Image Quality

Chroma Subsampling and Desktop Text Clarity

A television can show films cleanly yet make small colored text from a connected computer look soft or fringed. Resolution may be correct, scaling may be set properly, and the panel can still lose fine color detail before the image reaches the screen. One possible cause is chroma subsampling. Digital video can represent brightness detail separately from color-difference detail, then store or transmit the color portion at a lower spatial resolution. That trade is often hard to notice in photographic or moving video, but computer interfaces contain sharp colored edges that can expose it quickly.