Help with blurry text

[ncortines]

Hi,

first of all thanks to everyone involved here. I just built my first hackintosh, yosemite, following the buyer's and installation guides and I'm pretty happy with the result. These are the components:

* EVGA GeForce GT 740 FTW 2GB GDDR5 (128-bit) 2xDVI, Mini-HDMI
* Procesor Intel CORE i5-4460 3.20GHz LGA1150
* Crucial Ballistix Tactical DDR3-1600 CL8 - 8GB
* SSD Samsung 850 EVO 120GB
* Gigabyte GA-Z97-D3H
* Monitor AOC i2367Fm 23''/LED/IPS/HD/5ms/1000:1/D-Sub/HDMI, unfortunately I couldn't afford yet to buy one of the 4K monitors from the Buyer's Guide

Now the only problem I have is the blurry text, images are fine. The text is readable, but after one hour of reading or coding it is quite hard.

I've tried couple of things suggested in other posts:

* defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2 (very small improvement)
* Switching from the graphic card's mini-hdmi to the dvi port. Monitor staying at hdmi since there is no other input (no improvement)

I'm attaching 2 screen captures with the display settings.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks,
Nacho

 

[Pieroman69]

I think the solution is all in this "overscan" box that you have in your settings in the first screenshot. It's an option for TVs (or monitors detected as TVs because of HDMI) where the image is made smaller and sent with a black border, which is then cropped out by the TV... as a consequence things are not pixel perfect (downscaled by the computer, and upscaled by the monitor). Just uncheck the box, and make sure your monitor is configured appropriately (it should have an option to deactivate overscan so that it doesn't eat up the side of your images) and all should be fine.

Your screenshots actually appear perfectly sharp here

 

[ncortines]

Hi Pieroman69 and thanks for the reply,
I tried deactivating that "Overscan" box. I would expect it would make the image larger than the actual screen size but, at the contrary, it makes it smaller, displaying large black borders.
I also tried finding "Overscan" configuration options on my monitor, but couldn't find any.
Seems I'm out of luck

 

[ncortines]

For anyone reading this, seems like the problem was the monitor being detected as TV by mac os, as Pieroman69 well pointed out.

I used the patch-edid.rb script and now it is definitely better, although still not optimal, but that might be just the way mac os renders text.

For more information: http://www.ireckon.net/2013/03/forc...ix-the-picture-quality-of-an-external-monitor

Cheers,
Nacho

 

[slim.jim]

For anyone reading this, seems like the problem was the monitor being detected as TV by mac os, as Pieroman69 well pointed out.

I used the patch-edid.rb script and now it is definitely better, although still not optimal, but that might be just the way mac os renders text.

For more information: http://www.ireckon.net/2013/03/forc...ix-the-picture-quality-of-an-external-monitor

Cheers,
Nacho

I used a Samsung 22" 1080P TV as a monitor for a long time and never had blurry text even though it was detected as a TV. It was my main monitor and it worked flawlessly. I had to use the port on the TV labeled as HDMI/DVI and make sure the input was set to PC in the TVs settings. I used it with a GTX 570 and later a GTX 970.

 

[itwas]

Hi,

first of all thanks to everyone involved here. I just built my first hackintosh, yosemite, following the buyer's and installation guides and I'm pretty happy with the result. These are the components:

* EVGA GeForce GT 740 FTW 2GB GDDR5 (128-bit) 2xDVI, Mini-HDMI
* Procesor Intel CORE i5-4460 3.20GHz LGA1150
* Crucial Ballistix Tactical DDR3-1600 CL8 - 8GB
* SSD Samsung 850 EVO 120GB
* Gigabyte GA-Z97-D3H
* Monitor AOC i2367Fm 23''/LED/IPS/HD/5ms/1000:1/D-Sub/HDMI, unfortunately I couldn't afford yet to buy one of the 4K monitors from the Buyer's Guide

Now the only problem I have is the blurry text, images are fine. The text is readable, but after one hour of reading or coding it is quite hard.

I've tried couple of things suggested in other posts:

* defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2 (very small improvement)
* Switching from the graphic card's mini-hdmi to the dvi port. Monitor staying at hdmi since there is no other input (no improvement)

I'm attaching 2 screen captures with the display settings.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks,
Nacho

for your reference
http://apple.stackexchange.com/ques...ew-anti-aliasing-font-smoothing/168796#168796

 

[sentineljones]

For anyone reading this, seems like the problem was the monitor being detected as TV by mac os, as Pieroman69 well pointed out.

I used the patch-edid.rb script and now it is definitely better, although still not optimal, but that might be just the way mac os renders text.

For more information: http://www.ireckon.net/2013/03/forc...ix-the-picture-quality-of-an-external-monitor

Cheers,
Nacho

Thank you. My problem wasn't that it was YCbCr vs RGB, or even that it was seeing my display as a TV (AFAIK). Everything in the System Profile was correct, including the model etc. There was one thing off that was just weird - it said my display was running at 59Hz. That's a really weird number, and the same exact display model (different video card) in my cheese grater MacPro 5,1 said 60Hz.

None of the font smoothing options, at any of the values 1-4, helped. My head was starting to hurt from trying to read blurry terminal text, and I figured this was a long shot (from a 2013 blog post) that probably wouldn't make a difference.

It worked! The sys info says it's now 60Hz, and that's the only thing I can see that changed on that info panel. I don't know if that's what was making everything, especially monospaced fonts in iTerm2, blurry but overriding the EDID using that method fixed it. Seriously, thank you.