We explain how to make a monitor look good when in use with both a Windows PC and a Mac. QUESTION I recently bought a 27in ViewSonic monitor, which I use primarily on my Windows PC, but occasionally on my MacBook Pro. I’ve been really pleased with the picture quality under Windows. Text is sharp and readable, but without any jagged edges. Unfortunately, the same display looks horrible on my Mac. I’ve tried various inputs, but all with the same result – text looks horrible. If I look closely I can see colours in the text, especially around the edges there appear to be hints of green and magenta. Is there anything I can do about this? I know the monitor works well on my PC and I haven’t come across this before. HELPROOM ANSWER We actually discovered the same thing in the test lab and, with a bit of tweaking, finally found a satisfactory solution. The problem seems to occur due to a difference in the way the PC and the Mac render text. When using a PC, the monitor’s default settings work fine, but when we connected a Mac we found we had to delve into the display’s menu settings and reduce the monitor’s sharpness setting by a couple of notches. This removed the distracting colour effect you were seeing around text while keeping the letters just as sharp as they appear when using a PC. See all How to articles.
