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Dealing with Non-Retina Optimized Content on iMac 5K

B

bumstah

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 1, 2013
6
0
Hi guys,

I just got my iMac Retina a few days ago and I love the display. However it bothers me how 95% of the content on the internet such as webpages and games are not optimized for 5K. I knew prior to purchasing that this was the case but using it on a daily basis I can't get over how ugly the internet is. Aside from the Apple website, pages like Yahoo or games like League of Legends look terrible on the 5K. Of course this is not the iMac's fault but solely because every imperfection is magnified on the screen.

Is there any way to lower the resolution to be like a standard iMac? I use a standard iMac at work and ironically it looks much better than the 5K. I say this not as a pixel quality standpoint but from a resolution standpoint. I would like to use the 5K when I do design work but just use standard definition when I'm surfing the web and such.
 
bumstah said:
Hi guys,

I just got my iMac Retina a few days ago and I love the display. However it bothers me how 95% of the content on the internet such as webpages and games are not optimized for 5K. I knew prior to purchasing that this was the case but using it on a daily basis I can't get over how ugly the internet is. Aside from the Apple website, pages like Yahoo or games like League of Legends look terrible on the 5K. Of course this is not the iMac's fault but solely because every imperfection is magnified on the screen.

Is there any way to lower the resolution to be like a standard iMac? I use a standard iMac at work and ironically it looks much better than the 5K. I say this not as a pixel quality standpoint but from a resolution standpoint. I would like to use the 5K when I do design work but just use standard definition when I'm surfing the web and such.
Click to expand...

I don't follow you. I use web-based content every day for hours on my 5K, and there's simply no comparison: it looks miles better on the 5K than on the 2.5K iMac. And yes, that includes pages like Yahoo. I'm not sure the issue you're seeing..
 
The items on the web that look awful on a retina display tend to be images that are optimized for 1x resolution (generally speaking, not optimized at all). Images that continue to look razor sharp are actually 2-4 times larger pixel-wise and are essentially scaled by the OS to look good.
 
bumstah said:
Hi guys,

I just got my iMac Retina a few days ago and I love the display. However it bothers me how 95% of the content on the internet such as webpages and games are not optimized for 5K. I knew prior to purchasing that this was the case but using it on a daily basis I can't get over how ugly the internet is. Aside from the Apple website, pages like Yahoo or games like League of Legends look terrible on the 5K. Of course this is not the iMac's fault but solely because every imperfection is magnified on the screen.

Is there any way to lower the resolution to be like a standard iMac? I use a standard iMac at work and ironically it looks much better than the 5K. I say this not as a pixel quality standpoint but from a resolution standpoint. I would like to use the 5K when I do design work but just use standard definition when I'm surfing the web and such.
Click to expand...

You'll soon get used to some images being blurry/pixelated. I've been using Retina Macs since 2012 and hardly even notice a blurry image, only how crisp a sized-down high-res image is, such as one on the growing number of Retina-aware sites.

Regardless, text is always 4x as crisp.
 
After doing some reading Johnf1285 you are correct. Pixels saved at 1x resolution are doubled on the retina, therefore creating some loss in quality. Text and scalable vector files do not suffer from this as they are not raster based.

redheeler I can see myself getting used to this on the internet but I'm disappointed with the pixels in games (I don't know if you are a gamer). It's definitely because games are optimized to run on very specific resolutions. I will look into the Display App after I exchange my iMac for the new one they released yesterday.
 
I think that for those with the iMac 5K being their first retina mac, most web content is already optimized. You won't have the beta test feeling of the first 2012 rMBPs since web content has been improving for the last 3 years for retina displays. You'll already be going in with pretty every Mac app you encounter optimized for retina displays.

Oddly enough, the only Mac app on my rMBP that has retina issues is Steam.

Games are a different story. Unless you can actually run the game at the full resolution(In my 15" rMBP's case, 2880x1800) then pretty much everything is going to look a little crappy since you will have to run it at a normal resolution. You get used to it, though.
 
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