Widescreen as Tallscreen

A little-used new feature in the Displays preference pane in OS X 10.4 is rotation in 90-degree increments. I tried this feature out with the 20-inch Cinema Display on my desk. Novel – it took me back to the old grayscale Pivot I wrote so many columns on in the ’90s. A base that handled rotation would make it nicer. Also, the type and other elements onscreen just don’t look as good at 90 degrees – I don’t know if it’s the disparity in vertical and horizontal viewing angles, or maybe a change in anti-aliasing behavior. (Onscreen is top running in Exterminal.)

Fazal Majid commented on Sun Sep 24 00:22:11 2006:

The degradation in quality is probably due to the fact the RGB pixels are now horizontal and not in the orientation the antialiasing algorithm (which does sub-pixel smoothing) expects them to be.

john elemans commented on Sun Sep 24 02:17:03 2006:

I use Viewsonic VP2030b and VP201b in vertical orientations and the results are excellent. It’s great for editing and viewing web pages.