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M1 Mac Atrocious External Display Text Blurriness
4 points by thorncorona on Jan 16, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments
I'm suffering from a really bad problem where the text on my M1Pro Mac is blurry when connected to any external display.24" 1080p monitors look blurry, and 1440 27" monitors also look blurry.

This is particularly obvious when comparing the text quality of Windows to Mac side by side. For reference I've attached an image taken on a 1440p 27" screen running Windows inside a VM. The text quality of Windows is vastly clearer. [1]

In VSCode it is absolutely atrocious despite looking great on Windows on the same display. [2]

I'm at my wits end and have tried everything from running dummy displays with BetterDummy to messing around with DisplayLink adaptors to try and figure out what's wrong.

Does anyone else have this issue or a solution? Is a new monitor the only solution? If so which monitors don't produce this blurriness?

[1] https://i.imgur.com/cxQDMGT.png [2] https://i.imgur.com/xvryQUp.png



Could this help perhaps? https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2021/12/03/apple_m1_drivers/


Tried it already, didn’t work :(


Haev you tried disabling font smoothing?[1]

I note that the displays you're referencing are pretty low resolution, and Apple is very much all in on Retina displays.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/disable-font-smoothing-in-m...

[2] https://osxdaily.com/2018/09/26/fix-blurry-thin-fonts-text-m...


I had issues with an external display which were solved by using a USB-C to DisplayPort cable (supports 4K@60Hz). USB-C to HDMI in particular didn't work well.


Seconded, check for a better cable.


In my opinion Windows ClearType produces sharper text. The only solution is a display with a higher pixels density because then the font aliasing algorithm isn’t important anymore.




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