Strange effects when using custom scaling

Hello All,
I have an XPS 13 9310 2-in-1, and I have been running 125% scaling since I purchased the machine, but I have always wanted a little bit less (100% is too small) so I decided to play around with custom scaling recently. I changed the scaling to 115, and it is perfect. The only problem is that now everything in my Taskbar is blurry (not to the point of being unreadable, just very annoying), and is also a strange ghosting effect below my taskbar (it is only a couple pixels wide, but is extremely annoying). The ghosting is not consistent, but will change sometimes (e.g., if I go between virtual desktops). I managed to capture the ghosting in a screenshot which is attached. You can also kind of see the blurriness of the taskbar icons/text...that is not your eyes fooling you, that is actually how it looks on my screen.

Any help/ideas appreciated.

Sorry no one has answered you. Are you using any third party app that affects the GUI (such as explorerpatcher, startallback,startisback etc) If so uninstall it and see if taskbar returns to normal.

When you see the specs on a flat screen device, those are the exact pixels that are reproduced on the screen. For example a screen that has 1920 x 1080 pixels will be sharpest when fed exact multiples of 1920 x 1080. If you feed it anything other than multiples of what it can display, the pixels are not interpolated sharply. Screens look best when fed exact multiples of the screen pixels. You have chosen an odd pixel number and that results in what you are seeing. That's the reason for the recommended resolutions you see in screen size choices.

The only fix is to feed your screen the recommended choices.

No, I am not using any 3rd party applications... just the scaling in settings.

That makes sense, that you have to feed the screen multiples of its native resolution. I will try to play around and see if I can make it look any better, but I think I will just live with it...I would rather have everything a little less sharp than much larger than I want it (leading to reduced useable screen area for apps on an already small screen).

Choosing a Custom scale causes the base fonts to be adjusted in size, which not all programs can handle correctly. Many older programs use hardcoded UI layouts with fixed scales in such a way that the size of various windows and/or UI elements that belong to them will exhibit all sorts of alignment problems, often also with texts being cut off so they become unreadable, etc.. Using this option is therefore not recommended. The idea here is to use it only in situations where you absolutely have no other choice. By comparison, simply picking one of the percentage values from the normal list that appears under Display | Scale (doesn't necessarily have to be the percentage value that is marked by Windows as being the recommended choice in there...) causes the least trouble IMO, and IME.

I currently have mine set to 150% on a 55 inch 4k TV (that I almost always use as my only monitor). Like Vin Diesel said in the movie titled "Pitch Black"... it looks clear. But the white background still hurts my eyes. Because, greedy Microsoft is greedy, and doesn't have to care much about ppl with sensitive eyes.

organist1958 said:

No, I am not using any 3rd party applications... just the scaling in settings.

That makes sense, that you have to feed the screen multiples of its native resolution. I will try to play around and see if I can make it look any better, but I think I will just live with it...I would rather have everything a little less sharp than much larger than I want it (leading to reduced useable screen area for apps on an already small screen).

Click to expand...

The custom scale is producing a screen that does not follow whatever width to height ratio your screen was built for.
So it's stretching the pixels in a way they weren't meant to be stretched.
This is what is causing the blurriness.
Your screen has a native 16:10 ratio, with a native resolution of: 3840 x 2400

You should be able to run any of these resolutions with no blurriness.
You may have to change the text "size" a bit as well.

To anyone who still doesn't understand what this is really about... just have a look and see for yourself. Here:

Trust me. You'll figure it out soon enough...

That all makes perfect sense...I will play around a bit to see what works best.

Also, I have the 1900x1200 screen :).