fuzzyness

Font smoothing woes

6·Nov·07

I’ve recently replaced my ‘G5 + 19” CRT monitor’ set-up with a new MacBook Pro, adding a 22” Samsung 226BW LCD to the mix this week too.

Although mostly delighted with the new system, I was quite horrified to see bold/strong fonts looking very ugly indeed – rather like the effect of too much ink bleeding on poor quality paper. Some websites (including my own) became quite unbearable to look at.

After much searching I found the culprit:

System Preferences -> Appearance -> Font Smoothing Style

This was set to ‘Medium – best for flat panel‘ and while I agree that would appear to be the best choice for both the LCD of the MBP and the Samsung, it just didn’t look right at all.

Changing the setting to ‘Standard – best for CRT‘ did the trick, and now fonts are now back to their usual, clear, crisp selves again.

So what happened there? Research tells me that the ‘Standard – best for CRT’ option is the only one that uses straight-forward anti-aliasing. All other options add varying degrees of Subpixel rendering to the mix. Subpixel rendering is essentially a way of increasing the apparent resolution of LCD screens, by way of adding extra red, green and blue pixels.

And my goodness, did that look bloody horrible on both my LCD monitors! I don’t care whether it’s supposed to be a great effect or not, it looked completely terrible on my machine, and now it’s gone everything looks great again.

I’m sure it’s a matter of taste though – I wonder if anyone else has subpixel rendered font smoothing on LCD screens looking good?

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