Light Text, Dark Background, Bad Reading

[tedster]

There's this trendy look -- light text on a dark background. One of my clients has a site of thousands of pages that uses it.

Only thing is, I've noticed that on LCD screens -- especially some of the new high end, really flat ones -- the text is illegible! This isn't true on all LCD's -- many consumer level notebooks look fine.

Has anyone else noticed this? Any insights into reasons for the problem, and how common it is?

[gmiller]

Well, dark backgrounds are generally consider evil, but this is the first time I've seen a technical (not stylistic) reason for it.

[tedster]

Here's my current guess: The problem originates in the way font smoothing is accomplished. The light fonts on these LCD screens get invaded by "jaggies" from the background and that deforms the letters.

It's as though some part of the firmware's code assumes that dark is always the letterform and light is always the background and it does the smothing in an inverted way. I can sometimes gets a similar effect in PhotoShop if I invert graphic text.

The frustrating part is that this problem appears on the cutting edge hardware.

[GWJ]

Hey Tedster,

I have a Compaq 17" monitor. I have noticed this. I just wrote it off on new tech./semi-cheap (low end) monitor.

[tedster]

>I have a Compaq 17" monitor. I have noticed this. I just wrote it off on new tech./semi-cheap (low end) monitor

Normally we always keep at least one consumer level set-up for testing our sites. Now we have to watch out for the high end stuff, too.

[GWJ]

Never ends, always changes I guess should be the motto here. Guess that is what makes this work challenging/exciting.

Brian