Hi Everyone,

I am using a dell widescreen monitor and its default resolution is 1920 by 1080

Usually when I look for wallpapers I get resolution of 1920 by 1200. I rarely find any which is 1920 by 1080. So what can do to get the best possible output?

I use windows xp and setting options like center, tile or stretch does make the image a little diff.

Any info will be appreciated.

Thanks,

JG

If you have a program that can resize I'd get the better quality image and scale it down. You definately dont want a smaller resolution picture and have to stretch it out to screen size. In which xp and vista give you the option anyway.

I have a similar issue on my Powerbook. It is one of the few screens ever made to have a 1440x960 resolution. That is about impossible to find a wallpaper for (everyone has 1440x900). I usually just get the 1680x1050 ones and have the computer scale it down.

If you are really concerned about the picture looking perfect, I'd suggest getting the 1900x1200 one and manually cropping it in an image editor.

Also, check out www.interfacelift.com for some amazing free wallpapers if you haven't already.

Thanks for the support guys. I guess you are right, I should download picture and scale it down.

Can anyone suggest a free lightweight program that can do the task for me.

Thanks,

Cheers,
JG

Irfanview

It will resize, and there are several filters available to use on the resize which supposedly affect quality.

Actually, to make wallpaper appear correctly on different resolution monitors, you must adjust the aspect ratio. This is only done through cropping, not what we're referring to as "resizing".

The resolutions 1440 X 900, 1650 X 1080 , and 1920 X 1200 all have the same "aspect ratio". (1.6 to 1.0) Accordingly, any picture in one of these formats could be displayed on any monitor of these resolutions and the proportions will be correct, nothing will be distorted, and the graphics driver will add or subtract lines as necessary to fill the display. However 1920 X 1080 is a different aspect ratio, (1.78 to 1.0), so enter the crop tool, or canvas resizing dialog.

I have 2 different resolutions of WS monitors, 1650 X 1080 and 1920 X 1200, yet I do all my wallpapers in 1920 X1200, and it will look just fine when displayed at either resolution. Also, to avoid excessive "resampling" of large files, I will do wallpapers at exact multiples of the necessary resolutions, IE; 3840 X 2400 or 2780 X 1800, which are 2X and 1.5 times the 1920 X 1200 number.

Anyway, the "filters" to which SNGX is referring to in Irfanview, are related to it's resampling algorithms with respect to resampling an image to increase (or decrease) it's size with respect to DPI (dots per inch) for printing or screen viewing.

Most of that above is a slight oversimplification, but I hope it makes at least some sense.

You do have to get a handle on the correct application of cropping and resampling/resizing to acheive the best results possible with respect to wallpaper display strategies.

Basically, for a 1920 X 1080 monitor you can multiply the horizontal size (in pixels) of any picture file you might want to display by .5625 and the resulting number will be the number of pixels on the vertical axis you must have to make it display without distortion. IE; 1680 X 945 would be a size that would also display correctly.

Is that better?

Thanks a lot captain for the valuable information you have shared. I agree that I need to resize in a way that is appropriate for that aspect ratio.

But in order to get the best output, It a bit cumbersome to get a wallpaper and manually crop it to fit your desktop size is not easy.

I thought there would be something like batch conversion and I can get images of my desired resolution.

Good post, Captain Cranky.