Native resolution, why so important?

[Tankbuster]

I've looked through a lot of threads here, but have not found, or just missed the answer....

Why is the native resolution of screens so important?
Is it because most user made profiles are in that res?
If a screen's native resolution is, for example 1024 x 768, but supports 800 x 600 is that any less good than the having a screen that is native at 800 x 600?

Paul

[Wild.Bill.Kelso]

Good Question. I had the same question when I bought my first touchscreen. At the bottom of the Master FAQ it says this:

Why do my font's look crappy on my touch screen?
Touch Screens are designed to run at a specific resolution (called the Native Resolution) to display everything the best. At other resolutions things are stretched, so they may not look perfectly correct.

It's a good idea to purchase a touch screen that runs at the Native Resolution that you will mostly likely use. For smaller 7" & 8" screens, 800x600 Native resolution is a good choice.

Even though things are stretched, they look fine for the most part. Except for fonts/text. They can be unreadable unless the monitor is at it's Native res, and thus not stretching them.

My Innovatek 8" TFT TM-868 Color Touch Screen has a Native Res of only 640x480. But most of the profiles here are designed for a res of 800x600. It's kind of become a standard, but absolutely not required. I think it's because most of us started with these smaller touchscreens, and that's what most people still have.

So, for fonts to look good on my touchscreen, I run it at the Native Res (640x480). And to get the 800x400 profiles to fit and fill the screen, I set the following option in the touchbuddy.cfg file:

profile_scaling = 1
screen_resolution = 640,480
preserve_aspect_ratio = 1

So, you can run your touchscreen at it's Native Res, and have any profile fill the screen. It works well for me.

[Tankbuster]

Thanks WBK. I had read the FAQ but I thought there might be a little bit more to it.
Paul

[Tankbuster]

I've done a little bit of research and had a good think about all of this.

By modern standards, we are using quite low resolutions here. When looking at a 800x600 screen, the dots are quite big in relation to the overall screen size.
Also, just changing from 800x600 to 1024x768 is a big change, you're increasing the number of dots (in just one direction) by a quarter and when using bitmaps, that can easily make a nice image suddenly go quite poor.
I understand it all a but clearer now!