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9300 Resolution Issues
I recently purchased a new Dell Inspiron 9300 and quicky became disappointed with the image quality when browsing the web. As I am a web developer this is extremely important for me. Here are the specs:
Pentium M 1.86Ghz
512MB Ram
128MB ATI MOBILITY RADEON X300
60GB 7200 RPM HDD
17" 1920 x 1200 Display
I am running @ full resolution (1920x1200), yet all images viewed with IE6 look extremely blocky / Pixelated. I've tried a number of things including changing th DPI from 120 back to 96 but nothing seems to help. I also noticed that Internet Explorer CSS Filters are not rendered very well either and any text on them looks smudged. Many of the sites I work on make extensive use of css filters and this issue makes it very difficult to judge whether the page is rendering correctly. When I access the same pages on my old laptop, the filters and images look fine. My gut tells me it's video driver related, but I guess it could also be something with IE6. I can't find any IE settings besides "Smart image dithering" which doesn't seem to do anything noticable.
I took some screenshots of the Dell homepage and one of my websites. I used photoshop to create hi-res images. Any image quality issues you might notice is exactly what I see @ 1920x1200 and not due to any image compression while creating the screenshots (unless you're viewing this with a 9300 like mine!).
Note how pixelated all of the images look. Now here is the login page of one of my websites:
As you can see, it's all messed up. Notice that the username & password labels & inputs are nice & crisp, but the lightblue background box which uses the css opactiy filter to make it slightly transparent is all smudged. Also the background should look like evenly spaced pin-stripes, but they are all messed up. Here's what it looks like on every other machine I tried it on:
way better! Anyhow, please help.
Thanks,
-Nub
Message Edited by nub340 on 03-18-2005 08:16 PM
Message Edited by nub340 on 03-18-2005 08:17 PM
Message Edited by nub340 on 03-18-2005 08:18 PM
Message Edited by nub340 on 03-18-2005 08:19 PM
Message Edited by nub340 on 03-18-2005 08:20 PM
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Posted March 19th, 2005 05:00
look here, great resource for dell FAQ to be used in parallel with this forumtells how to force IE to stop changing settingsalso download firefox, and it will not change the settingscheers217
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Posted March 19th, 2005 07:00
Thanks for the replies. I figured out what it was. It was in fact the DPI setting in the Display Properties. I failed to restart my computer after changing the DPI to 96 from 120 last time. After trying again and rebooting, it fixed it. This made everything super-tiny and hard to see however, so I kicked the font size up a notch. I'm extremely happy now and am very impressed with the display and graphics card. The ATI handles America's Army @ full res no prob.217
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Posted March 19th, 2005 17:00
Also if you change to Clear type fonts they are alot cleaner too.
Message Edited by jankerson on 03-19-2005 02:44 PM
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Posted March 19th, 2005 22:00
Sweet. Thank you for the update on your situation. I think I'm going to switch my order from the 6800 to the 128MB ATI and save $150 on my new 9300.217
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Posted March 19th, 2005 23:00
How does the TruLife screen handle text, especially when scaled down to 1024x768?217
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Posted March 19th, 2005 23:00
As with any LCD is is best to run it at native Resolution or it will be blurry etc.
ecr72
5 Posts
217
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Posted March 19th, 2005 02:00
I hope you get some good answers to your issues for both of us. I ordered a 9300 with 6800 thinking that was the only card that would give me 1920x1200. Well, the ATI can obviously do 1920x1200 and since I don't play games, the 6800 seems overkill. Especially for $200. I was going to call and downgrade the video card to the 128MB ATI until I read this. Your screen shots worry me quite a bit. I have a feeling it may be a display setting and not the video card but who knows.
I can tell you I had similar problems settign up my current monitor which is an old Compaq TFT8000 on Win2K. I was getting rolling stripes in all my scrool bars and pics were pixilated. I had to run a piece of Compaq s/w with line patterns and make a bunch of monitor adjustments to clear them up. I'm sure LCDs have advanced since this monitor was made and the settings should be optimized already since it is a laptop.
Good luck. I hope it's a simple fix and not a hardware compatibility issue.