How To Check Your Dpi Windows 8
4K display applied science is hither, and if you oasis't seen a 4K display in-person prepare to exist diddled abroad! With products like the 32" Sharp PN-K321 4K Ultra-HD display at present hit the Us market y'all tin can now feel this technology for yourself. These 4K displays aren't inexpensive, but if your budget permits they offer an astonishing picture for professional piece of work or even amusement.
Windows 8.i tri-mon setup from left: Samsung 23" full-HD, Samsung 27" WQHD, Sharp PN-K321 32" Ultra-Hd
While high-resolution displays are amazing they likewise present some practical challenges. When yous increase resolution you inherently decrease the size of each pixel (bold same brandish size). By decreasing the size of each pixel the content shown on the display appears smaller. When display Dots-Per-Inch (DPI) gets sufficiently dumbo this "shrinking effect" can make content hard to encounter and UI targets difficult to click/tap.
Another challenge that is presented with the introduction of ultra-loftier resolution displays is dealing with multi-monday configurations with non-uniform DPI values. For example if you are running two 27" displays with ane at full-Hard disk and one at WQHD the content will not appear at the aforementioned calibration when an app is moved from ane brandish to the other. This is not an ideal user feel.
With the recent proliferation of high-DPI tablets, notebooks, and external displays these high-DPI and DPI scaling issues became an important consideration for Windows eight.1.
Windows 8.1 DPI scaling improvements are primarily focused on:
- Optimizing the usability and readability of high-DPI displays
- Providing a compatible experience multi-brandish systems
- Empowering developers to optimize app-specific scaling based on display DPI
Optimizing for High-DPI in Windows 8.ane
Sometimes facts and figures demand some interpretation before they can be understood. If you're comparing display DPI values betwixt a phone, a tablet, and a desktop display you need to factor in viewing distance. As a quick do I calculated the "effective display DPI" values for my Nokia 920 phone and each of the displays in the tri-mon setup shown higher up. Hither's what I came up with when I calculated a "normalized 1-foot DPI value":
It's interesting to note that my Nokia 920 (held at nine") has the same effective DPI as the 32" Precipitous 4K display (viewed at 22"). You lot tin can't run into the pixels in either display at these distances. On Windows vii and Windows viii I've noticed that some UI is hard to run across at this effective DPI. In addition to being hard to run across, information technology can besides be challenging to interact with UI when using a mouse.
In order to address these calibration/DPI issues, in Window 8.1 the maximum DPI scaling value was increased from 150% to 200%. This additional scaling adequacy provides ii distinct advantages for high-DPI displays on Windows 8.i:
- UI can scale larger which makes readability meliorate and touch/mouse interactions easier.
- 200% scaling enables pixel-doubling for up-scaling which provides a clear and crisp appearance for images, graphics, and text.
For comparison, here'due south what you would see in Windows 8 in the Display command panel under "Appearance and Personalization":
In Windows 8.ane you can run across here that DPI scaling goes upward to 200%:
And so on Window 8.1 your apps will run better on 4K and other high resolution displays. This is good news for anyone running ultra-high resolution displays on Windows. Merely what if you have a multi-mon setup?
Optimizing Multi-Mon DPI Scaling in Windows 8.one
If you are running a screen resolution of 1366×768 on a tablet, chances are that UI will wait proficient at 100% DPI settings. But what most when you connect that tablet to an external loftier resolution display? In Windows eight you tin cull either 100% to optimize the UI on the tablet display or up to 150% to optimize the UI on the external display. Y'all have to compromise.
Windows 8.1 takes care of this effect by supporting per-display DPI scaling. By default, Windows 8.1 will choose the optimum DPI scaling value for each display based on the value chosen for overall scaling in the control panel:
In order to illustrate this characteristic, I adjusted the screen resolution for each of the three displays connected to my Windows eight.1 preview system to exaggerate DPI scaling. This resulted in the following physical display DPI values:
- 23" display: 64 DPI
- 27" display: 81 DPI
- 32" brandish: 140 DPI (native)
To prove you how UI scales with this demo configuration, here'southward a side-past-side view of the Calculator app side-past-side on each display using 100% scaling in the command panel:
Side-past-side overlapping monitor configuration to bear witness relative calibration of UI
Relative scale of calculator app with 100% scaling on all displays (close-upwardly)
This single scaling factor yields different concrete scaling of the UI every bit you can see in the above photograph. With only one scaling factor for all displays you lot have to make a compromise. With the new Windows 8.1 per-display DPI scaling turned on things look different:
Relative scale of calculator app with automated per-brandish DPI scaling (close-up)
If nosotros overlay screenshots of these calc.exe app instances, we tin can see how they are scaled differently at the pixel level:
This translates to a much better user experience when y'all are running multiple displays with non-uniform physical DPI values. This behavior is automated for desktop apps on Windows 8.i, but there are some cases where an app will require cognition of DPI scaling so that app-specific scaling optimizations can be implemented. Windows 8.i has an answer for that likewise!
Enabling Custom DPI-Scaling for Apps in Windows 8.1
At that place are a lot of things apps can do to optimize the user experience for DPI scaling. If we take a photograph editing app equally an example, there are some very important considerations. A photo editing app may want to scale UI elements similar buttons and checkboxes, just not calibration other content. If we consider the prototype viewing surface area of the app it may exist critically important that that portion of the UI non be scaled. If the image viewing surface area of the app was automatically scaled to 200% yous'd never be able to see your photograph at native resolution because it would be pixel doubled. This could be a trouble if the reason you lot bought that 4K display was to see more of your images at native resolution!
Windows 8.1 provides APIs for apps to know what the optimal scaling value is. If you were developing that photo editing app, you could scale the toolbars and chrome based on the optimal scaling value and leave the image viewing surface area at 100% scale. Perfect!
I example of an app that responds to DPI scaling in the Windows eight.1 Preview is IE 11. IE eleven uses the API to determine the optimal zoom level and adjusts it automatically.
Here's a adjacent view of IE xi using the automatic zoom across the 3 displays used for this article:
IE auto-zoom at 100% zoom (left), 150% zoom (heart), 300% zoom (correct)
Notice how IE fills with width of the browser when maximized on each display. If nosotros view a screenshot of all displays nosotros can run across how differently IE is scaled at a pixel level:
Screenshot showing IE at 100% zoom (left), 150% zoom (middle), 300% zoom (right)
If you are running a high resolution brandish or an extreme multi-mon setup Windows 8.1 has some great improvements to wait forward to. I promise you'll try it out!
*Update: There take been some questions about when per-display DPI scaling is used (different DPI scaling values per brandish) and I wanted to add a notation hither to clarify. On Windows 8.ane when you take the "Allow me choose ane scaling level for all my displays" check box checked (not checked by default) one uniform DPI scaling value is used for all displays. If you don't have this checkbox checked (the default behavior), Windows 8.1 will determine the all-time DPI scaling value for each display and use dissever DPI scaling values for each display when needed. See the screenshots in this commodity for more information.
Find me on twitter hither: @GavinGear
Source: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2013/07/15/windows-8-1-dpi-scaling-enhancements/
Posted by: thillsithems.blogspot.com
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