Comparing 1:1 zoom on a 27" screen at 2560 x 1440 vs 22" screen at 1680 x 1050

Question

When using Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom for example, and zooming the photo at 1:1 ratio, when you work on a 22" screen at 1680 x 1050, there is an great inside zoom. On such a screen the pixel are large, so they are rendered precisely, and their size allow precise work.

When doing the same thing on a 27" screen at 2560 x 1440, whose pixel are really smaller, I imagine that the zoom is not so important, and it's more difficult to work on the photo. So to have the same comfort, I guess you have to zoom more, someting like 2:1. But doing this, I imaghone that the pixels are more blurry so it's more difficult to work precisely.

What happens in real life ? Do you have some experience on this ? I'm planning to change my 22" screen to a 27" one, but before spending a lot of money, I'd like to have some light on that point.

Answer 1

At a 200% viewing size, the application makes no attempt to smoothly scale the image; each pixel in the image is represented by a 2x2 block of pixels. (Go bigger and you'll get outlines between the pixels.) There is no blur to worry about at 200% (or any integer multiple of 100%); you'll only get an attempt at smoothing if you can force the app to display at fractional multiples (like 150%), when the image pixels cannot be mapped to blocks of screen pixels.

(If you actually scale the image -- resize it -- then you'll get smoothing unless you choose a resampling method that doesn't smooth. But that's scaling/resizing, not adjusting the view zoom level.)