Monitor resolutions, bit depths and desktop pictures.
Ever had your monitor go down? Boy isn't that annoying! You know your Mac is running fine but you're worse than blind, a sinking and frustrating feeling sets in because there's nothing you can do if you can't see even your mouse pointer. For the everyday Mac user the monitor IS the Mac and then there's that group that run their Macs without a monitor but that's another story.
For us MacOS interface fans, a monitor, its desktop picture or pattern and startup screen means a lot! This article is not about fixing broken monitors though, its about using them in the best possible way by matching resolutions and color settings.
MINE IS BIGGER!
Monitors come in a few common sizes. Ignoring the specifics of PowerBooks and the old Mac Plus or Classics, desktop monitors tend to be "classed" as 13, 15, 17, 19 and 21 inches. Depending on the make, the viewable area could be different between monitors of the same size. According to a 1996 study by Standford Resources, 17 inch monitors have 23.8% of the market with 15 inch at 39.9% and 13/14 inch at 33.4%. These days with the drop in prices for 17 inch monitors, I suspect the market share are almost equal between the three.
YEAH, BUT I CAN SQUEEZE MORE!
Depending on your Mac's configuration (AV or Audio Video cards etc) the maximum resolution that your monitor can display may vary. Resolution is measured in pixels per inch (ppi) or dots per inch (dpi) because a pixel is the smallest visible dot that you can see on a screen. Mac monitors are 72 dpi which means there are 5184 pixels per square inch of screen real estate. A 13 inch monitor can normally display 640 pixels horizontally and 480 vertically and again, depending on your AV hardware you may get 832 by 624.
You can use the Monitors & Sound Control Panel to change these settings (see the sidebar). With OS 8 the same can be done via your Control Strip. The most common settings are:
- 13 inch: 640 x 480
- 15 inch: 640 x 870 (portrait)
- 17 inch: 832 x 624
- 19 inch: 1024 x 768
- 21 inch: 1152 x 870
Setting your monitor resolution
using the Control Strip.
If you set higher resolutions then your Mac will try to squeeze more pixels in the same physical area. Whatever your comfort level is, there is a limited number of pixels that can be squeezed together i.e. a 13 inch monitor simply cannot display 1024 x 768. For a more graphical representation on the relationship between resolutions and physical monitor sizes, see this article.
EVEN MORE SQUEEZING
By now I hope you realize why those downloadble desktop pictures come in different resolutions. The more thoughtful creative designers will provide all common resolutions but first he or she have got to own the right Mac for the bigger monitors. If he or she owns and works on a PowerBook then you may see an 800 x 600 resolution.
Macs are also versatile enough that if you downloaded a smaller resolution desktop picture than that of your monitor's resolution, you can still display it. This also depends on which software you are using (Desktop Pictures Control Panel, Decor etc).
If you have a mismatch, the results can be anywhere from OK to ugly depending on whether if you're squeezeing a higher resolution desktop picture into a lower resolution monitor setting or stretching a lower resolution desktop picture into a monitor with higher resolution settings.
Moral of the story? Get the right image resolution for your monitor and its setting! Otherwise you'll have to do some work with the different programs that will allow you to crop or enlarge images. |
AND MINE IS COLORFUL
Occasionally you see web pages or Read Me's telling you to set your monitors to thousands of colors or that their image is x many bits. What does this all mean?
A bit is an electronic signal that can be either ON or OFF. If you set your monitor to 1 bit then all you have is two colors: ON for color and OFF for no-color. Conversely, setting your monitor to 16 colors means its working with 4 bits (2 x 2 x 2 x 2), 256 colors with 8 bits and so forth. These bit settings are commonly refered to as Bit Depth. Bit depth for images then tells us how many colors are used in those images.
The following is a list of Bit Depth and their corresponding number of colors:
- 1 bit: 2 colors
- 4 bit: 16 colors
- 8 bit: 256 colors
- 16 bits: 65,536 colors
- 24 bits: 16 million colors.
In general, setting your monitor to "thousands of colors" should suffice for displaying most desktop pictures at their best. For best results its best that you match the image's bit depth to your monitor's settings. Again, this can be done using your Monitors & Sound Control Panel or the Control Strip.
Setting your "bit depth"
using the Control Strip.
 By the way, you might want to try SwitchRes by Stéphane Madrau (shareware $9). I haven't tried it but the features listed looked complete for managing monitor resolutions and more.
TO PICT OR TO JPEG?
GIFs, JPEGs (or JPG) and PICTs are the three typical image formats used for desktop pictures. The objective here is to get great quality images with as small a file size as possible.
GIFs are good for flat-color images such as clip-arts, doodles and cartoon type pictures. GIFs are also limited to 8 bits which usually implies smaller file sizes.
JPEGs are small in size (in terms of bytes) too and is usually used for images that are photographic in nature or those with non-flat colors. JPEGs use a lossy type compression for image information so the trade-off for small file sizes may be the image quality. This is not always true of course because with clever adjustments on the software used to generate JPEG images, losses can be non-evident.
PICTs use lossless compression techniques so the file sizes tend to be very large. If you wish to edit pictures, this is the format you want because everything is there hence the best image quality.
Now go to this related article on hints and tips for managing and displaying your desktop pictures.
| SUMMARY |
• Set your monitor resolution.
• Download the right desktop picture resolutions.
• Look at Bit Depths of desktop pictures.
• Set your monitor colors.
• Match them for best results!
• Use PICT format for editing.
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Monitors & Sound Control Panel
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