Saturday, July 18, 2009

Blurry text disease strikes again

A little while ago I wrote about how the Windows 7 RC jump lists are affected by such a problem. I decided to install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and to my horror, it has also been struck by this illness in several places. Apparently something to do with that thing called WPF. Have a look at this over-sized blown up comparison of the main menu between VS2008 (top) and VS2010 Beta 1 (bottom):

Link to comparison screenshots

Look at that N, p and r! The Intellisense drop-downs are also quite bad.

How anyone can think that is remotely acceptable is beyond me, though apparently they are going to fix the Visual Studio problem for Beta 2.

Dan K kindly blew up my Windows 7 RC screenshot, and as you can see the problem is not nearly as bad there: http://shots.kordix.com/20090714_1.png. Still not great, though. Seems like they might have fixed the Windows 7 issue in builds after the RC, but the real test will be when the final version is out and installed here...

2 comments:

nagnatron said...

There is WPF Cleartype and GDI Cleartype. What Windows 7 uses by default is the GDI one. It is much sharper because it aggressively hints the fonts. On higher dpi screens the WPF one becomes a much better solution because it has a lot more respect to the original shape of the fonts. I love how the WPF one looks. My screens DPI is 129.

Unknown said...

why does win7 use color pixels on a b/w font to smooth it out? It really bugs me. Even in games now there is a red/green blur unlike vista. I have a ati 4850 w/latest drivers :(