So here is my question, how does ClearType work on those BUILD tablets?

-Josh 

i would love to start seeing desktop displays get the kind of dpi that the new ipad has.

the new ipad is about 260 ppi / dpi    most desktop displays are anywhere from 78 to 96 ppi

laptops tend to get 100 to 140

From http://mobile.osnews.com/story.php/25710/ClearType_dialled_back_in_Windows_8_s_Metro

As Long Zheng found out, though, ClearType as a whole isn't missing - only its most defining feature is not available: subpixel RGB optimisation. This technique uses the subpixels in LCD displays to improve glyph rendering, but by using only the red, green, and blue subpixels, this causes the edges of characters to display tiny coloured fringes. Some people find these coloured fringes incredibly annoying.

Without this technique, ClearType is reduced to more basic grayscale rendering, which produces - in my view - sub-optimal rendering. However, unlike what I initially assumed, this is not the same as the kind of shape-accurate rendering Apple employs.

Where's your bits on the differential display on tablets vs. everything else? Is there going to be a W8 tablet edition?

3 hours ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

I'm confused? Sinofsky said at Build that there was 450 million W7 PC that were W8 ready. Does that mean they're all getting denser LCD displays included with their upgrade to W8? A big LCD panel giveaway? IMO Microsoft is saying "F the old PCs. Just deal with it". Microsoft is counting on the fact that PCs will keep selling and those PC will always ship with the latest version of Windows no matter how badly they cripple it.

Just because older W7 PC spec hardware is capable of running W8, doesn't preclude the introduction of newer W8 spec hardware which will be even better. Indeed W8 goes out of it's way to adapt to older hardware in more ways than just cleartype and high dpi support, such as enabling special support for the less sensitive touch displays found in W7 devices.

41 minutes ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

Where's your bits on the differential display on tablets vs. everything else? Is there going to be a W8 tablet edition?

I was just remembering a discussion I had with one of the Win32k team at MS, but it was a long time ago. Lots of people on the Internet are claiming that cleartype is off in Metro, but it's also clear that it's on in IE10 (which is Win8 only). So I don't know. It's not all there, but it's not all gone either.

40 minutes ago, AndyC wrote

*snip*

Just because older W7 PC spec hardware is capable of running W8, doesn't preclude the introduction of newer W8 spec hardware which will be even better. Indeed W8 goes out of it's way to adapt to older hardware in more ways than just cleartype and high dpi support, such as enabling special support for the less sensitive touch displays found in W7 devices.

Introduction of something better? How's that when it displays make my text less readable in W8? So what you're saying is I should forgive Microsoft for reducing text clarity on my desktop's lower dpi displays when running Windows 8 because they were so gracious to accommodate my hardware in other ways? What happened to "No Compromises"? Did Sinofsky lie?

6 minutes ago, evildictaitor wrote

*snip*

I was just remembering a discussion I had with one of the Win32k team at MS, but it was a long time ago. Lots of people on the Internet are claiming that cleartype is off in Metro, but it's also clear that it's on in IE10 (which is Win8 only). So I don't know. It's not all there, but it's not all gone either.

That's a little different than stating it will be only off in tablets. I'm glad we can both agree Microsoft is implementing a less capable version of ClearType in W8 across the board.

And for the record all of my displays do not rotate to portrait.

Sounds like Microsoft is saying "since we can't do ClearType right on tablets let's just not do it right everywhere else". Yeah Microsoft!

-Josh

1 day ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

*snip*

Introduction of something better? How's that when it displays make my text less readable in W8? So what you're saying is I should forgive Microsoft for reducing text clarity on my desktop's lower dpi displays when running Windows 8 because they were so gracious to accommodate my hardware in other ways? What happened to "No Compromises"? Did Sinofsky lie?

Text won't be any less readable, Cleartype for desktop applications works exactly as it always has, regardless of how high a dpi display you have. It's only in Metro applications that they appear to have removed the sub-pixel rgb optimsations. Presumably that's because Metro tends to use larger fonts and large areas of flat colour, which reduces the need and benefits of doing so.

It's all academic in portrait mode anyway, since the orientation of the display pixels isn't suitable for Cleartype's RGB tricks anyway, so there is nothing to gain there.

2 hours ago, AndyC wrote

*snip*

Text won't be any less readable, Cleartype for desktop applications works exactly as it always has, regardless of how high a dpi display you have. It's only in Metro applications that they appear to have removed the sub-pixel rgb optimsations. Presumably that's because Metro tends to use larger fonts and large areas of flat colour, which reduces the need and benefits of doing so.

It's all academic in portrait mode anyway, since the orientation of the display pixels isn't suitable for Cleartype's RGB tricks anyway, so there is nothing to gain there.

Portrait is understandably a moot point.

Still text in article I read in the metro news reader, or the browser, etc. will be more jaggy than when read in the desktop counterpart (if there is a desktop counterpart -- if Microsoft is successful with metro there won't necessarily be a desktop app).

The font renderer should have enough know-how to determine that A) I have black text on a white background and B) that my subpixels are orientated either vertically or horizontally, and finally produce the best possible output. Anything less seems lazy.

The new iPad with it's 260 dpi screen will have been out months, possibly longer, before Windows8 tablets come to market. Since all these tablet apps have to be rewritten to begin with, why not get the software working well now, before we have to deal with a poor reading experience on shoddy 130dpi tablets. And we all know they screens will be low-rez.

Big text might work on a far field device like a TV. But on a near feel device, like a tablet, it's not going to stack-up well against the competition.

-Josh

The solution is for MS to start creating their own line of phones/tablets/PCs. I don't mind paying more for quality products.

Especially in the tablet and phone category, I doubt there should be any anti-competitive issues since MS is essentially the underdog there.

Buying Nokia might not be a bad start.

-Josh

"No Compromise" is going to haunt them like GW Bush's "Read my lips... no new taxes."

The Future of Reading http://billhillsblog.blogspot.com/

As one of the inventors of ClearType, I was always highly aware that it was a transitional technology, with a shelf life. It was invented to solve the problem of displaying text at the sizes human vision requires, on displays which at that time (1998) were 88 - 110 pixels per inch (Clustered at the lower end of that range).

Bill Gates told us that the technology had enabled sustained reading on screens some 5-10 years earlier than it otherwise could have happened, and I think that's true. I always believed that when mainstream screen resolution reached a certain point, it would become redundant. 

The same year ClearType was invented, I had a 204ppi IBM desktop monitor in my office. ClearType still gave a small advantage on that display. But it was a much smaller improvement than you got at, say 110ppi. The LCD technology in that display was not at all innovative, apart from the pixel size. LCD technology has improved a lot since then, with technologies such as In-Plane Switching, better color gamut, and so on, in addition to the improved resolution.

I found the first iPads quite acceptable for sustained reading, despite a slight blurriness (which font choice could improve. The new iBooks fonts Apple shipped last year showed a big improvement - especially Iowan, which I use all the time).

The new iPad has a screen resolution of 264 ppi, and a highly-innovative construction which avoids one of the problems from which that old IBM display suffered: that as you increase the number of pixels and decrease their size, the black wiring tracks between them take up a greater and greater proportion of the screen area. In effect, you're reducing light transmission, and you have to crank up backlight power to compensate, which of course also means more drain on the battery of a portable device.

The iPad does not, of course, use ClearType. But it is without question the best onscreen reading experience I have ever seen or used. Interestingly enough, with the addition of an Apple wireless keyboard and the Origami stand/keyboard case, it is also without question the best writing tool I have ever used. I'm typing on it now. It has spoiled me for every other system I've ever had.

When you reach >250ppi, you have passed through a threshold. Any further increase in resolution will bring a perceived improvement so small that it might not even be noticed.

So, my view is that Apple has now set the bar for screen reading quality on Tablet devices.

When I worked at Microsoft, we looked at the issue of ClearType on rotating tablet displays. No question, they were sharper in one direction (vertical RGB striping) than in the other. But our experiments showed the same algorithm was still optimal (the best you could get).

Of course, at 264ppi, with square pixels which you can go back to treating as whole pixels rather than dealing with non-square RGB sub-pixels, you don't need to care about whether a screen is rotated or not. And you don't have to compensate for color fringing effects, which cause problems for some users more than others because everyone's color perception is different.

Another interesting effect of this improved resolution is that most of the typefaces we have developed for print over the past 550 years now work really well on screen. The ones that don't are those which needed the "free anti-aliasing" which dot gain provided. That's the blotting-paper effect of paper soaking up ink and slightly blurring the edges of printed characters.

I've been building some experimental eBooks using embedded fonts and more sophisticated layouts than the largely "vanilla" novels most people will have read so far. They look stunning. There is (straightforward) technology which needs to be built yet to support some aspects of this; I won't give details here.

I've been working on screen readability for a long time, since the 1980s. I created my first electronic book in 1985, while working as a consultant for a company which created the first hypertext authoring system for the Macintosh. It was my total focus at Microsoft for 14+ years.

True screen readability has finally arrived. Apple got there first, and everyone else needs to catch up. It will be a tough challenge. I can't believe they can build such an easy-to-use device with a screen this good at such a low price. My IBM display retailed at $13,000 - only justifiable if you were at the leading edge of research.

Forgive the long post. It's a topic very much on my mind right now. I'm writing a book about my personal involvement with books, and their transition from paper to screen, over a period of almost 60 years.

Nice to talk to you all again,

Bill Hill

Office was far quicker to provide high-res support than Windows. Word was a pleasure to use on my IBM display: Two full pages of a document, side by side, at actual size, at 204ppi, was excellent, and the UI was easily scaled, so it worked. 

Then you went out on the Web, or into LOB apps, and everything broke, horribly. 

I hope Windows8 has been built to be resolution-independent. I really hope so. 

I'd be happy if all manufacturers set the bar at ~250ppi, and that became the norm. And you're right; it's not just about resolution. Other LCD technologies like IPS are contributing a lot to screen improvement.

Of course, it could just mean that W8 simply supports that particular resolution on that particular screen size. It remains to be seen if it truly is resolution "independent".

My concern with W8 is that they are marginalizing ClearType too soon. It's an advantage that W7 and its predecessors have today. Now in W8, IMO it appears they are hobbling it and then justifying that move because some day we'll all have high dpi displays. I really hope that isn't true as W8 will need every advantage it can get to recapture the hearts and minds of its customers. We certainly know Microsoft's marketing group isn't going to help much there.

Again, thanks for your responses here.

-Josh

2 hours ago, dentaku wrote

@DeathByVisualStudio:Forcing people to use ClearType the way it works now on tablet displays that will be turned 90 degrees allot really wouldn't do any good to the image on Win8. It looks horrible that way on my IPS panel. I couldn't use my monitor rotated in portrait mode for more than a few minutes with ClearType on but in LandScape mode it looks great.

I'm not a super coder or anything, but I have to imagine that, at present, it is possible to write software code that a. Detects orientation, b. Determines optimal font rendering methodology based on display type and orientation, then c. Turns Cleartype on/off on the fly. It's software.

1 hour ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

@dentaku: I'm not sure how you got "forcing" out of my words but ok, whatever. As both Josh and Craig have suggested my thought was at a minimum it would be configurable and at best it would detect the display and hardware capabilities automatically and adjust accordingly.

Technology at that time was not really up to the job. But it got better, fast. The first high-res device display I had was the Dell Axim PocketPC. Anyone remember that? 204 or 208ppi screen (I forget which), beautifully clean, crisp text - especially with ClearType in Microsoft Reader eBook software running on it. As a test, I read Gibbon's "Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire" in its entirety on it. It's a gargantuan reading task, six or seven volumes - and it passed with flying colors.

The prototype we built was at least ten years ahead of its time. That seems to have been the problem for the company.

The Microsoft Reader software was very, very good. If you were able to run it today on an iPad, it would stack up equally well against iBooks or the Kindle Reader - even after more than a decade. 

I'm delighted eBooks have now come of age. I just wish...

My feeling is that crispness is more important in small devices (wasting less time zooming in and out of websites etc.) and colour accuracy gets more important in larger devices where you will be viewing more photos and video and of course running photo/video editing software. 

So I agree that cleartype has a shelf life, but it will still be valuable for quite a few years.

It will no longer be necessary when screen resolutions (pixels/inch) double (will take 10 years at a guess, going by historical exponential rates), or if OLED takes over (noone will bother to write new algorithms for different subpixel patterns).

For the lifetime of Windows 8 it will still be very valuable - except on the highest end devices. And so it's a major omission for Metro to leave it out.

The screen is worth every one of those tradeoffs, and more. Color is better, too.

I watched HD video on it in bed last night. Terry Pratchett, Going Postal. Best picture quality I've ever seen. Just amazing. Reflections of ink on a quill pen just blew me away.