13T17:36:56.227
1As others have said, you really can't change the display resolution effectively, as it's built in. What you should do for low vision is to use larger fonts. And of course use a high-contrast color scheme. – jamesqf – 2016-11-13T18:01:25.650