The red, green and blue dots on a CRT screen are fixed, separate and not blurred, by virtue of a physical screen within the tube. Unlike an LCD however, the ratio of dots per pixel and the position of the dots within a given pixel cannot be guaranteed because of distortion and user settings etc. The apparent smoothing is probably caused by imperfect beam focus, dot (cluster) shape (i.e. round) and a non-integer ratio of pixels to dots.

Although ClearType will be heavily patented by Microsoft, the underlying concept is twenty years (or more) old. It's possible that an enterprising panel manufacturer will develop a vector based screen driver which does all the work, so programs like Xara could just treat the screen like they would a PostScript printer.

Regards - Sean

[This message was edited by Sean Sedwards on August 24, 2000 at 02:39 AM.]