by Pedro Pacheco

Created on: April 08, 2009

The computer monitor needs several adjustments to work perfectly, with great images, nice contrast and not hurting your eyes too much.

Let's start with the monitor resolution. The bigger the better generally. I always use 1600x1200 on non wide screens. This is the resolution that makes me read all the characters the best and still maintains all other icons very big, big enough for me not to have to force my eyes to read them. In wide screens specially on laptops I always use the biggest one the computer is able to make. The bigger the better all the time.

Another very important thing is to have a monitor that is able to support at least 60 hz or more. This is the number of times the image on your computer is refreshed. The average human eye is able to see about 24 images per second. Any refresh faster than this will make the image static like you see on this screen now. The image is not static but instead it's always being refreshed. You just can't see it. Also the faster your screen refreshes the better your videos and games will look. Try to get a screen that supports 75 hz. You will feel the difference.

LCD monitors need faster refreshes than CRT monitors need because of their operation method. They should always be set to work at 120 hz or more but I know most monitors will only work at 60 hz. That's why sometimes you see such a bad image quality on it...

The color depth is also very important. Your monitor should support at least 32 bit color because this means about billions of colors in your monitor. Of course your eyes are not able to see them all and it's enough to have for them the True Color standard which means 24 bit color. More than this is useless.

The graphic card plays a very important role in the computer monitor seetings too it's the graphic card that will decide which image it will have, else it will have no image. The graphic card is what will control the monitor, I already wrote about this in a previous article. It's very important to have the latest drives in the graphic card. If you have either Nvidia or ATI you can get the latest ones from their website. The latest drivers will allow you to have more color quality more stability but most of all you will have a lot more resolutions to choose from and much faster refresh rates, not to mention it's always good to upgrade your graphic card driver all the time to the latest ones because if you do not do it then why is the company releasing them?

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