[MacTUG] Mirroring and resolution... something for nothing

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

OK, this is one of those things where if it was not for the certainty of my user, I would say this is an easy one. But, my user, claims something was working that does not seem feasible...

My user has a Cinema Display hooked up to a Macbook Pro. So we have have a much higher resolution display hooked up to a laptop.

She claims that (before the holiday) she had it set on Mirroring, but the Cinema Display was running in its native 1900 by whatever glory (not merely upsampled). To me this sounds like something for nothing. I can have it work fine in non-mirrored mode, but when it is running in mirrored mode it defaults to 1200 wide. I realize that I can tell the cinema display to "run at 1900" in mirrored mode, but I think all it is doing then is upsampling the 1200 signal to 1900 -- and it certainly does not let it really show its glory.

This was precipitated by the settings for the monitor getting messed up (someone was playing with the settings) and she can not get it back to what she thinks it was. There was also a break away from the monitor which I think may have confused people as to what the settings really were like.

Her argument sounds convincing:
1) She had the row of folders on her monitor's desktop -- that sounds like it was set to mirror (but not the only way this could occur)
2) The row of folders was only a partial row on the monitor, but was a row and a half on her macbook
3) The same image was on both displays

Now I can more or less replicate this by having the displays not be mirrored, and setting the Cinema display to be the main display (have the menu bar be on the Cinema display). This lets the display run in high resolution. The only issue is that she claims that the display is that the display is showing a different image than the laptop image. This is a triviality that I am sure she can live with (solution, reset the background!!) but the issue is that she still is convinced that she had her laptop set to mirror and at the same time have the Cinema display natively display in its 1900 pixel wide glory!

Am I missing something here?? (Other than a Cinema display on my desktop, haha)

don

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Donald Duff-McCracken
Technical Services Manager
Mapping, Analysis & Design
Faculty of Environment
University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 x32151
http://www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/computing/people/don.html
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