> Is this not the case with other monitors that advertise different
> resolutions at different refresh rates? The Dell seems like it would
> be perfect for such tasks as web authoring because I could set
> resolution down to something more likely to be right for the majority
> of viewers, in the 1024 to 728 range, which is the resolution my
> current site was written at.
Basically, the problem you're hitting is that LCD monitors are
fundamentally digital and CRT monitors are fundamentally analog.
If you look at both of them up close, you'll see a pattern of tiny
dots; phosphor on the back of the CRT for old-school monitors, LCD
elements on newer ones.
The reason that CRTs handle different resolutions better is that they
get lit up by a beam (okay, 3, but let's pretend we're in black and
white for now) of electrons whizzing back and forth, and the beam
changes intensity as the pixels change. The maximum resolution is
determined by how fast the electronics can change the intensity of the
beam, but the maximum _useful_ resolution is determined by the number of
little dots of phosphor.
Here's the tricky part -- if you want to run a CRT monitor at a lower
resolution than it's maximum, all that it does is slow down the speed
with which it changes the beam intensity. That means that one pixel will
smear over multiple phosphor dots -- if you look up very very close, you
can sort of see this happening, but in general it's not a problem.
Now, with LCD monitors, there's a bunch of pixels, and they're either
on or off; there's no beam flying around. This means if you have a
3000-wide screen, and you want to display a 2000-wide image on there,
there's no way to say "every image pixel gets 1 1/2 pixels horizontally"
(at least, not in any monitor I've seen). So the monitor has to
alternately give each image pixel 2 and 1 screen pixel, which is why you
get the awful scaling effect. (some screens won't even do this, you just
get the 2000-wide image on the center 2000 pixels of the screen).
If you want to test web sites at different sizes, you can use
something like http://www.wpdfd.com/restest.htm
-- dan
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