And that's why ClearType sucks...

Huh? ClearType is a very neat tech IMO, that improves font display a lot. Yes, it does mess up screenshots a bit, so what? I know I wouldn't want to miss it. In fact, the screenshot looks very good to me because I'm using my Laptop right now :-)

It's blurred, it's ugly and I don't use it neither on my CRT nor on my LCD.

I love ClearType, but I don't agree with you that AA messes up on CRT's. It's used everywhere, even in games, and if it wasn't there everything would look worse than oldskool C64 graphics!

I didn't say AA sucks. I said ClearType sucks.

FYI, ClearType only works with LCDs. That's because LCD screens have the three different colored points neatly beside each other. So using the three colors seperately, you can get effectively three times the horizontal resolution. Rendering fonts this way gives you LESS blur than normal AA. The fonts will look a bit toned at the sides if you look close, but that's not very distracting IMO. On a CRT, the pixels are displayed in a different way. Using ClearType there will simply look like very bad and colorful AA.

Have you tried fiddling around with the ClearType Tuner?

And I vote for having an smooth font on the logo image too.

<ClearType rant>
If you display the image like it's supposed to be the font looks ok. It's those LC displays that are "broken" (not all of'em! Good ones use optical filters to blur all three components into one pixel). IMHO this ClearType technology affects the wrong stage (rendering stage) which leads to image data that's not device independant anymore. I'm more in favour of filtering the data right before it gets sent to the LC display (G is sent as it is, R and B are translated by 1/3 pixel to the right / left via proper interpolation -- I'm sure this is easily possible through Pixelshaders or something). This way the video card's memory still contains device independant image data and screenshots don't look ugly on a proper display.

I'm really sick of those "sub pixel AA"-screenshots.
</ClearType rant>

Wrong! This is what everybody thinks. But you still have the same amount of samples for R, G, B. The only thing that has changed is that the sample positions differ. You don't gain any resolution by that. If you render a black and white image at 3 times the resolution and deinterleave it into R,G,B,R,G,B, ... each channel can only represent a third of your signal (undersampling) which introduces aliasing and weird rainbow effects.


That pretty much depends on the taste. The toned edges you mentioned is because of the LC displays' reconstruction filter (speaking in terms of D/A conversion) being pretty poor.


On that we agree.

Note: I'm not saying ClearType related strategies are bad in general. I'm well aware of how they work and what they are trying to achieve.

One thing that ClearType does seem to achieve as opposed to the Standard antialiasing is that it kicks in at smaller font sizes. I remember being really excited when Microsoft announced "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts" for Windows 98 but was ultimately not so impressed as only fonts above a certain size would get smoothed i.e. nothing was antialiased most of the time. ClearType (perhaps inadvertantly) fixes that.

I hope this thread is not a nuisance to other HA members, straying a bit off-topic as it is. I for one am learning things I didn't know. If you can bear with me, I have another question to ask.

This Vista Classic screenshot from the Wikipedia article on Windows Vista looks perfect on my display, a NEC MultiSync LCD1970NX with a Super IPS (S-IPS) panel, connected to the digital output of a GeForce 5200FX. All this on XP SP2 with ClearType on.

Is it improper to give a direct link to the ss? I'll remove it if it is.

So, please, help me understand:

• Is some kind of anti-aliasing used there?
• Is this the same as ClearType?

If yes:

• Does the screenshot look bad on CRTs?
• Does the screenshot look bad on LCDs with a different panel technology?

rajas, thanks for suggesting this. I tried it a couple of years ago on some LCDs, but it seemed to me then that the default tuning was always better than the alternatives. I'm going to give it another try. (There is also a freeware tool that is said to do a better job than the MS Power Toy, but I can't remember its name now.)

It looks bad on mine (like any ClearType mode does)

Consider this:

Without ClearType, black on white:



With ClearType



I don't know if this is exactly how Cleartype would be rendered, this is just to show a point. The white background is composed of red, green and blue points. It doesn't make much difference with which it stops. Of course, if each pixel is "filtered" so that the colors are mixed, the corners will look more colored and the effect doesn't look so good, I agree there, but I don't know if or how much this is actually done. The pixels are so small that the colors mix in the eye, and they also shine left and right a bit on the monitor. On my LCD there actually is a very small gap after each RGB, but it's narrower than each R, G and B.

Also, ClearType should not affect image rendering AFAIK. It's only really useful for black/white-ish graphics like fonts.

My 2c on this topic. ClearType is fine if you are using LCD montors but it just looks terrible (blurry and irritating to the eye) on normal CRTs especially if you use high resolutions on a CRT display. I am not sure what is the percentage of of HA users having CRTs and LCDs. However, I am sure there are quite a lot of people (including me) using a CRT monitor. The logo as it is right now is a kind of balance for display on both the types of monitors. Maybe, when LCDs become ubiquitous, the logo can be tweaked. For now, I vote for the the existing logo.

audiomars

Thanks!


This is what I thought up to yesterday. In fact, I thought at first that Gambit's comment ("And that's why ClearType sucks...") was just ironic.

Now I'm really confused. (And supposing this is only an issue of the MS implementation in ClearType, then the screenshot taken with Ubuntu at Post #18 should not look bad...)

I never suggested using ClearType in the logo, and I certainly wouldn't, even if the majority of users was using LCDs. This discussion has nothing to do with the topic anymore. I suggest we either split it off or stop. While it's still part of this thread, I won't post to it anymore, to help end the discussion.

If you have a hi-res CRT you likely have one with a Trinitron layout, the phosphor/mask layout of which closely resembles the RGB subpixel ordering of common LCDs. This means you will see a similar contrast enhancing effect like on LCDs.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to improve the visual quality on those LC displays with the proper strategies. Your examples may look good in its ASCII art visualisation because the letters R, G and B are similarily darkening the area (same colour) whereas the actual diodes emit light with different wavelengths. So, you still have coloured edges like you mentioned.


I see your point. You silently imposed a restriction on your b/w image: Every line of your example contains 3 consecutive pixel elements (R/G/B) that are switched on. You'll agree with me that

will look ugly (only 2 components set). The line's colour will alternate between magenta, yellow and cyan.

The name for that restriction is: band limitation. This is the way to go. You implicitely used a boxcar filter of length 3. From a DSP point of view there are better filters that even get rid of coloured edges under the assumption that the LC displays' reconstruction filter is a good one (which it usually isn't!). But with other filters there'd still be an improvement. A good implementation can look good on such a display.

So, to recap: (1) Yes, I'm aware of all this. (2) Many implementations I've seen suck. (3) There's room for improvement. (4) IMHO fixing this my-display-sucks-problem at such an early stage (rasterization stage) is a bad approach because the data in the V-RAM won't be device independant anymore => screen shots look ugly on most other displays.

I happen do own an LC display that blurs each component of a pixel into one square optically. This type of LC displays is very common nowadays and makes ClearType and the like unnecessary.

Cheers!
Sebastian

Well, the way I see it, it's a personal preference. I prefer to have ClearType on. Infact I even have it on on CRT's as I'm not bothered by the color fringing and appreciate that text at small points get antialiased.

Here's a study done in UT Austin about ClearType. The conclusion was that 32 out of 51 users witnessed improvements in task speed with ClearType on but 19 out of 51 had a negative response. (Looks like gambit and SebastianG fall in the 19 / 51 category ) The study was Microsoft sponsored but I don't think there's a bias in it. Interesting reading.

And as for the font in the logo. I believe it should get some antialiasing simply because the large type font is antialiased too. It'll just look more consistent that way.

You need to distinguish between certain things.
Anti-Aliasing in general is a good idea. ClearType couples AA with partially adjustable inter-channel pixel delays. That's all.

Whether it looks good or not depends on many things.
- Your preferences
- Your display
- The quality if the implementation

I was merely pointing out that
- on my display any inter-channel pixel delay results in colour fringing -- most likely because there's no need to fix flaws of my display with ClearType
- IMHO the technology is used at an too early stage (in terms of the render/display pipeline)
- I don't consider Microsofts ClearType technology to be a good implementation. It's not bad, though. (*)

(* regardless of your display it may produce coloured areas where it shouldn't if done correctly. Try some consecutive lower case L letters with a small fontsize. I get a red tint over here.)

If you believe this article...

http://www.mdsupport.org/library/cvs.html

...then anti-aliasing, clear type, and the kind of Gaussian smoothing introduced by CRTs and some LCD filters are all bad for your eyes when reading text.

Interesting thread though - I'd never looked that closely at my LCD monitor before!

Cheers,
David.

Well, get this: I use ClearType on a CRT. I have perfect eyesight, yet it looks fine to me.

Get this: This is how ClearTypes renders filenames in my explorer.

The 'illi' part is clearly red -- not just a bit coloured with blue in there as well to compensate for it.
This is due to aliasing. Believe it or not.
Anyhow, I find it annoying.

Try to adjust the contrast setting with Microsoft's ClearType Tuning powertoy.

Every once and a while I'll try turning ClearType on at home (17" CRT, desktop normally at 1024x768, 75 Hz) and every time I end up turning it off because it literally makes me nauseous after a while! The "standard" font smoothing mode, like rajas pointed out, is almost useless, only smoothing really big and really tiny fonts.

since we're all posting how ClearType looks on our comps, here's mine.



i also used the ClearType tuner

Yeah, I used that and set it at the blackest setting. Looks much better and I can even ABX them at 128kbps!



Still has a definitive shade of black. Yay.

Believe it or not, I actually like the look of cleartype on CRTs (because of the small font antialiasing)
Not that it matters to me anymore — I'm on an LCD now.
Discoloration is not really a big issue for me : I actually like the red tint that cleartype gives to small characters, sometimes. Relieves me of my black-and-white theming

Hey, same here! I also like to use ClearType on CRTs...

Unfortunately turning on ClearType somehow bollixes the display of Arial Unicode MS, so I stopped using it...

Oh well, life's unfair...

You guys apparently ignored me saying that I use ClearType on my CRT (which is the only monitor I have)

I've also been known to use ClearType on CRTs from time to time. I must just like the distortion or something. I guess it's kind of like vinyl junkies preferring their old, antiquated, distorted format.

bollixes?

half-edit : ah : found it : http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bollix
how is the display jumbled with cleartype?

I am in complete agreement.

I turned it on when I first saw the option years ago, to see what it did. They should have called it "Blurry Type" instead of "Clear Type". Running the native resolution on my LCD, it was so blurry it hurt my eyes.

For reasons unknown, Arial Unicode MS becomes wider and rounder when ClearType is on.

I personally use ClearType for my LCDs. But I remembered a little trick... if you use the Magnifier powertoy, it will disable ClearType when the Magnifier is active. Just a fast way to temporarily disable it if you need to. Plus... Magnifier...

Hey, this is strange. I just enabled ClearType for... some reasons ... and Arial Unicode MS is no longer maimed!

Weird...