05-21-2011, 11:52 PM

I have the 27" iMac and I was wondering if anyone can tell me if it's possible to increase the screen image size without messing with the screen resolution? I guess I'm not understanding something because I figured by getting the 27" screen, I'd be able to have all the images and text, etc look bigger but still maintain the quality of higher resolution.

I changed the resolution to some of the lower resolutions for the screen and it increased the screen image sizes but it seems that it did it at the expense of the quality of the screen image.

Can someone tell me if there's a way to make everything that I open on the screen bigger without reducing the quality of the image? Right now, the setting is at 2560 x 1440. I tried 1920 x 1200, 1920 x 1080, and 1680 x 1050. The best out of these was 1920 x 1080 which I believe is the resolution of the 21.5" iMac model.

Thanks.

05-22-2011, 01:17 AM

Yes, this is an issue, and there's no good answer for it. Changing resolutions on an LCD to anything other than the native resolution is going to make things blurry, as on-screen pixels are stretched across actual hardware pixels.

Oddly, things are slightly larger on-screen with the 21.5" iMac than the 27" iMac, since the resolution on the 27" iMac is larger out of proportion with the actual screen size. But not by much.

Many apps (including all web browsers, and almost all word processors) have a "zoom" function that zooms a page with minimum blurring. Usually that's in the View menu somewhere. But that only works within the one app.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density

05-22-2011, 08:00 AM

What you need is resolution independance,(one of the few things i miss from windows) i.e. being able to increase ont size without losing the sharpness and clarity. Unfortunately SL doesnt support this, but LION will, so the rumours go

05-22-2011, 08:35 AM

Go "old school" and get a CRT monitor.

- Nick

05-22-2011, 10:57 PM

Here's something that will help in Safari:

1. In preferences, Appearance, set the font size to something comfortable.
2. In Advanced, set the minimum font size to something a bit larger (don't go overboard).

Finally, if you're on a page that insists on using a tiny font or is just generally cluttery, there's a couple of other things that can help:

First, look in the address bar to see if the word "Reader" appears at the end of the URL. If so, click on it.

If that doesn't work or isn't available, you can go under the View menu and zoom the entire page (without losing sharpness) or zoom just the text.

03-24-2013, 09:53 AM

Am I missing something or are you over thinking this . Press control on your keyboard and roll your finger forward or backward on your mouse to change the picture size.

03-24-2013, 10:24 AM

Originally Posted by ever95

Am I missing something or are you over thinking this . Press control on your keyboard and roll your finger forward or backward on your mouse to change the picture size.

Yes you are sort of missing something. What you are describing is the "zoom in" and "zoom out" feature. This is great for temporary purposes...but not for working 100% of the time.

The original poster of the thread wants to increase/magnify the size of things on the display...but not lose display sharpness. Even if they did as you suggested...if you zoom in far enough...things start getting fuzzy. This is not what the OP was looking for.

- Nick

p.s. This is also an almost 2 year-old thread. I'm guessing that the OP has figured things out by now!