Windows 10 scaling and blurriness issue

windows 10

A day ago, I suddenly started noticing blurry text & images on my screen, as well as weird scaling issues.

First of all, here is how my status bar and windows look like:

enter image description here
enter image description here

(notice the battery icon, in particular).

All the texts now look different and blurry: in my browser, in terminals, everywhere.

In the browser, websites look different, smaller. To be sure this wasn't just an illusion, I measured a columned layout. Even though the browser scaling is set to 100%, when developer tools report a 1200px wide column, if I take a screenshot and paste it in Photoshop, I can see that it's actually only 970px wide.

I had a look at this question: Windows 10 Font blurry 125% scaling but the suggestions didn't really help:

  • setting a custom scaling level of 125% does seem to fix the browser scaling issue, but it scales the status bar and other things to a scale that I was not used to (so this was not my previous value, for sure); also, why would I need to set 125% to make a pixel be 1px wide?

  • checking "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" on every application is really not a solution

What could be the cause of this sudden change and how to revert it?

Best Answer

The issues are mostly solved now, after a cumulative update of Windows 10 released around 10 or 12 August 2016.

Everything looks perfect on my laptop's 3K display, and although I still feel like the text is sometimes slightly blurry on my external Full HD screen, it is much more crisp and readable, and the icons now look all right!

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