Text display weirdness - chromasubsampling madness

[philehidiot]

Okay, so this is pathetic and weird but also very technical and annoying. Text appears just fine on my monitor except for when I'm in Windows control panel where just appears scraggy. Now I'm guessing that this is due to Windows colour management and specfically chromasubsampling where they're displaying stuff like text using 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 whereas text really does need 4:4:4. Now I'm wondering if this is due to the bandwidth of the HDMI connector I'm using and so changing it to a DP connector might stop Windows cutting down on the colour information and leading to scraggy text? To be blunt I don't think there IS a bandwidth issue, but I'm thinking that Windows just knocks the compression down to a lower quality by default on HDMI?

Any ideas? Or am I totally on the wrong path?

[EndlessWaves]

A bit late but I've never heard of Windows using chroma sub-sampling for text. Are you getting it mixed up with chroma anti-aliasing (aka Cleartype)?

Cleartype is nothing to do with bandwidth and doesn't save any. It's about about blurring (sorry, smoothing) the edges of text for a more paper-like look.

Are you talking about the old control panel, or the new settings panel - assuming you're on Windows 10.

Windows does use a mix of font smoothing technology these days, so depending on what your settings are and where exactly you're looking it may be font smoothing on vs. off, or greyscale vs. cleartype anti-aliasing.

[philehidiot]

What's odd is that the text in this part of control panel just doesn't respond to any clear type changes which made me think it's perhaps treating it as an image and therefore being affected by chroma subsampling? Yes it's windows 10 and the new thing.

It's not a problem so much as weirdness.

[EndlessWaves]

The Windows Settings panel doesn't use cleartype, but greyscale anti-aliasing.

A lot of the new elements and apps do, to accommodate the growing number of devices where cleartype doesn't work. That can be tablets and convertibles used in both portrait and landscape modes, or screens like OLEDs with unusual subpixel layouts.

Plus there are issues with cleartype and overlays: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/old...29-00/?p=44803

It does mean it looks fairly scraggly on a normal 96dpi desktop monitor, here what mine looks like:
Real size:

Scaled up:


That's an image so if it looks the same as yours you'll know it's nothing to do with Windows settings. You may still have other issues caused by the monitor and it's connection but without a high quality photo it's hard to judge.

I just wish the HiDPI desktop monitors would fall in price a bit quicker. LG's 5120x2160 model is on the verge of release finally, but looks as if it'll be the wrong side of £1000.

[philehidiot]

Ah right, yeh I can see how on OLEDs that might be an issue.

Yeh that's pretty much what mine looks like - scraggly.

It's quite impressive that in something so simple we seem to have taken steps backwards.