10 Foot experience

I have my computer in my living room and displayed on a 47 inch Philips 1080P LCD TV as a HTPC. I am having problems getting good settings for viewing from afar.

I have tried setting it to 1080 resolution (everything too small) then increasing Font up to 150%. Works OK, but text is extremely sharp and often unreadable. Also not all windows/programs increase to 150% and are unreadable.

Tried 1280 by 768 resolution at 125% font size. Things are a little blurry and stretched, but best for text and windows fitting.

Currently trying 720 resolution 125% font increase. Text is too sharp again. Also with increasing font size many un-resizeable windows do not fit properly on screen. See attachment on how window cuts bottom off.

Does anyone have any suggestions on good settings, or what I think I need. It would be nice to be able to use the 720 resolution with no increase of font size. and just use a theme that is bigger. I don't know if this would work or not. I would also need to change the font to something bigger, not just magnify it.

I am really not sure how to do all thins though. any help would be appreciated.

Well I can tell you that the issue of oversharpeness is a problem with the way your TV is set up.

TVs all ship with the sharpness set way too high to compensate for the worst of the blurry non HD signals.

If your TV sharpness can be set by input, merely reduce it on the TV itself. If not, get one odf the nice TV tuning DVDs out there and set the sharpness according to it's instructions. Your DVDs and HD channels will look better too (though SD may be "blurrier" that you are used to).

Also you probably notice the whites being overly blinding and possibly blooming over the text. The contrast/brightness also suffers from the "WOW!" settings that TVs normally ship with. The tuning DVD can help with that.

In lieu of that, remember that brightness controls the black level and contrast controls the white level :)

Id say manually up your fonts.

r-click desktop>Personalisation>Window Colour> advanced settings

a really old school window opens and it has a combo box with like 20 options in there - its tedious but keep the 1080 res and put your fonts upto something like 24pt?

Thank both of you for your help. I adjusted the TV and it helped. Contrast was 100 I lowered it to 50. Not perfect, but better. I will play with it.

Those were the settings that I was looking for. I will work with it. If anyone has gone through them and has good recommendations I would like them. If not I will try and post what I came up with.

hmmm...

One question? Did you try the cleartype setting wizard?

Control Panel -> Display -> Adjust ClearType text

I'm not sure why you're having problems reading your fonts unless you have really bad eyes?

Always set the PC to your LCD's native resolution.

Go to Display settings and adjust the font to 150%

I have this running on a 47" LCD sitting from 10ft away with no problem reading. Depending on what you're trying to do, some programs don't adapt to this very well.

dannieboiz said:

I'm not sure why you're having problems reading your fonts unless you have really bad eyes?

Always set the PC to your LCD's native resolution.

Go to Display settings and adjust the font to 150%

I have this running on a 47" LCD sitting from 10ft away with no problem reading. Depending on what you're trying to do, some programs don't adapt to this very well.

I have very good eyes. I am about 13 to 15 feet away. If I set the font at 150% almost every program does not adapt well. I have been playing with this excessively the last few days. I am beginning to think that until Microsoft comes out with a 10foot setting, it is what it is. Right now I am at 720 resolution and 115% font, redid Clear type and all windows fit, and font is readable, just small.

that's strange, what program are you using that's not adapting? I use mine mainly for HTPC but I do a lot of browsing on it with no problem.

Try to set your PC to 1920x1080 res. to match your LCD. 720p isn't your native resolution, which could be the problem.

I'm not sure if there's a difference, but what I set is the DPI to 150% been doing this since XP without a problem. If anything Window 7 gave me a much betteer experience with this setting. I leave everything default, no messing around with clear type or anything. I did have some issues with Xp and Vista adapting some programs to this, but I don't recall having any issues at all with 7 for the last few months.

Are you using DVI or HDMI to connect to the monitor? Do have you access to more then one interface one your video card? Can you try a different type of interface to see if you get a different result?