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Comment by NavinF | Hacker News Reader

This is unfortunately true. Fonts without cleartype are ugly af on my 4K 27” display and it’s very hard to find smaller (higher DPI) displays that support 4K, >60hz, and adaptive sync.

I suspect that 8K displays will be “good enough” and 16K will finally make this hack obsolete in a few years, but we’re not there yet.

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I personally can't stand any form of Cleartype-style rendering -- the color fringing stands out terribly. I vastly prefer a somewhat blurrier but stable grayscale than seeing a red-blue shimmer throughout the text.

Then again, I use a non-AA bitmap font in my editor, so yeah. Get off my lawn!

Eh that’s fair. I’m colorblind like 10% of males (and probably >20% of programmers) and I bet this defect in my eyes make cleartype more bearable. I need that subpixel resolution. Hopefully future displays will satisfy a larger proportion of the population.

I wonder how much of this is due to Windows font rendering currently being so focused on ClearType. At 4K and 27", you don't need subpixel rendering anymore, because your regular pixels are small enough, but you do still need grayscale antialiasing. As far as I can tell, Windows no longer supports grayscale font smoothing — it's subpixel or nothing, and "nothing" still looks bad except for bitmap fonts being displayed at exactly the size they were designed for.

Windows font rendering is surprisingly flexible. When you do the "calubrate cleartype" wizard, it can change many options on a per-monitor basis.

You can also directly edit the registry to change the gamma, greyscale/colour, and subpixel order.

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