Windows 10: How Does Magnifier Work and Is It Any Good?!

This is a video about Magnifier, the built in magnification software that is in Windows 10.

The video is 5 minutes long and includes a full set of subtitles.

In this video, the following questions will be answered.

1. What is Magnifier?
2. How do I start and stop magnifier?
3. How do I change the magnification settings on it?
4. How good is it compared to other magnification software?

A full transcript of this video can be found below.

Start of Video Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to this video.

In this video, I want I will give a brief demonstration of the magnification tool in Windows 10, called Magnifier.

Windows 10, like most other versions of windows, has a suite of built in tools that enable people with a wide range of disabilities to make their PC or laptop easier to see, to hear and to use.

In Windows 8 and Windows 10 these tools are controlled centrally via the Ease of Access Centre.

I have created very detailed videos about the Ease of Access Centre in Windows 8 and Windows 10 and I will leave links to those videos below this video.

Magnifier is a feature that makes the whole screen or parts of it bigger and so it is most likely to be used by people with a visual impairment.

To start Magnifier,  you can press the Windows key and the “+” key. A magnifying glass appears on your screen like this and that shows that we have started the Magnifier.

You can make things bigger by pressing the Windows key and the “+” key and you can see there that my mouse cursor, my mouse pointer are magnifying I am zooming in and making things bigger. 

You make things smaller by pressing the Windows key and the “-” key repeatedly.

Once you have set the ideal magnification level for yourself you then have a choice between using the magnifier in one of three modes; full screen (which we have it on now), lens, docked.

In full screen mode the whole of the desktop is magnified. To select full screen mode press the Ctrl and Alt and F keys together.

The centre, the focus of the magnification is where the mouse pointer is. You can see as I move my mouse pointer around then the magnification moves with it.

To select “lens” mode,  press the Ctrl and Alt and L keys together. A rectangular lens appears on the screen. Anything within the lens is magnified and the lens follows your mouse pointer.  So, here we go, you can see there is the rectangular magnification and as I move it around,  anything that the rectangle hovers over is magnified.

To select “docked” mode,  press the Ctrl and Alt and D keys together. A rectangular strip appears at the top of your screen (and you can see it here) which is stationary and magnifies the area around your mouse pointer.

And there you have it- my quick tour of Windows magnifier.

 Now to come out of Windows magnifier we press the Windows key and the escape key.

As magnifiers go, this one which is built into Windows is pretty limited and poor. It compares very badly to the magnification tool that is built into Apple Macs.

Other, better magnifiers are available. Some are free to download, some are very sophisticated and cost lots of money.

End of Video Transcript