Multiple Display Scaling is Blurry

Hi Andrew,

This is by design. The update adds a new, higher dots-per-inch (DPI) setting of 250 percent for Ultra High Definition screens. This changes the settings options from four different DPI levels to five. Depending on your settings, the DPI settings may be set one level higher after the update than they were previously.

See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2957105/en-us

Hope it helps. Get back to us for any issues related to Windows. We will be happy to help you.

Hello,

I know what you mean about the update switching my system from 200% to 250%, however this is not the problem. I switched it back to 200% before I bought the external display and even after I plugged-in the external display, the internal display is definitely still at 200%. The external display is also definitely at 100% because the size of text, icons etc is the same as when setting all displays to 100%.

If you look at the comparison screenshots of the external display, the screenshot where all displays are at 100% is sharp, but the screenshot where the internal display is at 200% and the external display is at 100% is unusably blurry. The result is that the external display is useless when using per-display scaling.

If this is how Windows per-display scaling has been designed to work I am going to have to return the monitor.

Andrew

Thank you for the response. I would suggest you to post your query in TechNet Forums. Here is the link: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/home?category=w8itpro&filter=alltypes&sort=lastpostdesc

Hope it helps.

Hi thanks for the suggestion,

I already have posted to TechNet in the hope there may be others with similar setups. However it looks like this is how per-display scaling in Windows 8.1 has been designed unfortunately. Microsoft need to change it in my opinion.

Andrew

This is due to display scaling.  On your primary monitor, windows has to double everything to make it appear a reasonable size.  On your side monitor, windows has to keep everything it's original size.  It splits the difference by doing some uneven divisions which makes things look blurry.

To fix, set the laptop resolution to something you can live with - 1600x900 or 1920x1080, and on "Make text or other items larger or smaller", set the scaling to its lowest level.  You'll probably have to log out and log back in before things look good.

You can go back to the native 3200 res when you aren't plugged in to an external monitor.  Again, it usually takes logging out and logging back in before things look good.

Of course, reducing any display to a non-native resolution renders the whole idea of multiple-display scaling pointless. I found the best workaround was to set all displays to 100% when using multiple displays, I even created a script with AutoHotKeys to automate changing the resolution between 3200x1800@200% and 1600x900@100% and then sign-out to help make the process more fluid. It's crazy that even when using a nice round display scaling of 200%, the results are still unusable on the 100% display.

It's stupifying that Microsoft have implemented multiple-display scaling in such a poor way. They should just have not bothered. In fact it's very misleading to say they provide multiple-display scaling when actually it's just bitmap crunching, leading to unusable results.