I've connected my Mac mini (Mid 2010) to a very nice Sony 1080 TV but the image is poor and text looks jagged. Anyone else had this problem and found a way around?
Best regards
Mac mini, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)
Does the TV have any settings like sharpness or similar?
TVs, especially larger ones are poor monitors since unless you are very far away yur can see the individual pixels and thus the quality of the picture looks poor.
Does the TV and a DVI or displayport/mini displayport input? Those are better.
Thank you very much! It may have been naive of me to believe a high definition TV would automatically be a high definition monitor!
I'll need to buy some adapters to see if DVI output is any better.
My best regards,
While the TV and the Mac can both do 1080p it may have automatically chosen a lower resolution e.g. 720p check the resolution in System Preferences and see if it needs manually adjusting.
Thank you John. Resolution is set to 1080. It seems there's a problem with HDMI output in these models, related to firmware. I'm looking for VGA and DVI adapters (every new model requires a different connector...) to see if the image gets any better. Otherwise, I'll need to by a newer Mac mini.
Best regards and thank you, once again, for your time.
Mario,
I did have a perfect display from my Macmini (Mid 2010) 1080p on a Sony Bravia KDL 40XBR45, text was smooth, and very readable up close, no jagged edges.
Model: Mac mini (Mid 2010), 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB
However, I have upgraded to a Sony KDL-50W800C, and find the text display very poor indeed.
No change to Mac mini, always used HDM, and am quite puzzled as to why I see this deterioration.
Note that VGA and DVI are not likely to be better than HDMI at 1920x1080.
Refer: CNET Discussions
Having said that, I still do not understand why the text is so awful on this new Full HD TV.
Nor can I find a way to 'get back to what I had' on my old Sony TV. 😠
Here is a screen capture of my Mac mini Display Setup: I have resolution set to Default for Display,
Here I have toggled Resolution: to Scaled to display actual setting adopted automatically by the Mac mini.
Mario,
My problem (and I am confident your too) is with the TV.
Do a screen capture [Cmnd, Shift, 4] of a portion of the screen image [for example, the Display Setup dialog box].
Open the image in Preview, and print it.
You will find there is nothing wrong with the image generated by your Mac mini.
The image in my previous post was captured on my Mac mini, then dragged over to my iMac 27 Retina, and as you can see, it is perfect.
Here is a photo (iPhone) of a portion of the image, as seen on theTV Screen; very poor indeed.
And I am unable to figure out how to fix it. Let me know if you find a trick that works?
Mario,
OK, I think I have discovered the optimum set up with my new Sony HDMI LCD/LED [bla bla] TV.
On my TV, I found that I am able to set the display parameters separately for each HDMI input.
So for my Mac mini input, I reduced the sharpness [suggested elsewhere on the many Forums on this issue], and was able to get a reasonable looking text.
Its not perfect, but acceptable.
Here is how it now looks: compare it with the images above, the text is noticeably less ragged.
Poor image quality from macmini hdmi output
