Today I am finally getting around to setting up more of my home office.
We bought a relatively new HDMI 1080p ViewSonic monitor off of a friend, as is with no booklet. For the past couple of months we’ve had it attached to a blu-ray player and some Harmon Kardon speakers in our bedroom and it has worked just fine for watching movies. I’m now trying to usurp it for computer purposes.
I’m using a mini displayport+USB Audio to HDMI Adapter and I have it working but am having some trouble with the fine-tuning.
For one thing, when in clamshell mode the margins of the external display screen are too small, no matter what resolution I try selecting in my system settings. I can’t quite see my dock or the top menu bar. Also, in the external display everything is blown up way too big and just looks a bit fuzzy and out of focus. When I try and change the settings on the external display itself, the settings that I’d want to twiddle to try and adjust are greyed out.
I also don’t seem to know how to wake up my Macbook from clamshell mode without unplugging the external display from the mini display port.
Because of having the wrong HDMI setting on the monitor, I kept having to have my laptop open in order to try and adjust the resolution there (since the menu bar was outside of the functional view of the monitor). But with mirrored displays, when my laptop is open the monitor adopts some altogether other resolution that I don’t quite understand. The same thing happened with my old macbook with a similar external monitor setup. Anyway, once I had closed the laptop and set the MDA Adapter’s resolution to 1080p, all became nice and small and crisp.
When the displays are mirrored, it has to find the most compatible resolution between both of them. I think they often overcompensate, just in case.
I remember running into this when I got my first Radeon, which had TV output. The resolution would automatically reduce to the lowest possible (800x600) and the refresh rate would drop to 60. This was considered the only safe settings for the SD TV.
So, I have a related question. I have a MacBook and just bought a ViewSonic 24" monitor. I’ve got it all hooked up, the resolution seems to be right (e.g. I figured out how to mirror the screen with the laptop so that they are the same) except for one thing. I can see my laptop contents on my 24" monitor, but on the right side of the monitor, there is 2.5" that there is nothing. Black. No nothing. If I change the resolution, everything gets stretched out.
Any ideas? I really like the monitor, but having 2.5" on the right be totally blank seems lame.
Why don’t you KEEP your built-in laptop TFT screen but do NOT mirror it. Turn it into an auxiliary monitor. Make the big ViewSonic the primary with the menus and so on.
Yes, span don’t mirror. There’s really no reason to mirror in this case – you’re only going to be looking at one at a time anyway. Then pick the native resolution for the external monitor (there is one and only one native resolution). Things will work better.