Blurred Screen on new Monitor? (Asus VX239h)

Question

I just bought a new monitor after reading a lot of positive reviews about it but I just can't get the image to be clear and I don't know what I can do to fix it.

I bought this monitor to use use both as a dual screen for my PC and to play PS4. On the PS4 the images looks amazing and I have no complains but while using it with my computer, the letters get a little blurred, specially on Google Chrome, windows explorer and most program that have texts on white background. I've already played around with contrast, sharpness, gamma, brightness, etc on my monitor but nothing really helped.

Here are some things I found trying to fix this:

1. I saw people with this problem on other monitors as well while using HDMI cable and they fixed it by changing to a DVI cable but this monitor doesn't have a DVI output.

2. Others solved this by entering on Nvidia Control Panel and changing the resolution from HD 1080p to PC 1920 x 1080, but for some reason under PC I don't have the option to choose 1920 x 1080.

3. Also saw people saying that it is caused by post processing that happens on HDMI cable which doesn't happen on DVI cable. If this is the case, is there a option to disable this processing?

I'm open to other ideas as well.

Please, anyone have any idea how to solve this?

Answer 1

First, you need to set your monitor to its native resolution, as any other resolution will always result in an inferior blurry image. The native resolution is the maximum resolution of the monitor, which will be listed in its specifications, e.g. 1920 x 1080.

You should be able to do this with your graphics card/chip vendor's control panel. If your computer has more than one graphics card/chip, ensure you are adjusting settings for the right one. For instance, my laptop has an Intel chip as its main graphics (for which I need to set the resolution) and a fancier nVidia graphics processor used mainly for games video processing (which has no resolution setting). If in doubt, open Device Manager and see what's listed under Display adapters.

If the native resolution isn't selectable in your own graphics control panel, you might need more recent drivers for it. If you're using the latest drivers but the native resolution isn't listed in your graphics vendor's control panel, then you might have a video card too old to use a large monitor.

Once the native resolution is set correctly, you need to setup Cleartype text in Windows. You can find these settings by opening Control Panel and typing ClearType into the search box. Follow all instructions in the ClearType Text Tuner.

That should fix the Windows text display. Unfortunately, third party programs such as Chrome might still have blurry text, because some programs have their own settings for font smoothing/Cleartype etc. If that's the case, try googling the name of the program along with words like font, text, blurry, smoothing, and Cleartype to find the specific settings for that program. You might have to experiment with a few settings to find ones you like.