It's been a long day at the computer, and you can barely read the screen anymore. Is it that you're overworked, or is this an equipment problem? Most likely, the display is at least contributing to your bleariness. It may seem harder to read because it is harder to read. With new monitors, resolution has gone up even faster than display size, yielding more dots (pixels) per inch. The result is crisper photos (good), more windows you can put on a screen (good for productivity), and type that's smaller (not good).
Most users are comfortable with standard fonts on a display with a resolution of 100 dots per inch (dpi). That's XGA resolution (1,024 by 768 pixels) on a 13.3-inch notebook (96 dpi) or a 15-inch CRT. If you switch to SXGA+ resolution (1,400 by 1,050 pixels) on the same size display, text will only be four-fifths (81 percent) as big. As LCDs get larger, their fixed resolutions increase too. This means that fonts don't get much bigger and may sometimes shrink, since they are programmed to appear in a given number of pixels, often 8 wide by 12 high for a screen font.
To see how far we've regressed, try opening a DOS window and see how small the fonts are. Before the advent of Microsoft Windows, the so-called "DOS box" of 80 characters by 25 lines filled the entire screen. Each 8-by-12 pixel character was about 0.133 inches wide, roughly eight characters per inch. When you open a 640- by 480-pixel DOS box on an SXGA+ screen, fonts are less than half as wide, 0.061 inches, or 16 characters per inch. Manual typewriters, in comparison, typically provided 10 characters per inch; fewer cpi indicates bigger, more readable type. A 100 dpi display (such as a 13.3-inch XGA) would show about 12 characters per inch. Between the fixed resolutions of LCD panels and Windows font-scaling difficulties, it's little wonder your eyes get bleary.
Click here to view the DPI: Crispness vs. Readability table.