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Eventually, I noticed something in the monitor’s settings: My new Mac was connecting with an Input Color Format of YPbPr, while my old Mac used RGB. To make sure I wasn’t crazy, I plugged in my old computer, and sure enough, it looked great! Comparing further, I couldn’t find any meaningful differences reported in software. Disabling it via LCD Font Smoothing helped somewhat, but the overall image was still noticeably worse than I had experienced before.
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My first hunch was that something was going wrong with this. I’m aware of modern operating systems’ use of subpixel rendering, individually manipulating the red, green, and blue components of a pixel to improve text rasterization. The effect varied with typeface and application, but it was universally distracting and difficult to read. Some narrow strokes appeared as blue or red blurs. There were strange color fringes on the edges of characters. It’s difficult to photograph, but it looked something like this: When I plugged it into my new Mac, the text looked terrible. It’s a pretty nice display with a bright IPS panel, good colors, and wide viewing angles. I’ve been using a 27″ Dell at work for a couple years, connected to my Mac via DisplayPort. In this post, I’ll describe what I learned and how I managed to fix it.Ģ021 Update: a small change is necessary to apply this post’s workaround to MacOS Big Sur.
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A low point of my first week came when I plugged into my external display, and the image looked really bad. I’m enjoying the additional cores and memory (😀) and coming to terms with the touchbar (🤨). I recently upgraded to a 2018 MacBook Pro.
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