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I would prefer to have a "nearest-neighbor" scale mode in the Magnifier (where each original pixels is rendered as a large square, not blurred between eachother).

Is there an option to change that, or a Registry tweak even to do this?

Kenster
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chamberlainpi
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4 Answers4

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In Windows 10 and 11, you can go to the Magnifier settings (start the Magnifier, then click the Settings button symbolized with a gear icon, and then click the "Go to Settings" link).

On the Magnifier Settings page, you can uncheck "Smooth edges of images and text" to get nearest neighbor scaling instead of interpolated pixels when using zoom increments of 100%.

Note that this apparently doesn't work for some (maybe GPU-accelerated?) windows.

jamesdlin
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1

As @TWiStErRob suggested in the comments, using magnifier.sourceforge.net resolved this for me. Using this tool, I can clearly see the individual pixels I wanted to see, in "nearest neighbor" presentation.

Community
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Christopher Bruns
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To disable the magnifier smoothing filter in window 7 Go to Control Panel > Ease of Access Centre > make the computer easier to see and uncheck " Turn On Magnifier " Unfortunately , Windows 7 doesn’t have a direct option to disable the smoothing filter itself.

saprasheenu
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Partial solutions and weird behavior

This page on alternativeto.net lists ten alternative apps filtered by "Windows" and "free". Please help me try them. Here are the ones I tried so far:

Zoomit

For people who don't mind a full-screen zoom: You can use Zoomit from Microsoft instead of the Windows Magnifier.

It has two modes and unfortunately both of them have disadvantages:

  • Zoom with Ctrl+1 doesn't show changes that happen on screen after you start zooming.
  • LiveZoom with Ctrl+4 is blurred.

You can change those hotkeys. The default ones are listed at the bottom of its website.

Magnifixer, Lens

Magnifixer and Lens display crisp pixels, but they display some parts of windows at a higher resolution than the original resolution. For example, they show images in Google Chrome at a slightly higher resolution than text on the same webpage. So they tap into some mixed(high&low)-resolution data stream from Chrome? They also render the mouse cursor smaller than it is.

Virtual Magnifying Glass

In Virtual Magnifying Glass, Google Chrome windows look completely black.

Glassbrick

Videos of Glassbrick show that it shows some windows blurred and others crisp. So it seems unlikely that there's a setting for showing all windows consistently crisp.

root
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