Macbook Pro with HP Monitor via USB C - Bad Quality why??

[JaanIsMiles]

I have searched the internet for the past 6 hours, so hope someone can help..

I recently bought a HP M27FD monitor for my 2016 Macbook Pro 15".

Bought this because it had a USB-C port so i could screenshare and charge. - but when connected the image quality is not at all as expected - you can still see but the quality is not something you can work on. I tried switching resolutions without any luck.

I tried launching an old windows laptop via HDMI and the resolution was perfect..

What can i do to get a good resolution?

Get a new USB-C cable than the one that came with the screen? (USB3.1 GEN1)
Use HDMI with an adapter?
Change settings somewhere?

 

[Moonjumper]

Apparently macOS is not good at low resolution rendering anymore due to changes in font rendering, and 1080p at 27” is a very low pixel density, so will be difficult, if not impossible, to make it look good.

 

[bradman83]

Full HD/1080p on a 27" is fairly low resolution, which is part of the problem. Anything is going to look somewhat fuzzy on that display no matter what you do.

The difference between how the display looks being driven by macOS or Windows comes down to something called sub-pixel antialiasing. Each pixel on the screen is made up of red, green and blue dots. With sub-pixel antialiasing when the system draws text it can use these separate dots to artificially improve resolution and make text appears sharper. Windows has this enabled by default. macOS supports it to, but it's been disabled since Mojave because it actually makes text look worse on Retina displays. That's why the monitor looks better when connected to your Windows laptop - Windows is using sub-pixel antialiasing for text whereas macOS is using whole pixels for antialiasing, making text look fuzzy.

The functionality still exists within macOS but you need to use the Terminal to enable it. There's also an app out there called BetterDisplay which can do the same thing. I haven't used it personally but I've heard good things about it and its ability to make macOS look much better on non-Retina displays. Alternately you can do some Googling and see if you can find the Terminal command line codes to re-enable sub-pixel antialiasing. Hope this helps!