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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Digital cameras have used LCDs with non-square pixels for years, but the problem is that with such an arrangement, you can't get sharp text (or any other fine horizontal/vertical line detail) without things looking blurry or unusually jagged vertically/horizontally. Photography is (mostly) fine because the content is largely smooth gradients.

The red and blue pixels can be used for sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which can improve percieved resolution and rendering accuracy further.

Subpixel AA just makes my eyes water and I feel dizzy after a few minutes, probably because there are no real edges to focus on. I'm probably in the minority, but not the only one who prefers pixel-sharp text.

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If your antialiasing is making things look fuzzy, then you are either positioning yourself too close to the display, or your display has too low resolution.

When you’re talking about digital camera LCDs, do you mean the display on the back of the camera? Those are mostly awful, I just ignore them. :-)

It can also be a display gamma issue, which will be worse at some angles on TN displays.

But beyond that, disabling antialiasing and using a pixel font (like Terminus) gives an effectively higher perceived resolution than one would expect from modeling a display as a collection of point samples.

Isn't your first statement tautological? I'm also in the apparent minority to whom font antialiasing (subpixel or not) on low-ppi screens, e.g., 22" at 1920x1080, seems a bit blurry, even when leaning back. Certainly though, there are implementations of different quality: I find ClearType the most acceptable.

As far as I am aware, I have yet to see non-antialiased fonts rendered on a high-ppi screen, but it would be interesting to see to what degree antialiasing is still necessary on such screens.

Luckily there are now displays with ~22″ diagonal and 3840×2160 pixels.

These look much better than the 1920×1080 ones.

Reminds me of my cow-orker complaining yesterday that when he turned his screen 90 degrees (pivot into "portrait" mode), the text started to look visibly less sharp. I guess that's the problem with subpixel AA and subpixels now being wider than tall.

Depending on the OS, I think screen rotation can sometimes cause it to just give up on subpixel-AA and fall back to "fullpixel" greyscale-AA.

Windows 10 in this case.

Mac os does that.

Ironically, subpixel AA works better at high resolutions than it does at low resolution. Once you can't see individual pixels anymore the blurriness goes away, and you're simply left with finer positioning.

By rotating the grid 45 degrees, the OP mitigates the problem with fine horizontal / vertical line detail.

Can you explain that? My intuitive sense is that that would make fine orthogonal detail worse.

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