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Fonts not looking smooth

G

gus6464

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 27, 2007
102
0
I just got a new Mini with 23" monitor hooked up via hdmi and I am really having a hard time with the way fonts look on Lion. Fonts just don't look smooth compared to the monitor that is running Windows 7 right next to it. I have gone through the calibration process a couple of times and now I am up to the point where I don't know what to do next. Is it the HDMI connection on the mini that is just not up to par? Thinking about picking up a thunderbolt to dvi adapter and going that route to see if that is the problem.

Appreciate any insight anyone can give me on this matter.
 
What is the native resolution of the monitor?

While you are answering that question, you should consider two other issues:
  1. MacOS/MacOS X and Windows have two very different engineering goals in rendering fonts onscreen. The Mac tries to maintain the fidelity of the font design within the constraints of the much lower resolution of the screen compared to paper. Windows goes for readability at the expense of font fidelity. It is a choice--Coke/Pepsi, foreign/domestic, Kirk/Picard.
  2. You appear to be using a small TV set as a monitor. TV sets and computer monitors are different animals designed with different engineering goals. The most notable is that TV sets are designed to be viewed from a distance. Computer monitors are designed to be viewed from within arm's reach. There is also the issue of resolution. I own two 16:10 23" Apple Cinema Displays. Both have native resolution of 1920 x 1200. A 23" TV, on the other hand, is expected to have a resolution of 1366 x 768 or 1280 x 720. One of my flat panel TVs has 1366 x 768 pixels but displays 1280 x 720. For TV, this looks OK. However, I would not expect to be pleased if I used this panel as a computer display.
 
It is a 1920x1080 monitor and not a TV. It has hdmi, dvi, and vga out.
 
This is a bug in OS X detecting LCD Monitors. If you go through the article here it'll tell you how to reenable the font smoothing.
 
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