Tuning the Display

The System Preferences interface is broken up into five rows, including Personal, Hardware, Internet & Wireless, System, and Other. Clicking the Displays icon, located in the Hardware row, opens a new menu. From this menu, you can select screen resolutions. In general, for the best visual results, pick the native resolution of the screen. This is especially important when using an LCD, or liquid-crystal display. Although displays can generally run in multiple resolutions, they are optimized for one particular resolution. As Wikipedia describes it, “While CRT monitors can usually display images at various resolutions, an LCD monitor has to rely on interpolation (scaling of the image), which causes a loss of image quality. An LCD has to scale up a smaller image to fit into the area of the native resolution. This is the same principle as taking a smaller image in an image editing program and enlarging it; the smaller image loses its sharpness when it is expanded.” Thus, you are when using an external LCD or the built-in LCD display on a Macintosh laptop, it is important to ensure that it’s running at its native resolution. Typically, a monitor can inform a computer of its native resolution through extended display identification data (EDID). If a monitor doesn’t support this standard, search online for the native resolution. If it can’t be found, experiment with various resolutions. Generally, it is obvious when you select the native resolution because the text will look significantly crisper.

Another feature that is available on the Macintosh laptops is support for automatically adjusting brightness as ambient light changes. This enables the laptop screen to adjust to the conditions of the room and is helpful when users move their laptop back and forth between well-lit and poorly lit locations.

Clicking the Color button offers additional options for managing the display profiles. Picking a profile that matches the output monitor can result in a more accurate representation of colors, which means people will look more natural when in a video call.