External monitor = blurry fonts

I also had a similar issue. But I am trying to connect my Macbook pro retina display (late 2012 built; running maverick) to an external monitor and use it as a home desktop (so, I don't need to have the MBP screen on! However I include a solution for that as well!). So, after reading articles after articles, and doing everything possible to my monitor and MBP I was able to fix my issue and now I get amazing resolution and picture quality with my ASUS VS238H-P.

So these are the things I did:

Disclaimer: I am not an engineer or a computer geek so what I write here is from a layman terminology, so don't get offended if I'm not completely accurate in my descriptions.

1. Unlike what have been suggested by many people in this thread, you DON'T need to use/buy any cable other that HDMI. If you already have one of those good, if not, don't waste your money. This works with all any connection your laptop has.

2a. If you are like me and don't need to have your laptop open (aka. have a mouse/trackpad and keyboard connected to your laptop), Close the lid of the laptop when you connect your external monitor. This action tells the mac that you are solely using your external monitor and that way it adjusts only to the external monitor's aspect ratio and settings.

2b. If you need to have access to your laptop keyboard/trackpad and want to keep it open, mac OS only gives you the option for "Mirror display". What's annoying about this is that your MBP wants to have it's internal display looking the best at all times, so it stretches/shrinks images and texts accordingly on the other monitor when it adjust it to it's aspect ratio. This is one of many reasons when you connect an external monitor, you get a poor image quality if you choose to optimize the displays for your external monitor. So to fix this issue, go to Display (System Preferences/Displays/Display) and choose "optimized for:" built in display (Ex: in my case, Optimized for: Built-in Retina Display). With this option, your external monitor might have some black edges on the sides (because you are not using it's full aspect ratio) but the texts/images are much more crisp because they don't lose their native aspect ratio (ex:shrink/expand) to fit the external monitors'.

3. I also suggest turning off the "Use LCD font smoothing when available" (System Preferences/General @bottom of the page). This will give you a better text quality when using external monitors.

4. Most importantly, check out these links:

a. http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107846/how-to-enable-hidpi-mode-on-exte rnal-display-in-os-x-10-9-mavericks

b. http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/vi9yf/set_your_retina_macbook_pros_resolu tion_to

All the credit goes to these guys! Long story short, the issue is that when you connect a monitor to your MBP, in Displays you only couple of generic options for "Resolution" which are mainly meant for the internal MBP monitors, most of which aren't even close to what you need to have a good picture/text quality on an external monitor. You can increase the number of available resolutions by pressing Option (aka. alt) and then clicking on scaled in (System Preferences/Displays/Display). This was all great news until I stumbled upon the these articles and discovered HiDPI. This is the setting that your retina display uses and by using the correct resolution in HiDPI mode you can make the quality of your external monitor as good as a retina display (that is if your monitor has the capacity which most newer ones do!). So, follow the Reddit article and download the RDM. Then choose an HiDPI resolution that best suits your monitor (ex: I like bigger icons/texts so I'm using 1280 x 720 HiDPI and am loving it!). This will fix all the issues that you will have with bad image quality.

Good luck.

Had the same issue here using iMac

I connected two Dell monitors of different models to it and one works perfect while the other having the blurry text.

Tried the patch-edid.rb solution and everything else I could find but did not quite help.

One day I disconnected the perfect one and reconnected the other using the same cord it suddenly turned out to be perfect as well. Still no idea what happened but it worked.

Thank you a lot for this info. I highly recommend other users also to check their monitor settings that display does not try to scale picture automatically. I believe this is the reason in many situations.. 🙂

Just sent Apple feedback and a link to this thread. It is unbelievable & unacceptable that this is still a problem in July 2015 (OSX Yosemite on a MBP 13" w/ Retina). If I wanted to type command line instructions, I would have stayed with Windows. Looks like I have to go back Windows to use Excel on dual monitors. Bummer.

This is pretty much the same I have observed: a Windows 10 Enterprise VM running in Parallels Desktop full screen on an external monitor is perfectly fine, with or without the edid fix the fonts are clear and extremely good looking. If I switch to another desktop on OS X, with the same settings, the fonts are terribly blurry.

This is not what I expected from a top-of-the-notch machine. I'll use it on a bootcamp partition as much as I'll have to, and sell it as soon as possible.

So just to make sure? There is no official solution to this problem yet?

I have the exact same problem. And i tried everything! even spend some money to try with different cable solutions.

Running: el capitan btw

I don't know if this has been shared on this thread (sorry, I didn't read through the entire post), but if you're using a Dell LCD monitor, or perhaps other brands, perhaps this can help:

http://www.ireckon.net/2013/03/force-rgb-mode-in-mac-os-x-to-fix-the-picture-qua lity-of-an-external-monitor

I have a Dell U2412 monitor. I had a same problems with blurry fonts. Well, they weren't blurry as much as too high a contrast. White outlines around my black type. My solutions was to adjust the Sharpening feature of the monitor. By default it was set to 50. I set it to 0 and now everything looks fine.

I have just purchased a Dell U2715H, and have exactly the same problem, with a brand new Mac Book Pro 15" with Retina display. I've tried the hack by setting the LCD font smoothing, and also the Display hack posted on ireckon - Absolutely no difference what so ever in the fonts looking blurred. However, looking at About this MAC, I now noticed after the ireckon hack, that my graphics card doesn't display the external as a TV!

I have one question to Apple - How, can they not get this sorted? Surely, they must have the same problem with people buying the Mac Mini (or is this a dedicated graphics card).

I've been an IMAC user for many a year, and now need to be more portable, due to a change in role at work, and when back at home, need the extra real estate an external monitor provides.

Apple, clearly state that we shouldn't be having this problem, as they state that 4k devices are supported - this is not a 4k monitor, and it looks awful.

What gives!

I had the same issue. Thank for the solution link. Now my Dell monitor working OK with Mac OS.

btw.

Apple should fix this problem since many users reported issues. I am new in Mac OS universe and everyday I have some new disappointed, one day i discovered hibernation not working another day iscsi only works when you extra pay .... ....

This is super disappointing as I own 4 2713hm Dell Monitors. For some reason I decided to buy to iMac 27 5K computers. One for home and one for the office. 2 of the Dell's are connected to each.

The monitors in el capitan do not need the RGB fix. The OS does it correctly. The issue after 3 days of lost productivity is that the main system font is designed for the retina display. Found a way to get the lucinda font installed which cleaned up my dells but ruined the retina.

With apple care I have 2500 spent on each machine. $5000!

I'm furious. I made the switch simply because I love the iPhone and the integration with the mac is excellent.

Surely this can be fixed. I've exhausted google trying to resolve. Guess I am going to switch back to my Windows PC. Very disappointing. Wish android felt better to me as I could use that with my windows pc and accomplish much of the same but that is a hard switch after using an iPhone from day one.

I may be drudging up the past, but I figured I'd mention that the part about making sure the monitor is set to PC instead of PC fixed it all for me. I didn't have to use any of the crazy "Force RGB" stuff.

I have a 27 inch HP monitor. All you need to is turn OFF Overscan on your Monitor, then in System Preferences on your Mac Underscan all the way to the left "OFF". That's all. Works with other external monitors as well. Works like a charm, no scripts needed or any sort of tweaks.

Hi guys,

Just got myself a external monitor (Dell 24" UltraSharp u2417h) and plugged in my MacBook Pro Retina 15" Late-2013 using DP. To my great disappointment text and fonts look extremely blurred and not with a good definition, I can't stand reading anything on it.

I tried doing some research but I didn't get to any conclusions.

Space in set RGB in my Color Profile, so I guess running that script would not have any effect. I'm running Sierra.

Is this kind of monitor not compatible with Retina?

Can someone please let me know what should I do?

thanks

Thomas

The solution I found was to set the underscan on your Mac settings to Off. Then, on the monitor settings (on the front panel) turn the underscan to off as well. You will find the image quality is much better. Keep the sharpness to a 3 or 4 and you'll be set!