39 minutes ago
Unlike my previous BenQ monitor which had sharpness settings as an option, my new monitor lacks it. The only thing it has is sharpness options for if you are using an analog (VGA) cable.
I bought a G2260VWQ6 monitor recently which is made by AOC, it's great in many way including cost, but I remember how much better having sharpness turned up made the BenQ look (which was also a lower resolution monitor, but appeared to have superior clarity due to sharpness).
Once I after a couple months of owning this monitor tried out SweetFX, and realized I could turn up sharpness with the LumaSharpness setting, I immediately wanted this effect to run at all times when using my PC. Is it at all possible to make this happen? Would it require a separately written program if it is possible to do? I'm not sure if such a program exists. The only advice I kind find out there is stuff about ClearType, and other things like Contrast & Brightness that I've long since configured optimally and that don't help solve this sharpness issue.
I tried out SMAA and Vibrance, and there might be times I'd want to play around with them along with other options (SMAA + Bioshock 1 & 2 is a situation where it's nice to have it as an option, since the old releases had no AA in the video options) for now I simply install this for the LumaSharpen, and set #define sharp_strength 1.00 (still playing around to find what seems to be the optimal setting), with #define sharp_clamp set to default. I even got it to work on the emulator Higan and found that SNES games looked a LOT clearer, less blurry, much more satisfying. What I found with the emulator though is you can't turn it off and on, the emulator needs to be restarted and you have to add or remove the files in the folder to change the setting. I proved it was working though with screenshots.
It might be that the desktop is already sharpened, but I'm not sure about that. Screenshots I take of games seem to come out looking about right though, so I don't know. Games at least seem to run sharpened in windowed mode, but that might only mean that region of the screen is being sharpened.
Essentially I find the screen to look blurry, especially in games, with LumaSharpen and on my last monitor with sharpness turned up, many details in textures show up that are otherwise diffused behind a layer of goo across the entire screen. Colors even seem to be richer, the whole thing is a lot easier to look at for long periods, and simple objects pop out making it actually look somewhat 3D, instead of blending things together in a hard to differentiate manner. Switching SweetFX off and on you can see simple objects which suddenly look important rather than completely irrelevant all over the place. Any game world I've tried this program with so far seems much more compelling visually with sharpness set to a higher level than whatever this monitor defaults to.
I sent the manufacturer of the company an email about my dissatisfaction with the fact that they didn't include sharpness as an option in their monitor (it's a gaming monitor with FreeSync) when other companies seem to be able to (I'm not actually sure if their entire line of monitors doesn't have sharpness as an option for digital cables [DVI, HDMI & DisplayPort]). After a pretty long message sent to the tech support they told me they would send my message along to a higher up in the company and I might get a message back if they decide to do something. My main points were I wanted them to find a way to either update the firmware so that I could install that and have sharpness as an option, or at least release all new models and revisions with the option, if they have to make a hardware change to resolve this issue.
My last BenQ was actually an old monitor I bought for a similar price around 2008, and it had sharpness as an option. I stopped using it when I got a newer monitor of a higher resolution, but went back to it when that newer monitor died. I realized when I went back to the BenQ that it had a sharpness option, tried it, and realized it looked better than the monitor that died. When the BenQ died recently I tried another BenQ which also had sharpening, it was a VA panel and it had issues that I was not willing to put up with, but the sharpness was nice. The other issues it had resulted in me returning it within the first 14 days of purchase. Then I got the AOC and I was back in muddy image land, until I found LumaSharpen.
Anyway, if I could somehow get LumaSharpen to run on the desktop that would be wonderful, but I'm not expecting miracles, just hopeful. If not I'll just have to live with it until I can afford another monitor.