Microsoft plans with display scaling on Windows 10 Redstone

As the offices at Microsoft begin to churn again with regular employee traffic, questions about Windows 10 Redstone are starting to resurface. Many have speculated that Windows 10 Redstone will be the fit and finish update that the seemingly early Windows 10 release missed.

While Microsoft has been rather cagey on the details of Redstone, Windows engineers and developers are ready to talk about an important aspect of the operating system with regards to scaling. With the Consumer Electronics Show under way, the event has helped showcase a centralized resolution theme for PC and PC-like devices for this upcoming year. Unfortunately, many Windows users have notoriously fallen victim to the operating systems lack of standardized scaling practices. That is, until Windows 10 Redstone.

In a series buried away in the Insider Hub called “Made by you,” the Windows team goes into great length and detail about how things are going change when it comes to scaling in Windows 10.

Scaling is a complex problem for the open Windows ecosystem, which has to support devices ranging in size from roughly 4” to 84,” with densities ranging from 50DPI to 500DPI. In Windows 10 we took steps to consolidate and simplify our developer story for scaling and to improve the end-user visual experience. Stay tuned for future release!”

Thanks to some detailed criticism and real-world examples provided by the Windows 10 Insider community, the Windows team can accurately tailor upcoming Windows 10 development to cater to the increasing pixel density wars developers are encountering.

To begin, the Windows team covers a glossary of terms that are relevant to the way Windows 10 currently handles scaling that include:

• Physical Pixels: dots making up the screen – the smallest parts of the screen that can be lit up
• Effective Pixels: an abstract unit of the display; each one represents a block of physical pixels
• Scale Factor: The ratio between the size of an effective pixel and a physical pixel, roughly equating to the ratio between the physical resolution and effective resolution.
• Dynamic Scaling: Essentially what modern apps are currently designed to address. Switching and adjusting content based on the display or windows size. Even scenarios including projecting, docking, moving apps between different monitors, and using remote desktop connections

Here’s what Microsoft plans to do with display scaling on Windows 10 Redstone

Thanks. Scaling is important in this day and age.

It sounds better than their solution to the Windows 10 Photos app where their solution to cure photos being soft at 100% view was just to apply sharpening to every image (even with 'automatic enhancements' turned off). The result of this is that photos are now over-sharpened, instead of being native 'as is' pixels. Fortunately, on a 1080P monitor Windows Photo Viewer still displays images reliably.

Windows should be easily capable of recognising the screen type as being "classic desktop monitor" - unrotatable, with landscape aspect ratios, and therefore only requiring ClearType sub-pixel rendering and no monochrome antialiasing for text, with physical pixels defined by the monitor type - and mobile tablet and hand-held screens without benefits from ClearType sub-pixel rendering, requiring monochrome antialiasing for text and effective pixel scaling for images at all times, as images are zoomed on the screen on demand.

This mixed-up rendering travesty has continued for too long, and it is high time it was addressed.