Determine the Optimal Viewing Distance From Your Screen

Ever sat in front of your screen and have been disappointed by how blocky or pixelated things look but then find that other content looks fine? Not all content is created equal and is one factor that will impact an optimal viewing experience.

To keep things simple, the viewing experience is influence by three factors, specifically:

• the size of the screen being used,
• the native resolution of the screen been used,
• the resolution of the content being viewed.

Now, there is a long formula you can use to work out the optimal viewing distance for your situation which is:

Optimal Viewing Distance Equation (Source: Wikipedia)

where:

• VD: Viewing distance,
• DS: Display’s diagonal size,
• NHR: Display’s native horizontal resolution (in pixels),
• NVR: Display’s native vertical resolution (in pixels),
• CVR: Vertical resolution of the video being displayed (in pixels).

Now, I can understand that might be worrying for some people (particularly the bit involving “tan” which you might have last used in high school). So, I have put together a calculator to make it easier. All you need to do is provide four values and the calculator will work out the appropriate viewing distance for you.

As examples, I have provided a two additional scenarios for comparison to the customisable column, those bring:

• Example 1:
• 55 inch screen,
• Native resolution of 1920 x 1080 (Full HD capable),
• Content vertical resolution of 576 (Standard definition content).
• Example 2:
• 32 inch screen,
• Native resolution of 1920 x 1080 (Full HD capable),
• Content vertical resolution of 1080 (Full HD content).

If you want to try out the calculator then click here and enter in your values in the “Variables” tab. Feel free to copy it to your own Google Docs account if you want to muck around with it.