How to cure the blurry display on external monitor...

[At the Gates]

I finally did it… After a lifetime of Windows I’ve leapt from the Dark Side and am LOVING OSX… the combination of Spaces and Expose alone will save me countless hours!

I just got the VGA adapter to connect my spangly new MBP to the large monitor I used to use for my PC (no DVI capability on the large monitor, Acer x223w). Now however, I’m getting a strange and inconsistent problem:

If I connect all the cables and then power up, both my large monitor and the MBP screen appear slightly but infuriatingly blurry (see screenshot, left-hand side). If I power up MBP without connecting my large monitor and then ‘hotplug’ it (connecting the cable while everything is turned on), the blurryness is mostly cured - see screenshot right-hand side. The screenshot is from the same monitor in the two different states.

Has anyone else experienced this? It’s going to be a real pain if I have to keep plugging/unplugging the display cable every time I boot up :-( and there’s no way I could code for any length of time with the blurry version, ugh.

Any pointers gratefully received,

James

 

[spinnerlys]

Welcome.

Most probably your external display is set to mirror the MBP's display, you have to switch it off to use the external display as an extended desktop/display.
The external monitor is able to have a much greater resolution than your MBP, except if it's the 17-inch model, which has 1920x1200 as a resolution, normal for 24" displays.

Also your screen shots don't appear correctly. Besides making a screenshot via the build in Grab tool or the screen shot commands (CMD+SHIFT+1-4) will make screen shots at different resolutions, for instance if your MBP's resolution is 640x480 the screenshot will be in 640x480 resolution so we/you won't see any blurriness.

 

[At the Gates]

Hi spinnerlys, thanks for your reply and sorry for the delay, I didn't notice any email notifications that there had been a reply...

The display is not set to mirroring, so that's not the problem... The large monitor is 1680 x 1050 and the MBP is a 13'' (1280 x 800), both are set to the "correct" resolutions according to the Display settings.

As for the screenshots, the picture is a completely accurate representation of what I see in the two states, (you'll need to click on it to open up the full size version) and as I said they were both taken from the same monitor at the same resolution.

I'm still stumped, but I've decided to just leave the MBP in sleep mode instead of turning it off, which could be a solution.

 

[Coolnat2004]

Do you think it has anything to do with font smoothing? (System preferences > Appearance)