External monitor and DPI

[WTFH]

4K is so last year...


http://www.canon.com/news/2015/sep08e2.html
(yesterday they announced a 250MP camera, today it's an 8K screen & cinema camera)

[VectraMan]

Bump.

So I now have a Dell M3800 with 3200x1800 screen. And very nice it is too.

Predictably Windows 7 was hopeless; exactly as I thought: with the DPI set higher so you could read it on the laptop screen anything on the external monitor was ridiculously large, and vice versa. The only thing you could do is run the laptop screen at half the resolution, and then although it was usable the text quality wasn't great. At 3200x1800 it's so sharp it's almost unholy.

Windows 10 does it 99% right. Dragging from one monitor to the other and the window is too large/small for a moment then it sorts itself out. The only flaw I've found is that tooltips in Explorer on the external monitor are twice the size they should be. It worked all this out by default too; I didn't have to do anything complicated to set it up.

[VectraMan]

In case anyone is listening it's not all smooth sailing.

One problem is VS2005 which I need to run for some old software. All the text comes out ridiculously large and so is completely unusable. VS2010 works, but the text is blurry on the external monitor. Obviously it's rendering at double the resolution and then scaling it back.

The only ways I've found around these problems is to set the external monitor to be the primary, or reduce the resolution of the laptop screen. Doing the former means that in Chrome on the laptop you lose the sharpness of the text - obviously it's just taking it's cues from the primary display and not rendering according to the monitor it's on. The new IE does it right - yaay for Microsoft.

And the other big offender I've found is Paint.NET. Which mostly works until you bring up a dialog and the text is either unreadable small, or double the size and it's a mess. It's almost like they're scaling it the wrong way.

You can forgive legacy stuff like VS2005, but you expect better from Chrome.