M1 Macbook Pro - External Monitor Blurry Text

I have same problem with MBA M1 and Dell U2414H 1920x1080, texts are so blurry and watching netflix on full screen mode was same too. Display was so good with previous PC so I guess something has to do with the Mac itself, not the cable nor the monitor.

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.

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.

Thanks for the reply, i dont have a usb c hub with display port, if i still go with hdmi couls you please recommend the brand and type that will solve this issue? Maybe from amazon for instant. Really appreciate!

Nothing to do with this issue. I purchased such a certified cable at a cost of $25 and it made no difference to this issue. My previous cables with perfectly with Windows and the new cable did not improve matters on either windows or the M1 Mac.

Can we get a better answer than all of our hardware is faulted. I have a 4K monitor and when I plug it in with the same HDMI cable I notice that in the displays settings I get slightly different options. Instead of a choice of resolutions I get multiple options of either larger screen or larger text.

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.

What are the resolutions of both your monitors. It seems that in order to get a great picture on a Mac the output resolution needs to use HiDPI. Unfortunately MacOS only allows you to to do this on 4K and up resolutions. On Intel based Macs there is a hack to force HiDPI from tools like SwitchResX but currently do not work with M1 Mac machines due to config files that Apple has now made read only. Other OS's like Windows and Ubuntu will allow you to do this no matter the screen resolution. Above is a link to a command on the terminal that will at least make your text a little less blurry by disabling font smoothing but will not fix any scaling problems.

Grant Bennet-Alder Why did Apple do this?

I just purchased a MacBook Pro 13" to replace my 2013 MacBook Pro 15" and I also experienced blurry/jagged text when connecting my existing external monitor. My monitor control panel has a setting for sharpness and I reduced that to zero. I now have BEAUTIFUL text on my external display with no negative side effects.

I am using a cheap QGeem USB C to HDMI cable to my ancient Samsung Syncmaster and was worried that I had an incompatible setup, but this suggestion work. Holding option and clicking on 'Scaled' and selecting a nearby resolution did the trick. Thank you!

Just dished out $800 for a Mac mini with M1 chip after my Dell Studio XPS crashed. Picture is dim and fuzzy on my 32" Samsung C32F391 monitor, which was super sharp with my Dell. Tried everything including using a brand new Ultra HD 8k USB C to display cable with no avail. I know I should've stayed with windows PC!!! What a disappointment after all the hype about M1 chip.

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.

Same on my MacBook Pro 13 / M1 / 16GB, I have a genuine Hub with HDMI port, seems like the signal from Macbook M1 HDMI is all time the same, and behave differently on different Monitors resolution. I spotted that when I go to displays and hold the `option` + click on the `scaled` radio button, then going through all resolutions, on some of them the text is less blurred, and on others is completely blurred. Some resolutions give me a totally black screen, crazy.. Waiting for some news related to this...

Unfortunately this year is still not over....Im using a Dell U2722DE WQHD monitor with an 2020 m1 mba connected via USB-C.

It's running at 2560x1440 and the font on the dell looks pretty much like on my MacBook Air from mid 2011. Has anyone heard back from Apple lately about this issues we have? Or does anyone have another solution to try with those monitors?

I cannot work with that MacBook for more than an hour before becoming an headache....no issue with my windows laptop.

You need a 4K monitor and that’s it. No solution offred in this thread works it’s not RGB vs YPBPR, dongles or cables.

I myself tried everything suggested here.

Unless apple fix this ( or not ) the only fix is a 4K Monitor.

[Edited by Moderator]