Horrendous text/font problem - not clear, smooth or "normal"

Chelb1 said:

@Bree - Thankyou here is it what it says...

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Yours says 6 bit colour depth, which is the same as mine. But there are obvious dithering artefacts in yours, while mine has smooth colour gradients.

Something about your hardware is causing dithering to be employed. Your processor and graphics driver are capable of using 6 bits, which should enough for smooth colours, as mine shows.


You and I both have Intel Graphics, and according to Intel there are no options to control dithering. You may have an HP OEM utility to do so though. Look in the Start menu's All apps list for any HP utilities.

There are no options available to control dithering status.
Consult with your Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) for additional tools they may have to control dithering.

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You may be able to improve the look of the display by calibrating it, go to Control Panel > Colour Management and on the Advanced tab click the 'Calibrate display' button.

I didn't watch the video so not sure what you have tried.
I had a similar issue . My fonts seemed grainy and pixelated in light mode but just fine in dark mode. It took some tweaking but here's what I did.
Since one setting can affect another, I did it in this order.
1. updated video driver. . Mine was Intel so I used Intel Driver and Support Assist to get latest one. It was much more recent than what was on OEM site.

2. set resolution to "recommended" and scale to 100% (you should do your troubleshooting at default settings).

3. Performance Options>Visual Effects>choose "Let Windows choose what's best for my computer.' Restart laptop.

4.. use Cleartype

5. Change to a more readable system font. The default is segoe ui, a sans serif font. For readability, it is recommended you use a sans serif font and there are many other sans serif fonts available that may appear more clear to you than segoe ui. What I did was type out several different fonts in a word document to see the subtle differences and compare them all until I chose what looked best to me.
Note you might have to run cleartype again if you change font.

If any/all of that improves appearance, then you can adjust scale. Not recommended to go over 125% on a laptop. Leave resolution at 'recommended' setting.

If none of it works for you use dark mode

I realize this is thread is quite old, but my brand new Lenovo IdeaPad 5 with Windows 11 was showing the same issue which is how after several fruitless hours I of searching, chatting and speaking with Microsoft, Lenovo and others, I finally found at least part of the solution. I was a graphic designer by trade so when fonts are off I notice. I noticed immediately that my desktop fonts had a black shadow and appeared grainy. I knew a few of the tricks, like Adjust ClearType text, from previous experience and implemented them. It helps in some situations, but not on the desktop. I finally stumbled on the following:
1) Settings→Systems→About
2) Under the Device Specifications on this page (before the Windows Specification subhead), see the Related Links and click on the Advanced System Settings. There's probably another way to get to this same window, but this is how I located it.
3) Under the Performance section, click on the Settings button
4) In the Visual Effects tab, click on Custom and scroll all the way to the very bottom and deselect use Drop Shadows for Icon Labels on the Desktop! Clearly someone thought it was an awesome idea to add this drop shadow, and clearly it was not and Windows probably added this deselect button at some update, but buried it so well that it is next to impossible to find and fix an issue that should never have happened in the first place!!!

As I mentioned earlier, there are other Windows 11 font issues, some of which were already addressed in this thread. I just hope this posting helps some other extremely frustrated soul find a solution to this simple, yet infuriating issue.