El Capitan: Screen text looks blurry and jagged

Hi mate,

I have the same problem. MacBook air from autumn 2016. Worked well until installation of OS X El Capitan. Now text is blurry and the use LCD font thing doesn't work. It really tires my eyes reading text. Tried to change colours etc.

Have MacBook Air just upgraded too. Yes, concur that things look blurry but some do say its due to many changes in OS X El Capitan. Couple things to try is go into settings and accessibility and select reduce transparency and also increase contrast. I guess the people having the worst experience with this are people who don't own a Mac with retina display. Apparently the cheaper screens don't like the changes as well in El Capitan. But personally, I have to say the tweaks do help and actually I found Dark Mode setting in Settings and General settings seems to make my eyes adjust better to the font also. I generally believe the MacBook Air screens are not of great quality and resolution is pretty low in todays standards. Probably affecting things worse then someone who has a better screen quality and higher resolution. I doubt if I will downgrade because Yosemite was not so great either. May try to change fonts too to see if it helps.

As a comparison I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) and an iMac 27inch late 2012, the fonts seem fine to me and I didn't really notice much difference, all the best

I do feel when I first bought my 2014 Macbook Air it came with Mavericks on it. Yosemite has just been released and I guess I had bought older stock from a third party Apple store. I was used to the older UI so I kept Mavericks for a couple months. After upgrading to Yosemite I noticed a slight reduction in crisp font detail but nothing significant. In upgrading to El Capitan it does appear to my eyes that another slight reduction in font clarity is apparent. Not sure why? But certainly could be the new metal UI graphical engine Apple is using along with some new fonts.

I have the exact same problem capital media. Dont know what to do. Tried everything. Forced RGB, different cables (HDMI, VGA, Displayport so on.)

Apple? A solution?

So no official solution?

someone who wrote in here yesterday complained of the same thing. When I saw a screenshot of his System Preferences> display he had th brightness of his mac set to maximum, this caused me concern as this affects the life of the display. So if you have the brightness up high turn it to about half way.

i got him to run the screen calibrator from System Preferences>Displays>Color you will see a Calibrate button, press the option/alt key while clicking calibrate

and you should enter the calibration screen, click the expert mode button, and then continue and follow the on screen instructions.

hopefully this helps.

Thanks, but non of the solutions seems to work.

This is not even close to be as it's supposed to. 😟 Maybe the best solution will be just to wait to apple fix this?

I just ended up back with Mavericks. It was a viable option given that Safari was freezing up in El Capitan and that I had other peripherals not working correctly.

Lesson learned is not to be overly quick to upgrade a OS when the current version is perfectly fine and doing everything perfectly. My Bad.

So downgrade to mavericks solved the problem John Scott1?

I have the same problem. On Yosemite was perfect

APPLE please solve it!

HI. I know that this thread is a few months old now, but I'm hoping that someone has come up with a solution. I've tried every suggestion I can find, including forcing RGB (actually made it worse in my case), disabling smoothing, etc. In my case, I am on a Mac Mini connected to two Samsung S23C200s, and everything was fine under Mavericks and Yosemite. The issue is most immediately apparent when looking at notification badges on icons in the dock -- what were once clearly readable numbers are now unintelligible little blurs. In general, all of the text has a sort of blur/haze to it. I'm severely regretting upgrading, but hoping that someone has figured out a fix and I won't have to blow the system away and install a clean Yosemite.

Have you tried calibrating the screen(s). What is the brightness set to?

Thanks, I have calibrated the screens, and just re-calibrated them per your suggestion, but with no improvement. I have the brightness currently set to 90, but no change makes any difference. Here's a screenshot of one of the badge icons that might better illustrate the problem. Before the upgrade, that would clearly read as "16". Thanks again for the reply.

someone who wrote in here yesterday complained of the same thing. When I saw a screenshot of his System Preferences> display he had th brightness of his mac set to maximum, this caused me concern as this affects the life of the display. So if you have the brightness up high turn it to about half way.

i got him to run the screen calibrator from System Preferences>Displays>Color you will see a Calibrate button, press the option/alt key while clicking calibrate

and you should enter the calibration screen, click the expert mode button, and then continue and follow the on screen instructions.

hopefully this helps.

as mentioned above I think the brightness is set too high, 90 as you say has the backlight too high affecting the screens longevity.

turn it down to about 50 and try the screen calibration process from System Preferences>Display>Color press the alt/option key whilst clicking on the Calibrate button, then make sure expert mode is selected then follow the on screen instructions.