Screen Resolution Matters

What happens to your screen when you connect to an LCD projector – are you often surprised by the sudden loss of resolution?  I see this time after time – particularly when vendors connect their laptops to customers’ older projectors with lower resolutions.  The result includes surprised looks and a quick struggle to re-align or otherwise try to manage the screen resolution differences, often without a satisfactory solution.

Here are a couple of suggestions, particularly if screen resolution dramatically impacts the look of your software:

1.  Bring your own projector, when possible.  This may sound expensive, but consider the loss of a single piece of business resulting from a demo done where poor resolution impacted the results…

2.  If you can’t have your own projector (when visiting a customer or when operating over the web), coordinate with your key contact to organize a projector with sufficient resolution – and test it ahead of time.

3.  If you can’t do 1 or 2 above, then at least find out the resolution of the customer’s projector sufficiently before the demo to make changes to your preparation…

Interestingly, to give a sense of the importance of screen real estate and resolution, one Great Demo! Workshop participant noted that in a recent POC the impact of monitor size (and corresponding resolution) was striking:  Those with 17 inch screens loved the software; those with 13 inch very much did not!