New Monitor Woes

Hey all

So we lost power this weekend and I had to haul my editing rig (a 1,1 Mac Pro, ATI 5770... yeah, it's a little long in the tooth but dang thing keeps on working!) out to a friends house so I could keep working. I figured it would be easier to just buy a new monitor (and I've been planning on doing that for awhile) than disassemble my old monitors and haul them.

So I found this guy on sale at Best Buy: Samsung - C750 Series 27" LED HD Monitor (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Samsung---C750-Series-27%26%2334%3B-LED-HD-Monitor/8 585136.p?id=1218879338068&skuId=8585136)

Basic details are thus:

3000:1 contrast ratio

300 cd/m² brightness

Displays up to 16.7 million colors

1920 x 1080 resolution

Digital (2 HDMI) and standard analog VGA inputs

And I plugged it into my ATI Radeon HD 5770 using a DVI to HDMI cable and I mean, the thing is just stunning to behold. Bright and beautiful.

So here's why I'm here posting: It's at it's highest setting (full 1080) and I'm noticing that while most stuff looks really great text is not very smooth. I've exhaustively gone through the settings to see if I'm missing something but now that I'm back on my Macbook Pro here at work I can really see the difference (and it's not a Retina screen). I can take some screen shot comparisons when I get home. Granted this is how it was on my older monitors but I figured it was because they were several years old and had a lower resolution. Is it a graphics card thing? Can the ATI not render text as well as the NVIDIA in my 2009 MacBook Pro? I'm running Lion FWIW.

So am I missing something here? Anyone have any ideas? I have 15 days to take this thing back and while I could live with the less than perfect text I figure if I'm going to plunk down several hundred bucks for this I should make sure this is the best I can do. Anyone with ideas or thoughts, I'd love to hear them. Thanks!