Blurry display in Big Sur, bad quality fonts.

Agree with this. I've seen this with external monitors on every Mac that was upgraded to Big Sur. The fonts on external monitors are horrible when scaled. I even replaced a 34" hi-res monitor with same monitor with lower resolution (to match what "scaled" makes it) and it is still horrible. Tried everything... SwitchResX, terminal commands, etc. All horrible. It's so incredibly obviously horrible. Very disappointing. I had to reinstall Catalina and it's back to being crisp, clear, and beautiful. Fix Big Sur's External Monitor Fonts! I had to return my Macbook M1 for this very reason. Disaster!

I had this problem with Big Sur and a Dell 32" monitor, but oddly enough not another 1x Dell sitting next to it.

I tried the font-smoothing terminal command, no luck.

I tried setting scaling to 'Default for display', no luck.

What worked: On the affected monitor there was a new setting in System Prefs > Display, High Dynamic Range, turning that off fixed readability and it's back to what it was, and is fixed for me.

I have the same problem on a Mac Mini (2018) using an external HP 227n display (2560x1440). All the text seems slightly foggy now. It's worst in places like the sidebar of the mail application, seems a little better when reading some pages in safari (but not all).

I had the same problem, I went on a forum and found that if you run the below code in terminal it fixes the issue. I did it and it worked. Looks like it did before

Code:

defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

I was able to test using my same 2018 Mac Mini and a 5k monitor, and the fonts seem clear on that. So it appears that older graphics cards will work fine with Big Sur, but maybe Apple is assuming everybody has retina displays?

yakbutter wrote:

I did the terminal fix for my machine and it worked. I'm not trying to be a smart-***, but I did have to reboot after I posted the line in terminal.

Lucky for you, for me it doesnt do sh*t just makes the fonts less bold. Still blurry asf. This happend after installing Big Sur 11.0.1 and even on 11.1 its still an issue on M1 macbooks

Solution!

I had the same problem when I updated to big sur but I just fixed it! The code some people posted for terminal did nothing. Not only were most fonts blurry but my desktop background was too. This is what I did:

System preferences

Displays

Resolution

Choose "default for display"

It was on a scaled setting so everything was slightly enlarged. I don't understand why it couldn't still be good resolution but my screen went black and then came back crystal clear. It was like putting glasses on. Hope this helps!

stradjr wrote:

System preferences

Displays

Resolution

Choose "default for display"

I know this fixes the problem, but i don't like it being so enlarged, i use the 'More Space' option. Before Big Sur this wasn't a problem

Coming from Windows and be happy with the hardware Macbook Air M1 I now have this problem with blurred fonts on an external display with scaled view. What happens to Apple to don‘t solve this feature basically as it is solved in Windows? I am very dissapointed, font sharpness is an ergometric important fact. Shall I wait now for Windows running on M1? And if I see all the forum entries to this topic from the last years with various configurations and realizing, that still here is no solution from Apple, I am shocked.

Hello,

I tried this command but didn't help:

defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

Rebooted system and than I have changed custom colour profile on my monitor (HP EliteDisplay E243) to RGB and set all components to 255.

I have a 1080p 23" display, and fonts in Big Sur look horrid - much worse than Catalina. Is this a function of the 1080p resolution? Is stepping up to 4K (or 5K) the only real solution? The Terminal steps made only a slight difference.

I found something that seems to have helped. I had the same issue: Blurry 4K monitor at home and then really blurry remote desktop connection to work. I found something in the Remote Desktop Preferences (not the Apple preferences)

Remote Desktop --> "Preferences" --> "General" tab --> Uncheck the "use hardware acceleration when possible" --> Set "Graphics interpolation" level to "high".

I have been using Macs for thirty years and no longer will be spending any of my money on their product. I should be able to read text without doing anything. It is extremely difficult to read, the Safari interface is junk and looks like it is something a toddler came up with.

https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/terminal/apd5265185d-f365-44cb-8b09-71a064a42125/mac

Once you have terminal open you simply type of copy and past that code into the terminal and press enter.

Doesn’t fix the issue