New emac blurry, makes my eyes water

markpatterson

markpatterson

Registered
Hi,

I've just acquired a new emac, hoping to use it for iMovie and xcode. But I find that it is hard to stare at. My wife's 2 year old ibook (when it's booting)
is a joy to read from, but this new one is giving me a headache, literally.

It seems to be something to do with the font rendering. Have a close up look at the text in this:
http://members.optusnet.com.au/pattersonmark/EmacScreenShot.tiff

The menus at the top are fine, all black, but the text in the rest of the screen looks strange: different colours where there should be just black, I would have thought. The same strange effect happens consistently: all instances of same letter look the same.

Can anyone help me out? I've played with the appearance options a bit.

TIA,

Mark
 
Well, the two things you need to play around with are the font smoothing in the appearance control panel and the color tab in the display preferences tab. The only thing I noticed was the white point was a bit different from that of an ibook. On a CRT you are probably going to get truer whites. It's like those new headlights on cars most people say they have a purple or blue tint to them when actually that is pure white...Im noticing more of a redish cast to your screen. So, play around with that a bit if you are happy with the ibooks settings you can adjust it so it mimics that of an lcd on your emac. Of course you can play around with the font smoothing a bit as well or turn it off completely. One things for sure if you are used to using the lcd and then go back to a crt you will definitely have some eyestrain. But the text itself is sharp.
 
I'll add that the tiff doesn't look particularly blurry to me; about the same as the text I see in Safari on my 20" apple lcd.

Also, check System Preferences/Displays and make sure your refresh rate is as high as it will go.
 
Thanks for your replies. What I've done is increase to maximum the font size below which font smoothing is turned off. It makes the default font in Mail.app look bad, so I changed it to Lucida Grande. The blurry effect making my eyes water is reduced. This site for example now has characters that are all black and quite easy on the eye.

But that madpenguin page looks no better. What surprises me is that the lowercase l (elle) for example appears in that tiff to be composed of a brown vertical bar next to a blue vertical bar, with the top 2 pixels at 2 different brightnesses. A similar effect has affected most of the other letters. This seems almost like a definition of blurriness, as if the colours have been smeared out. Might be all right on a larger font, affecting only a small percentage of the shape, but. The help acknowledges this: "When text smoothing (or "antialiasing") is on, smaller fonts can be harder to read.".

It's still not quite right though. I wish there were a more appropriate algorithm that didn't split the colours on fonts. I haven't played with the colour thing yet
 
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