My Friend on a 30Hz Phone Screen because of battery saving mode said the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz is so minor, that in "In practice, it's been unnoticeable."

At one point in time 95%+ of HN comments were cheering on about Atom the text editor and later VSCode as being fast enough or unnoticeable. When Sublime user are baffled as to why. And Sublime isn't the fastest text editor either before Zed came out.

Yes, 10 times out of 10 I could tell an OLED font rendering to LCD. I wish I couldn't. Some people call it taste, some call it absurd requirement.

I could go on and on. The point is most people aren't very picky and picky is a definition defined by average. But there are those of us who have, let say very high standards that cares about PPI, Refresh Rate, Colour accuracy etc. Keyboard Key's typing distance, trackpad responsiveness, all the tiny details that I wish I could unseen and un-feel.

As the article state, RGB OLED Tandem is coming out, and I cant wait to see it in person. I have been pro LCD on Laptop for so long that when I learned Apple will soon ditch LCD for OLED I was worried. Hopefully the new sub pixel layout will fix it.

(Author here.)

There's no Cleartype in use here, as the first paragraph says, it's macOS.

And I'm using the default font sizes because they work well for me on an LCD. The point of this post is to document my experience with trying a current-gen generally-available OLED and how it did not work out well because of the subpixel arrangement.

It's also not just an issue on text, it affects any high contrast edges, especially perfectly vertical or horizontal ones. This meant that CAD stuff, spreadsheets (the grid), and large colored sections in graphic design software looked off as well.

> He's also got Cleartype on and set to RGB stripe even though the OLED is not RGB stripe (though to be fair, Windows doesn't really make it clear what each page of the ClearType tuner does).

I doubt it's Cleartype, the close up photo of the U3223QE show all subpixels uniformly dimmed on the fringes. The post also says the monitor is attached to a Mac mini and a previous post about OpenSCAD has a screenshot with MacOS window decorations.

Author here.

There is no Cleartype; this is macOS. And as mentioned I couldn't see the fringing from normal use, that only became evident with macro photos. During normal use it just looked sparkly or weird or artifacted.

And yes, the fonts are small, but that default size in VS Code or Numbers.app -- the example photos -- work well for me. And look fine on an LCD.

He's using a Mac, Apple removed support for subpixel rendering many years ago, it's not ClearType, the display shows color fringing even with grayscale antialiasing, that's what he's complaining about.

It's not like the Cleartype tuner actually does what the pages claim - you can go through and use the magnifier to choose the grayscale-only outcomes and still see Windows doing RGB stripe cleartype throughout. People literally have to install third-party tools like MacType or GDI-PlusPlus to get solid font rendering. So blaming users for using it wrong (especially when they're not even on Windows) is odd.

Also, many people can see and are bothered by particular non-rectangular pixel layouts - it doesn't require doing odd things.

I have a 49" QD-OLED panel. I have never been one to find visual artifacts distracting, but fonts were awfully jaggy in Linux to the point I spent a week tinkering with font config and almost switched panels to a larger miniled since code looked horrible. And I'm someone who was fine with horrible VA low res low quality screens back in the day.

The sub pixel geometry on samsung's qd-oled needs very specific font configuration to be correctly displayed, and even then it just stops looking bad.

I bought a w-oled monitor for office work and gaming, very happy with my oled tv. I returned it after a couple days.

I got unbearable eye strain from it, even though I use rather large fonts, and the ppd was the same as with my previous IPS. Yes, the “more fuzzy” text was very much noticeable too.

Maybe it varies by person, maybe it’s influenced by things like astigmatism, but I totally see where the author is coming from, and I too am waiting for the new OLED panels to see if there’s an improvement.

The issue with his monitor is that regular subpixel hinting of cleartype doesn't work because of different subpixel layout, and DPI is not high enough to not need it. It is a real problem.

One of the benefits of having somewhat terrible eyesight :). I can see the fine details if I squint and get closer, but for me everything fringes because that's just what astigmatism or a smudge on my glasses does.

Those do show the best example, yes. And best to photograph. But it's also noticeable on any high contrast edge or a fine line, like a drawing in Autodesk Fusion (CAD software) or just the lines between spreadsheets.

And no, no Cleartype here because (as mentioned in the first paragraph) it's a Mac running macOS.

I use smaller fonts as well and when I first got an older OLED display with a pixel layout not supported by Windows ClearType, I used BetterClearTypeTuner and later MacType to adjust it. It was leagues better after tweaking a few settings and I'm very happy with text now, even on my AW3425DW, which has an older layout they moved on from in recent generations.

> In practice for me, it's been unnoticeable.

You act like being able to see this a minority opinion, it’s not, and it’s a known issue. And you don’t need to be sitting close, or using a tiny font to notice it.

My 4K OLED is noticeably less clear compared to an IPS display and I’d never use it for productivity as a result, because why would I willingly subject myself to an objectively worse experience?

I used to work on custom embedded UIs that supported fractional scaling. This shit is hard.

You have to understand there's enormous effort that needs to go into this to make things look good. It's absolutely no surprise to me that Jobs era Apple used to stick to integer scaling ratios with relatively low-res phones while the competition battled with paper specs.

The trick to make things look good is to be mindful of the pixel grid, (and the subpixel layout). You have to choose font spacing and fonts so that major font features line up with the pixel grid. You sometimes have to slide a letter a bit to the left or right, which might result in inconsistent spacing, you might even want to have multiple versions of characters to hide these issues.

This applies to borders as well (both spacing and thickness).

Sometimes you can't make it look good no matter what you try - and the designer has to change it.

While flexbox and other super-duper layout algorithms might be very clever, if you use them, there's no way to line things up perfectly, and if you expect to, you might be in a world of hurt.

Adding PPI is a poor way to fix this. Even if you 2x the resolution, going from 1080p, to 4K, these issues still persist, and you quickly run out of hardware beyond that.

There's no wonder why modern 'flat' UIs usually have 1-2 pixel-ish gradients on edges of features, or use smooth transitions, it's a cop out - but that's the only thing that works with flexible layout, different pixel densities. But subtly, you notice things looking a bit blurry, just as if the images were low-res, even though the pixel density is insane.

ClearType is brilliant, but it only works with a certain set of assumptions, like a bit of light bleed (which exists on LCD but not on OLED afaik), and needs to know the subpixel layout, and can result in absolutely gorgeous looking fonts with relatively low res displays.

There's a reason why Windows 95-era UIs have a cult following - it's insane how sharp they looked even on hardware that on paper is much worse than modern stuff.

I don't generally use tiny fonts and I hopefully don't sit unreasonably close to the screen yet fringing is very apparent to me (even on window borders, i.e. it's not a font rendering quirk in my case). Just another anecdotal data point.

> iMac to a Mac mini in late 2024

Windows?

Is there another tool for ClearType that isn't the Windows tuner? It drives me nuts