Thursday, January 20, 2005
Screen Resolution
Most people think of resolution in terms of photographs or television. In those media, resolution indicates picture sharpness. In the computer world however, screen resolution refers to the dimensions of the pixels displayed on a screen. Your computer may have come preset to a resolution of 640 X 480 pixels. That means that your monitor will display a screen that is 640 pixels wide and 480 pixels high regardless of whether you have a 15, 17 or 19-inch monitor. The size of the monitor does not determine the screen resolution. But the bigger the monitor, the larger the screen resolution you can use. Try it for yourself.
If you have a 14 or 15-inch monitor, switch the resolution from 640 X 480 to 800 X 600 and to 1024 X 768 if your video card supports it. You will quickly see that everything gets smaller as the resolution increases. That's because the monitor is displaying a larger number of pixels in the same screen space. Most people find everything is too small at 1024 X 768 on a 14-inch monitor, but on a 17-inch monitor you'll have additional screen real estate.
Ideally, when viewing web pages, you want as large a resolution as you can get. The larger the resolution, the more of a page fits on the screen. Since many web pages are too large to fit on one screen, a larger resolution allows you to see more of a page. We suggest using a resolution of 800 X 600 if you have a 14 or 15-inch monitor, and a resolution of 1024 X 768 for 17-inch and larger monitors.
Changing the Resolution
For Windows users, from the Start menu, select Settings, then open the Control Panel folder. Now double-click on the Display icon, then click on the Settings tab to see the current screen resolution.
Change the resolution to the largest you can: 1024 X 768 if you have a 17-inch or larger monitor; 800 X 600 for a smaller monitor.
Screen Colors
The number of colors is also important. Unless you are working with professional graphics and photography and have a computer loaded with memory, avoid using 16 million colors. The best practical resolution to use on the Web is 64,000 colors (High Color-16 bit setting). You get near photographic quality and you'll find many web graphics, like those on Learn the Net, look much better than when your monitor is set to only 256 colors. The Web becomes more visually exciting when you surf at thousands of colors.
