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Snapshots California Harbor, May 2009 Nikon D700 photo, Nikon 28-200 f3.5-5.6 G zoom lens. Click to enlarge: 1200 x 1500 pixels, 627 KB Click to enlarge: full size 8x10 crop 2832 x 3240 2.2 MB Male Emu on a stroll with his chicks on a Texas ranch. Nikon D3 photo, Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR zoom lens. Click to enlarge: 1200 x 1500 pixels, 708 KB Emus are large, flightless birds native to the grassy plains and open forests in Australia. They can reach a height of up to 6 feet tall and a weight of up to 120 pounds. The male Emu is in charge of incubating the eggs and raising the young, guarding the chicks and teaching them the ways of the world for up to 18 months. Raw files converted with Nikon's Capture NX 2 software, finish sharpening done in Adobe Photoshop with Lonestardigital's Texas 2-Step Sharpening Action. The Texas 2-Step Easy to use free Universal Sharpening Action for Photoshop 5, 6, 7, CS, CS2, CS3, and CS4 that extracts the fine details in your pictures with unmatched smoothness & clarity. Read all about it here ... LCD Monitors - Get the best image quality with maximum native screen resolution. LCD Flat Panel Monitors & Laptop Computer Screens need to be run at maximum native resolution to display images, text, and graphics at their best. In many cases, what people consider to be a poor quality LCD monitor or laptop screen is simply the result of using less than maximum (also called full) native resolution. What is Native Resolution? All LCD screens are built with a fixed quantity and size of display pixels. This fixed quantity & size of pixels is called native resolution. Different sizes of LCD screens have different native resolutions. Generally speaking, the larger the screen, the higher the native resolution. Native resolution is the maximum resolution an LCD screen can display. In other words, a 1600 x 1200 resolution LCD monitor cannot display anything greater than 1600 x 1200 pixels. How do you know what your LCD screen's native resolution is? If you don't have the monitor's documentation available, you can run a system diagnostic program like Everest Ultimate Edition. Free download / free trial version available at their site. Important: The term "Native Resolution" applies only to LCD screens, it does not apply to CRT monitors. There is no fixed resolution on CRT monitors. A CRT monitor can project a variety of different resolutions onto its blank display screen, similar to how a movie or slide projector works. Your video card has the ability to display less than maximum native resolution on an LCD screen, but you really shouldn't do it. Because video cards are not specifically designated for just LCD or just CRT use, they can work on either type of monitor. A video card can display a lower screen resolution than the LCD's built-in native resolution, but it's not a good idea. That's because lower screen resolutions degrade image quality when scaled to fill a screen using less than native resolution. Example: A grid representing a 20" LCD panel's 1600 x 1200 pixel native resolution screen. Let's say you decide to reduce the screen resolution to 1280 x 960 pixels because you like the look of larger images, text, and icons. 1280 x 960 pixels actually cover an area like this. The LCD's fixed-pixel display automatically scales up the lower screen resolution it to fit onto its 1600 x 1200 native resolution screen. The enlarged 1280 x 960 pixels now cover the full screen. Yes, images, text, and icons will look bigger. But the scaled pixels are mismatched in size with the actual screen pixels. Red grid: Scaled display pixels. Black grid: Actual screen pixels. The scaling mismatch causes losses in image sharpness, poor text quality, and / or edge color fringing. Below: An extreme example of blurred, broken, & artifacted text caused by resolution scaling. The loss of display quality by running mismatched resolutions on an LCD screen can be minimal depending on your choice of settings, but it's definitely something you need to be aware of. For example, I originally set up my wife's Dell 2007FP LCD monitor with her preferred display setting of 1280 x 960. She liked the way the text, fonts, and icon sizes looked at that resolution ... and everything seemed to be great. If I didn't know better, we both would have been satisfied with the display quality as it was. But when I changed the display setting to match the screen's native resolution of 1600 x 1200 so I could show her what she was missing out on, the improvement was obvious. Text, fonts, and icons were smaller than she liked but the overall display quality became virtually perfect. So I bumped up the text, font, and icon sizes one notch and now we're both happy. The Bottom Line: Always match your screen output resolution with your LCD panel's maximum native resolution. A good MVA, PVA, or IPS panel LCD monitor set at full native resolution can deliver image and text quality that's equal to or better than a good CRT monitor. IPS panels are considered by professionals to be the best. Typical Desktop Computer LCD Monitor Native Resolutions Nearly all makes & models of desktop flat screens fit these specifications. Screen Size Aspect Ratio Native Resolution 15” Standard 4:3 1024 x 768 pixels 17” Standard 5:4 1280 x 1024 pixels 17" Widescreen 15:9 1280 x 768 pixels 18” Standard 5:4 1280 x 1024 pixels 19” Standard 5:4 1280 x 1024 pixels 19” Widescreen 16:10 1440 x 900 pixels 20” Standard 4:3 1600 x 1200 pixels 20” Widescreen 16:10 1680 x 1050 pixels 21” Standard 4:3 1600 x 1200 pixels 21" Widescreen 16:10 1680 x 1050 pixels 22" Widescreen 16:10 1680 x 1050 pixels 23" Widescreen 16:10 1920 x 1200 pixels 24” Widescreen 16:10 1920 x 1200 pixels 26" Widescreen 16:10 1920 x 1200 pixels 27" Widescreen 16:10 1920 x 1200 pixels 28" Widescreen 16:10 1920 x1200 pixels 30" Widescreen 16:10 2560 x 1600 pixels Laptop Computers Laptop screens are subject to the same rules of matching native resolution as desktop flat screen monitors. As shown in the chart below, laptops often have large native resolution variances within the same screen sizes depending on make & model. If you're thinking about buying a laptop for photography use, remember that the higher native resolutions produce the best image display qualities. As with desktop LCD panels, for best results you should set your laptop's screen resolution to match its maximum native resolution. Screen Size Aspect Ratio Native Resolution 12” Standard 4:3 4:3 4:3 *800 X 600 pixels *1024 x 768 pixels *1400 x 1050 pixels 12” Widescreen 16:10 1280 x 800 pixels 13” Standard 4:3 4:3 *800 x 600 pixels *1024 x 768 pixels 13” Widescreen 16:10 1280 x 800 pixels 14" Standard* 4:3 4:3 *1024 x 768 pixels *1400 x 1050 pixels* 14” Widescreen 15:9 16:10 16:10 *1280 x 768 pixels *1280 x 800 pixels* *1440 x 900 pixels* 15” Standard 4:3 4:3 4:3 5:4 3:2 3:2 *1400 x 1050 pixels *1024 x 768 pixels *1600 x 1200 pixels *1280 x 1024 pixels *1152 x 768 pixels *1280 x 864 pixels 15” Widescreen 16:10 16:10 16:10 16:10 *1280 x 800 pixels *1440 x 900 pixels *1680 x 1050 pixels *1920 x 1200 pixels 16” Standard 5:4 1280 x 1024 pixels 17” Widescreen 16:10 16:10 16:10 *1440 x 900 pixels *1680 x 1050 pixels *1920 x 1200 pixels *Native Resolutions vary by make & model How do you match your video card's screen resolution with your LCD panel's native resolution? 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