M1 Macbook Pro - External Monitor Blurry Text

Disable Apple font smoothing https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/disable-font-smoothing-in-macos-big-sur/

• Result: much better text clarity.

Try a 27 inch, 2K monitor

• Result: OK, but the text is very small at 2K resolution. I needed to bring the resolution down to 2048 x 1152 or even Full HD 1920 x 1080 if I want to look at the screen from a bigger distance, but this blurs the text a little.

On the Monitor settings, choose Color Settings to RGB

(or sRGB) color instead of YPbPr or any other setting.

• Result: OK, I can see an improvement.

Use the USB-C to USB-C cable that came with the monitor.

• Result: OK, I can see an improvement.

Set the Color Profile on the Mac as RGB

• Result: OK, much better fonts. Fonts appear more full, bold like and the Colors look more vivid.

Reduce the Sharpness level on your Monitor settings.

• Result: OK, much better now.

Disable any Smart Features or Sensors on your

Monitor.

• Result: OK, much better now.

Use CMD + right Shift and + to increase text size

on apps.

• Result: better clarity of text.

Try a USB-C to HDMI adapter

• Result: not much improvement

Try a USB-C to Display Port adapter

• Result: not much improvement

It's probably not an issue with the monitor or cable. It's probably because Apple removed font smoothing to help smooth fonts on lower resolution screens. Windows uses Cleartype for font smoothing so fonts still look good on non-Retina screens like a 1080p monitor. This is probably why some of the comments are stating how the monitor looks crisp when hooked up to their Windows computer, and when the same monitor is hooked up to their Mac, the fonts look blurry.

You can try going into the terminal (https://www.archyde.com/macos-big-sur-removes-system-preferences-option-to-smooth-fonts/) to manually turn on font smoothing (which may not work in the future depending on whether Apple removes the feature). If you have a higher resolution screen like a 4k monitor, you can try a different display scaling (https://www.macobserver.com/tips/how-to/4k-monitor-retina-mode/) at the cost of some performance hit.

The manual for that display suggests that such problems MAY be caused by the display's Picture format = "Full screen Display" feature. In this mode, the picture ever-so-slightly stretched to fill the entire display.

I except you want to select Picture format = "dot-by-dot"

on the "color" sub-menu, there is a setting to 'I-Style setting' = "Text" that can be selected for sharpness of text over all else. 'Blue-light reducer' seems to turn off MANY other features.

I had this happen today. I went into display settings and clicked the scaled option. Only two resolutions showed as being available. I then plugged out the HDMI from the USB-C adapter and back in again and when the computer reconnected to the monitor 4 resolutions became available. One of the hidden ones resulted in no blur. Hope this helps someone else.

I had the same problem with my DellTM UltraSharp U2713HM (2560 x 1440). I had a MacBook Pro 2012 that was plugged with a DP to miniDP cable and was perfect. When I bought the Mac Mini, I didn't have a Thunderbolt/USB-C cable, so I used a HDMI cable and it was HORRIBLE. The way I solved it was buying a miniDP-Thunderbolt adapter. I guess all the trick is using Display Port to Thunderbolt cables (of course nobody tells you that). I hope this will help you.

Please try turning off the "True Tone" feature in your built-in display preference because it fixed my issue with a 1920x1080 Dell monitor.

I always assumed that the "True Tone" only applies to the built-in display, but it actually does affect the external monitor.

Good luck!

sfromgi wrote:

It turns out the problem is that M1 is incorrectly using YPbPR mode instead of RGB mode

Readers find that when that occurs, it is because the DISPLAY is telling the Mac that is its recommended mode, and the Mac responds by sending YPbPR instead of RGB. Tthe problem is in the EDID information sent by the display.

You may be able to modify the defaults by using a third-party app such as SwichResX, but it is not trivial.

Do you get the same blurry text is Safe Mode, which takes defaults for as many settings as possible?

You need to hold the option key while clicking on scaled in the display settings to reveal all resolutions.

It turns out the problem is that M1 is incorrectly using YPbPR mode instead of RGB mode, making the monitors text blurred and colours off. There is no known solution, other than to go through a DVI or dual link DVI cable if your monitor has DVI. IF your monitor has HDMI or display port there is no fix for this issue, and workarounds which functioned on the intel macs dont work on M1 macs. See https://gist.github.com/adaugherity/7435890

I strongly recommend using the apple feedback app on your machine with the monitor attached. The more people who report this bug the more likely Apple are to fix it. Unless its a deliberate move to sell more apple displays of course.

Apple has a very high standard for its built-in hardware-accelerated displays, which are suitable for production/display of cinema-quality video with NO dropped frames, and NO dropouts or partial-blank scan lines due to memory under-runs, marginal cables, or other issues.

The Mac monitors your display. If your cables are not adequate to provide ERROR-FREE transmission to the display, the resolution will be automatically reduced until the transmission to the display is error-free. The symptom most often reported when this occurs is "blurry text".

The cables you want for HDMI-only Monitors (higher resolutions than 720p TV sets) are marked as Certified with an anti-counterfeiting tag and are labeled:

"Premium High Speed HDMI cable" or that + "with Ethernet" --OR--

"Ultra High Speed HDMI cable" or that + "48G"

Cables with No Certification tags are good for your standard TV set, and not much more.

Best results are obtained with DisplayPort connection, or its cousins over USB-C or ThunderBolt.

Hi, is it via option key + scaled button click to reduce font smoothing?

I've got two monitors, exact same model, connected to a TB3 dock with two cables out of the same multipack. One is crisp and the other slightly blurred, but not always.

Sometimes it seems that my second monitor is not recognized as WQHD, so some sort of scaling issue occurs. It will usually be that the monitor is being seen as native 1600x900 and it's getting scaled to FHD. I can generally correct this by unplugging and replugging the dock cable on the laptop, then it picks up the WQHD native resolution, I turn off scaling, and it's good for the rest of the session.

Go to the display preferences and choose "scaled" for the blurry monitor. If the monitor's native resolution is not lister there, it's probably the reason for the blurring. Like I said, unplugging and replugging the dock cable usually cures this for me.

But yeah, this is just another reason why I'm not loving working for a company that shoved a Mac down my throat. On my last el-cheapo windows laptop from my former employer, a $30 DP over USB-C dual-HDMI splitter did the trick. For this high-end MBP, I need a $300 Thunderbolt dock and it's still unreliable. The "Apple tax" goes WAY beyond the stupid price of their hardware.

This issue is most often caused by the display not running at "Native" resolution.

Is your display running at the highest 'native' resolution ??

 Menu > about this Mac > (System Report) > Graphics & Displays ...

two resolutions will be shown:

the first is ACTUAL resolution. This should be the display's native highest resolution.

the second is "User-Interface Looks Like" resolution. This is the apparent resolution after Scaling is applied to the text.

Try going back to default and saving and then hold the options key on your keyboard and click scaled. See if you get more options.