MacBook – Font smoothing on external display working badly. (rMBP)

displayfontmacbook pro

I have attached two external monitors to my retina MacBook Pro:

  1. 24" Dell 1920×1200 with HDMI->DVI
  2. 19" Samsung 1280×1024 with Thunderbolt->VGA

While non-retina enabled apps look just fine (e.g. Blender) and seem to be pixel exact (monitors working correctly), all OS X rendered fonts seem to lack font smoothing or seem to have bad font smoothing. The funny thing is, that there seem to be two different kinds of font smoothing:

A black on white font with just black and white (font smoothing on the internal):

just black and white (Font smoothing on the internal)
big2

and some with color (font smoothing on the external monitor):

With Color
big

There is also some text smoothed with color on the internal, and folder names on the desktop are smoothed in black/white on both displays. The folder font on the external display still looks bad, though.

Short question: how can I improve this behaviour, e.g., get the font on the external monitor to smooth in black/white like Blender does it?

blender:

blender
enter image description here

same font size finder:

finder
enter image description here

Blender also always seems to get the straight lines in a font aligned with pixel lines. The problem is still there when working with the lid closed. I already tried to read 

defaults -currentHost read -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing

to get the current setting but it tells me it the setting does not exist.

Best Answer

It doesn't look quite as good as my 27 inch iMac, but something that helped me was to turn down the display's built-in sharpness setting to zero (Dell U2713H). This, combined with increasing the brightness, made my display look much better when plugged into my rMBP (running 10.9.1 at time of writing). It's a huge improvement!

(additional note, I'm plugged into the display with mini displayport)

Related Question