Blurry Text on Apple iMac OS X 21.5" I recently purchased a new iMac which I love except for one sort of big issue - the text is blurry on several programs. At first I thought it was a browser issue when I noticed it in Gmail (using Chrome then Safari) and now I notice it's in other programs/applications on the computer as well. I have tried changing the display settings and nothing seems to help. After doing some searches on this it seems like this is a common issue with Apple. Is this something that Apple users just learn to deal with? It is night and day from my PC where the text was as crisp as can be...I was really looking forward to making this switch but this would be a deal breaker I think.

Here are some screenshots that I captured:
Both screenshots look normal, but subpixel rendering is disabled in the Pixelmator dialog.

There is a hidden preference for using a lighter text rendering style:

defaults write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 1
sudo defaults write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 1


The second command affects the force quit window and login screen. You have to quit and reopen applications to apply the changes.

Other than that, you can't really change the way text is rendered.