Font problems using Samsung 710T and OS X

[BartholomewHigglebottoms]

Just bought this monitor and I'm getting color sync problems with my text display, particularly with system fonts. This exhibits itself as extraneous RGB colors along the edges of what should be purely black letters. It's more pronounced with the DVI connection than the analog one. I've tried everything including calibration, fiddling with display controls, changing resolutions, changing fonts, etc. - to no avail. Trouble is, the OS does not allow you to load in any drivers and is supposed to have all the drivers preloaded. The system recognizes the display correctly as a Syncmaster, but does not specify model number. Is this an issue with how the OS handles anti-aliasing? For everything else, the display seems fine, although there is a bit more dithering than I'd have imagined.

 

[KristopherKubicki]

Have you tried the microsoft cleartype?

Kristopher

 

[BartholomewHigglebottoms]

I've only heard of cleartype in passing and am not too familiar with it. I imagine it's cross platform? Is it a costly solution? My G5 works fine with a Synmaster 750s that I tested, although with fonts smaller than 10 or 9 point I will begin to see some of the RGB "Christmas" colors begin to exhibit themselves along the edges of black text. Particularly with m's, u's, and l's. Again, this is a much greater problem on the 710t, especially with DVI, even with 12 pt fonts, although it will tend to go away with title or headline size fonts. Unfortunately I don't have the luxury of testing the monitor on a PC with a decent vid card to see if the monitor is the problem (I suspect it isn't).

 

[mooojojojo]

Seems obvious, and most likely you know it, but are you are running it at the native resolution, right?

 

[BartholomewHigglebottoms]

Yes, I've certainly tried native res. LCD's don't downscale very well so there's no question of running it at anything but native.

 

[ViRGE]

I don't have my Mac in front of me right now, but hit the Apperance sys pref pane, and there should be an option to adjust the text quality there.

 

[BartholomewHigglebottoms]

Yes, I've played around with the text smoothing option in Appearances, but that hasn't done the trick. A friend of mine did manage to run a script through Console or Terminal to turn off anti-aliasing which got rid of the problem but also left me with aliased text, so while an interesting exercise, it wasn't the answer.

 

[BartholomewHigglebottoms]

Kris, I looked on the Cleartype homepage and it's interesting technology but it doesn't appear there are any provisions for it in the Mac OS. I did learn however that some lcd's have a BGR color striping order instead of the more common RGB.

 

[ViRGE]

If you're having that problem with any sort of AA, I think you might very well have a problem with your LCD; that shouldn't be happening.

 

[BartholomewHigglebottoms]

The problem doesn't seem to affect type that is of any other color than black, which is strange. Doesn't AA work for any text, regardless of color? The only thing that seems to work at all is reducing the sharpness to 40 percent. Black text is then truly black but everything else is a little fuzzier. Unfortunately, the display only allows you to increase values by increments of 20. But this begs the question: is it typical to operate lcd's at 50% sharpness (it's my first experience with lcd display)?