All PC screens (except possibly for highly specialised ones for medical and military purposes, etc) are made a certain height in relation to width, 4:3. The CRT is PHYSICALLLY that shape and ratio. Happens to correspond to TV, 4:3 is the same as 1:1,33, put a different way. If you fill the screen with a picture at 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, 1600x1200 or 2048x1536, it is precisely 4 wide to 3 high and looks right. 1280x1024 is not - it is 5 wide to 4 high. Short and fat by about 10% or so. What you render an image at is not an issue. It's the number of lines the graphics card is instructed to shoot per cycle. Regardless of what height and width you render at, it looks fine at a 4:3 ratio. If you look at it in 1280x1024, it looks wrong. Simple test - at 1024x768, create a basic block image onscreen, exactly square. Measure it with a ruler on the screen, make sure it is square. Then reset the graphics card to show 1280x1024 and measure the square. It will of course be a slightly different size (smaller), but NOT square. This is what happens when you (if running at 1280x1024) look at other people's images, everything is a bit short and fat. Unless of course they were working at that resolution too and made it look right on their screen :o) ------------------------------------------------ Another thing - PC screens always run at 72 dpi. Standard. So for display onscreen, dpi settings are irrelevant. The only issue onscreen is pixel width by pixel height of the image. Dpi only has significance when printing. For instance, when preparing an image in Photoshop for print. ----------------------------------------------- Plasma and LCD screens are a different kettle of fish. They are even more literal with this pixel thing, being hard wired with a certain specific number of pixels. The matrix is say 1024x768 for instance, and if you run it at any other resolution, it looks like cr*p because the graphics card is forced to approximate, smearing virtual image pixels across the hard wired borders of a different number of physical pixels. In other words, laptops are junk for graphics work unless you will always work at exactly the resolution the screen is made for. :] Fish