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1 Mass Effect 2 SDTV Text Size a 'Design Choice'
1 Month Ago - Saturday, February 6, 2010 vote unvote 1 hits
Matt Peckham
If you've been playing Mass Effect 2 on a standard definition TV, chances are you've been squinting to decipher the game's neon orange and green text. That's according to a 15-page thread on the game's official forums and noticed by Ars, anyway, claiming "the text is REALLY small" on even reasonably large SDTVs.
Standard definition TVs in the US run at 480i, or 720 horizontal x 480 vertical lines of resolution. If your SDTV supports 480p or what's sometimes called EDTV ('E' for 'Enhanced') that drops to 704 x 480 while benefitting from every scan line rendering consecutively in a single pass--the upside being a clearer picture during motion-intensive sequences, though it's of no benefit to static images like screens with lots of text.
High definition TVs run at much higher resolutions, starting at 1280 x 720 and running up to 1920 x 1080. While not always the case, it's generally true that text on HDTVs, which tend to be 30-inches or larger, is much more legible than on SDTVs. What's more, games designed for HDTVs often squeeze more text on-screen as well--drop them back to SDTV resolutions and the text can seem microscopic.
