Your old monitor looks blurry? It’s a retina (or lack of it) issue

Display technology, just like nearly all technology, has advanced in leaps and bounds over the decades. A monitor just a few years old may look crummy compared to modern ones. But that’s especially true when you cross the “retina” boundary. Some readers have thought they had broken monitors or ones that were missing a feature, when it’s really that their eyes have been retrained by modern displays.

For a long time, monitors and laptops had a dot pitch—the numbers of pixels per inch—in the 72 to 96 range, a limitation on affordable cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays. We used that pitch and we liked it, even though screens looked a little jaggy. These older displays had limits on both maximum brightness and the related contrast ratio, which measures the display's range from darkest to brightest. Early LCD monitors improved image aspects and other elements—like being able to view without being nearly square on—but initially remained mostly lower pitch.

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