Sometimes it happens to us that we find a loose monitor at home or we buy a second-hand one because we need an additional screen to work. It is in those moments when we do not have the specifications that we would like to know the screen resolution. However, the process to know this information is much easier than you think. You just have to follow a few small steps.
Native screen resolution is the maximum that a monitor can reproduce with a 1:1 correlation between the pixels of the image and the physical idem of the panel. This is represented in the number of pixels per horizontal line x the number of pixels per vertical line. As the panel is a rectangle, this gives us the total area measured in points or pixels
How to know the screen resolution of our monitor?
The process is simple, you just have to follow the following steps:
- Right click on the Windows icon on the taskbar and select Settings
- System
- Select screen in the left bar and scroll down
- You will arrive at a section that says “Scale and distribution, well, in Screen resolution the one that Windows marks as recommended is the one that supports your monitor.
- System
That’s it, you don’t need to do more to know the screen resolution of your monitor.
Why is it important to know?
Well, for the simple fact that LCD and OLED screens, not being based on cathode ray tube technologies, means that if we transmit images below the output resolution, a significant loss of image quality is caused. In the old tube screens the color of each scan line was achieved by varying the voltage of the video signal. In changing the current screens, being a matrix of points where each one has to have a different color, they do not allow transitions from one point to another.
The image buffer is nothing more than the final frame generated by the graphics card and copied to the monitor screen at high speed. What happens when there are fewer dots or pixels in the transmitted image than in the one emitted by our monitor? Well, then the screen interface of our graphics card has to fill in the missing gaps, usually with a transmission through interpolation, where an intermediate color is sought for the neighboring pixels without information. The result? A sudden drop in image quality because images are not being reproduced at their resolution n
Let’s not forget that when what we do is use the applications in window mode, we are really sacrificing output resolution and with it image quality in exchange for taking advantage of our desktop space. When we adjust the size of an edge or an image, we also lose detail and what we see with our eyes is the result of an interpolation. In the same way, if the output resolution is higher than what the monitor has, then the display driver will be forced to remove detail.