External display's fonts are awful

I had exactly the same issue with an older Apple Cinema display connected as a main display to a brand new MBP 15". After a week of headaches induced by that awfully fuzzy system font I went back to Mavericks. It's remarkable that none of the Yosemite reviews I've read even mentioned what it looks like on a non-retina display.

I am running the same monitor with my mac mini 2014. Cannot comment for Mavericks as this is my first mac, but text looks awful, night and day vs Windows. Did you find a fix?

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

Feedback

Or you can use your Apple ID to register with this site and go the Apple BugReporter. Supposedly you will get an answer if you submit feedback.

Feedback via Apple Developer

I spent hours with Apple support, send screenshots of the screen with mac and windows, and they say to their eyes the screen is sharper with mac so little point discussing with them..

Running a Mac Mini with a Toshiba 40" 1080P TV with PC Input. Same problem both PC input and HDMI. No native resolution available. I had a 27" 1080P screen that worked fine with a Thunderbolt adapter to DVI. HDMI and PC didn't work. Quite odd. I did have to use the alt key when selecting the screen resolution on the 27" to clear up the screen. If you haven't tried this, Settings : Display : and when selecting "Scaled" hold down the alt key for more resolution options. That fixed the 27" with a DVI adapter. I did use all three connectors on the 27" and only DVI worked.

When I set the Mac to a 4:3 resolution using the PC port on the 40" screen, the fonts look great but I lose 33% of the screen area. I also used ScreenResX. Didn't help, others have said it did on other forums.

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

1. Basically, to to here https://gist.github.com/adaugherity/7435890, download the gist
2. it'll be a zip file that most likely will download to your Downloads directory
3. unzip the gist
4. open terminal and (assuming the gist downloaded to your Downloads directory) type "cd ~/Downloads/gist7435890-66c54c17b179809b028b58a2ca7af0b9540d05b6"
5. then type "ruby patch-edid.rb"
6. Finally, "sudo mv the_name_of_the_new_directory_that_was_created /System/Library/Displays/Overrides"
7. Then reboot your computer.

That should fix it. I worked for me. It also worked for a co-worker. The problem is Apple's monitors are made for the YCbCr color space, instead of RGB which 99% of the world uses.

vidyerthy wrote:

Isn't just incredible. Of late I am questioning the entire apple ecosystem. Their quality assurance aspects have taken a nose dive. Have you tried to preview an image by hitting the space bar? Seen the jittery animation? Noticed how mission control animations struggle on anything other than 1440x900 due non integer based interpolation they need to do for downscaling and upscaling... it's all just shocking... there was a time when people came into OS X because things just worked. It cannot be further from the truth. I run Linux everywhere and would not have bothered with OS X if it wasn't for Lightroom. I am pretty much waiting and hoping that 10.10.1 will address majority of these issues. If it doesn't this MacBook Pro is going straight on eBay! Goodbye Apple forever.... I just cannot imagine that on a top of the range hardware there will be so many issues because of the hideous software it runs! I don't care about 'Continuity' - just get the basics right...

Could not have said it better myself.

Apple doesn't appear to be focusing on the desktop side as much. There are a lot of issues on the desktop side. But, then again, Apple is going for the lowest common denominator. It's supposed to be easy, and hard to shoot yourself in the foot with. The downside is Apple has taken away our freedom. Apple has made its computers not work with non-Apple hardware; locking you in the Apple ecosystem.

If you want to tinker you have to go to homebrew or start installing from source, overwriting paths, and going through dependency ****.

The plus side, is, it's still hard to shoot yourself in the foot. I just updated my ubuntu server's XML parsing library, overwriting the standard libxml parser and now I can't update my ubuntu server. Oh well, i won't make that mistake again.

But, at least with Apple I was shielded, I learned a whole lot about the underlying system, and have a system that works the way I want it to. I can still upgrade to the latest release, and, the web cam works as does the wifi. I have a dual booted windows/ubuntu laptop which the webcam works on neither OS, nor does the SD card reader.

digital photographers, video ,pre-press, or anything that goes to print by professionals use this color space, casual who spend most of their time on the web won't and the monitor was never designed for that. It's like buying a $4500 Nvidia Quatro card because you think it will play games faster.

Hi, thanks for the reply.

So, I've been trying to do as you write, and I get to the final step, but after I've entered my password, terminal says: "mv: rename the_name_of_the_new_directory_that_was_created to /System/Library/Displays/Overrides/the_name_of_the_new_directory_that_was_creat ed: No such file or directory"

I checked that the .zip file was downloaded to the 'downloads' folder and unzipped as well. Any ideas?