External monitor = blurry fonts

Hello,

This could be an issue with font anti-aliasing and external third party displays. To get good results with my external monitor I had to set the correct AA setting. Pre Snow Leopard you could do this via preferences but Apple "simplified" it. They try to detect it automatically but this apparently only works with Apple displays.

Open a terminal and C&P

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

Then logout of your account and back in. The fonts should look less fuzzy now.

I have the same problem with a 2012 retina MBP. I wasted 2 weeks trying to fix Apple's Mountain Lion OSX. The display on external monitors is pathetic, and Mountain Lion won't let the user change the settings to something that might work. Apple Support even suggested I spring for SwitchResX ($20) to "patch" the problem until Apple fixes it. What?!

I returned the nice new retina MBP for a refund. No way am I going to shell out over $3K for a computer that can't even play nice with external monitors. And don't even get me started on the whole "wake from sleep" issue!

Hello All,

I have a dell U2412M. It worked fantastically with my old Windows 10 Lenovo B570 laptop. I bought a MacBook Pro (non retina display) as for me it was an upgrade form my old corei3 processor with a maximum ram limit of 8GB. I use Adobe creative cloud and I wanted the more powerful processor and the ability to put in 16GB of ram. I can't afford the retina display, plus I do almost all my work on my external monitor so I thought there would be no issue.

I bought a kanex mini display port to VGA adaptor. The fonts were terrible. I tried all the solutions posted on this thread with no noticeable improvement. I then went to the i-store and bought an apple mini display port to dvi adaptor and used the dvi cable supplied with my monitor. There is a very slight improvement but nothing to get too excited about.

I am really disappointed as I thought Apple was supposed to be this absolutely fantastic product. Expensive but really impressive. I like the way photoshop works on my new machine but my eyes are getting roasted by staring at these horrible fonts on my external monitor.

Some are worse than others. I have noticed that fonts seem to render slightly better in Safari than they do in google chrome. I really wish there was a solution to this.

Very disappointed new Mac owner.

Cheers

SneakPeak

Thank you for the ireckon link. It worked for me using a ViewSonic external monitor.

HOWEVER......THERE IS ONE ADDITIONAL STEP

Be SURE that your external monitor's input is set to "PC" rather than "AV". I am using a thuderbolt to HDMI adaptor to connect to my monitor's HDMI input. The default setting for this is "AV" by which I think treats the signal as a TV 1080p resolution rather than a monitor 1920x 1080. Even after forcing the MAC to send a RGB signal, the text remained blurry until I switched the input to PC.

Also, make sure that the monitor display is set to RGB rather than YUV mode (TV mode).

Hope that helps somebody.

And again, the question remains: Why does Apple Central make it so difficult to play nicely in the sandbox with non-Apple products.......

Hello to everyone, I really don't understand if I have a similar problem than yours..but sure, the external monitor works great on the Parallel machine (Win 8.1).

Here an example how a page differs if I use Safari on the Guest machine (MBP 15 retina late 2013) vs Parallel (Win 8.1)

I tried the script mentioned in this thread, but no way to improve the visualization.

(the filed TV:Yes has been disappear)

Someone could tel me if this is your same problem?

MBP

Win 8.1 (Parallel)

A couple of days ago I went out and bought a HP Pavillion 23xi to use as a second screen connected to my Late 2012 iMac and was pretty annoyed when I plugged it in as the fonts were pretty badly defined, which brought to me to this forum and was even more frustrated when I saw it seemed to be a common problem. Its connected via HDMI to the Thunderbolt connector.

However, after playing around with the settings on the monitor I found settings called Dynamic Contrast Ratio and another called Custom Scaling which I turned off and its has solved my problem.

The results are now brilliant and the problem has gone away.

I know that this won't solve every bodies issues, but if you have a recent HP monitor then this might solve your problem.

I just received this monitor this morning and have it connected to my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, late 2013) with the NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2GB video card running El Capitan. I initially connected my monitor via the Mini Displayport to HDMI cable I bought from Monoprice a year or so ago. I do a lot of touring and corporate video work and it's the same cable I use to connect my Mac into many video switchers that have an HDMI input, so it's been a solid cable in a variety of setups. With this monitor, it wouldn't work properly at 1080p (red dots everywhere) and at 1080i it wasn't syncing properly and was shifting up and down (jittering, is probably more accurate). I grabbed a standard HDMI cable out of my gear bag and plugged that in instead and it's working great at 1080p. It still has the same issue at 1080i, with the rapid up and down shifting. However, at 1080p it's perfect.

Unlikely some people who have complained about this monitor being way too bright, ti's actually dark (on the Natural setting) than my rMBP screen at 100% and only slightly brighter than my late 2009 21.5" iMac that it's also sitting next to.

I haven't had a chance to test with VGA or DVI yet since I don't have the correct Apple adapters at home.

Response Time is best set to Standard for normal use. When I set it to Advanced or Ultra Fast I get trailing on my mouse cursor. I have Dynamic Contrast off.

Contrast is set to 60 and Brightness is set to 100. My home office has natural light filtered through blinds with the windows behind my screens rather than behind me, so there isn't really any glare. I don't see any reflection on the screen of the lamp that is behind me like I can on my iMac screen. The color matching seeing fairly close to my MacBook Pro screen. When I set my background to solid white or solid black, they are both fairly even and I don't see any bleeding or obvious color issues.

Hi,

I'm facing the same problem. The fonts on an external monitor are very blurry. Graphics and icons are displayed crystal sharp. I can rule out any issue with the monitor or cable (mini DisplayPort to DVI) whatsoever, because if I run Ubuntu in VirtualBox, then within the VM the fonts are displayed sharp. Also no font issues on the notebook display itself.

So it all comes down to a font issue on external displays, as can be read in several forums. The font smoothing tweaks didn't show an effect.

Macbook Air 13" mid-2012

OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion (10.8 pre-installed)

External Display: Benq G2222HDL connected via miniDisplayPort to DVI Adapter on the Thunderbolt connection

Can anyone reproduce the correct font display in a virtual machine?

Thanks,

sal_manilla

i am having the exact problem. i tried a few differnet cables as well. bought the original thunderbolt to hdmi from apple store and still the same issue. the fonts are pretty blurred and i have do have a professional grade monitor. the Asus Proart. Incidentally the windows laptop which i used previously gave crisper fonts. anyone who has same problem please help. This is on a macbok air 13" bought 2 weeks back.

System: MacBook Air

Display: Asus PA248q

Connection: Mini DisplayPort HDMI female adapter to HDMI

Thanks for the tip, Michael. It's helped make the fonts on my new display look better. However, it's still slightly off (no matter what level of font smoothing) when you do a side by side comparison with my MacBook Air screen.

Is there anyway to make it more seamless?

Same problem here and there are 27 pages someplace here of other people reporting the issue. Please report a bug fix. What people have discovered is that it's probably an OS issue because someone said when they booted in Windows, it was fine. I bought 2 new monitors, 2 different brands, same problem. I tried HDMI and DVI cables. Same problem. @BigTrouble, by DispalyPort cable, do you mean DVI??

My fonts look as if they were written in fuzzy chalk. It's really bad.

Is this Apple's way of forcing us to buy their monitors? If they were affordable I would.

@katndmouse - By DisplayPort I mean DisplayPort. DVI is a totally separate thing.

My Asus PA248Q supports both DVI and DisplayPort inputs. Here's the cable that I bought. It supports both audio and video. So I'm able to connect my speakers to my monitor and get audio from one cable.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003TSTDI0/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00

I've tried it now on a Dell U2412M with DisplayPort cable and with DVI+Adapter and still the same blurry text - unbearable for reading more than a couple of minutes.

Absolutely annoying that there is still no fix and workaround whatsoever for a show stopper like this!

I had this problem on a Dell Ultrasharp U2312HM 23 inch IPS LED with DVI <-> DVI.

Showstopper, monitor returned. I want to recommend a Mac Mini to people, but can't unless I know they're going to be able to use it without blurry fonts!

Possible resolution for some users:

I running Lion on my MBP and have run into the same issue described here with an external Samsung monitor.

Adapter is a thunderbolt-HDMI (I did not have an issue with the thunderbolt-DVI)

To resolve the blurry font issue I had to change the video mode from 1080p to the max available resolution setting which for me was 1680 x 1050 (60Hz)

I know this isn't ideal but it fixes the blurry text issue nicely.