Computer Monitor : Resolution
Monitors are measured in inches, diagonally from side to side (on the screen). A 14-inch monitor only has a 13.2-inch viewable area, a 15-inch sees only 13.8 inches, and a 20-inch will give you 18.8 inches (viewing 85.7% more than a 15-inch screen).
A computer monitor is made of pixels (short for "picture element"). Monitor resolution is measured in pixels, width by height. A pixel is the smallest element of a video image, but not the smallest element of a monitor's screen. Originally, monitors were fixed at a particular resolution, but most monitors today are capable of changing their displayed resolution under software control. Compare a 15-inch monitor and a 21-inch monitor, both set to 800 x 600 pixels: the 15-inch will have a higher resolution. Larger monitors must contain smaller pixels in order to maintain the same resolution, but when a smaller monitor is set to a high resolution, the images would be much too small to read.
Adjusting Resolution
Color
There are 4 standard color depths used by monitors: 4-bit (Standard VGA), 8-bit (256-Color Mode), 16-bit (High Color),and 24-bit (True Color). Each pixel of the screen image is displayed using a combination of three different color signals: red, green, and blue. The more bits that are used per pixel, the finer the color detail of the image. Bit depth is the number of bits in each pixel. Color depth is the maximum number of colors in an image [...]
and is based on the bit depth of the image and of the displaying monitor. A black and white monitor uses 1-bit color depth (2 to the power of 1): black=light off, and white= light on. Each pixel has a bit depth of one and a color depth of two. One bit produces two possible colors. Color monitors use at least 2-bit color, or 2-to-the-2nd power (2x2=4), meaning that 4 shades of color are available for each of the three primary colors (red, blue, and green). 4-bit color (2x2x2x2=16) means that each of the primaries has 16 shades; the greater the bit depth, the more shades for each color. See the chart below for a comparison of bit depth and color resolution. 256-Color Mode: uses only 8 bits (2 bits for blue, 3 for green, 3 for red). A palette is created containing 256 different colors. Despite the ability to "hand pick" the 256 colors, this mode produces noticeably worse image quality than high color, and most people can tell the difference between high color and 256-color mode.
High color: 16-bit color—uses two bytes of information to store the intensity values for the three colors. True color: 24-bit color—three bytes of information are used, one for each of the red, blue, and green signals that make up each pixel. [TheScreamOnline is best viewed with 24-bit color, or millions of colors, though thousands of colors will suffice. On a Mac, go to Control Panels > Monitors (see graphic above under Adjusting Resolution) and set the color depth to thousands or millions of colors if your video card supports it. Lowering the resolution of your screen display may allow you to achieve a greater color depth.
Monitors vs. Browsers
Macintosh monitors display text at 72 dpi (dots-per-inch) and PC's take 96 pixels to show that same text.
Bigger Computer Monitors = More Productivity
Blame your computer screen. A new study finds that bigger monitors make people more productive.
Researchers at the University of Utah tested how quickly people performed tasks like editing a document and copying numbers between spreadsheets while using different computer configurations: one with an 18-inch monitor, one with a 24-inch monitor and with two 20-inch monitors. Their finding: People using the 24-inch screen completed the tasks 52% faster than people who used the 18-inch monitor; people who used the two 20-inch monitors were 44% faster than those with the 18-inch ones. There is an upper limit, however: Productivity dropped off again when people used a 26-inch screen. (The order of the tasks and the order of computer configurations were assigned randomly.)
Check Out My Other post on Laptop Computers
