Black text appearing dark blue in some places

[jbrighton]

Today I installed a Palit GeForce 1050 Ti 4GB graphics card in my computer, and I hooked up a 4K LG Smart TV (43UH603V) via HDMI. At first I had a problem with a white glow around text, until I figured out that it was due to the sharpness settings of the TV, which I turned all the way down in order to resolve the problem. But a lot of the letters (around 25%) still appear in a dark blue colour, while a similar amount are a darkish red. The rest look like a murky dark grey colour, definitely not completely black. This affects text which is displayed in the default text size, and is even more pronounced with smaller text. I thought at first that it had something to do with the quality of the display, or that it might be an optical illusion – however, icons with the same amount of detail are displayed properly. A lot of text was also appearing very pixelated at first and different letters had different stroke widths, and there was some bleeding of the dark blue colour into surrounding white areas, but after I played around with the clear type settings and scaling, those issues seem to have become resolved.

What is causing this weird behaviour, and are there any settings that I can tweak in order to get all text to be displayed in black, as it is intended? I have tried changing a number of different display settings that I could find, but to no avail.

 

[bigwoofer]

Congratulations on your new 1050 video card! Sounds like the monitor may not be in its 4k native resolution. What is the native resolution of your 4k tv, and what resolution are you set to on your pc?

 

[jbrighton]

Thanks for your reply. The TV is set to its native resolution of 3,840x2,160, and I have checked that it is running at 60Hz.

The issue appears in all applications that I've currently got running (Chrome, including this text box that I'm currently writing in), Photoshop (tool bars, menu, labels etc.), Process Explorer, Windows Explorer, with one exception – Mozilla Thunderbird. For some reason, my email client is displaying all text crisp and black, without the weird multi-colour effect that I am seeing with other applications.

None of the display settings that I played around with changed that effect (contrast, brightness, tint, colour temperature etc.). I also just found some advanced controls for Dynamic Contrast, Dynamic Colour, Colour Gamut, Super Resolution and Gamma, but changing those settings hasn't solved the problem either.

I was seriously starting to doubt my own sanity, and wondering whether I was seeing things that aren't there. But I just took a photo (posted with slightly increased saturation), and the effect is undeniable.

 

[jbrighton]

I noticed that the photo is a bit dark, so I applied some curves instead of increasing the saturation:

Here is the same photo with added saturation for better visibility:

Another example, from Google Chrome:

And again, with the saturation increased by 50:

Finally, Thunderbird as a comparison:

The same photo with the saturation cranked up, and the text still remains black with no discolouration:

 

[bigwoofer]

WOW great pics, best example I've ever seen! It looks like your video card output is not set to the correct resolution - what you want is your video card set to display what's called the "native resolution" of your monitor.

3840x2160p is indeed the native resolution of your LG monitor.

Can you try for testing, to set it to 1920x1080p? I have a geforce 1070 outputting to a LG 4K tv via HDMI in 1920x1080 and it's perfect (the fonts and everything). I recall having the same problem you're experiencing when set to the native resolution, however everything being so tiny I couldn't read anything from the couch LOL so I set it back to 1080p and am extremely happy with it.

 

[SinxarKnights]

It looks like you might need to run the clear type tuner or simply turn off text smoothing. I am going to assume Windows 10. So just hit Start and start typing Clear Type and it should pop up.

 

[ryano]

Old post but having this same issue with an AMD card.

Solution for me was properly setting the GFX card color output to Full RGB.

That rendered the black on white text sharp as a tack and without any "off-black" color elements on the text.

 

[thekiezer]

It looks like you might need to run the clear type tuner or simply turn off text smoothing. I am going to assume Windows 10. So just hit Start and start typing Clear Type and it should pop up.

I have an AMD card and just started experiencing this issue randomly this afternoon.

Turning off Clear Type fixed the issue completely.

Thanks!

 

[Immasharemathoughts]

I had this very same issue after installing Windows 10 and using my LG B6 OLED as the display. It looked like there were hyperlinks everywhere in texts.

Interestingly, in Google Chrome, the text renders perfectly, I believe because they do their own font rendering and use a non-broken sub-pixel method as opposed to whatever nightmare MS concocted for Windows 10 :O Comparing this webpage in the two browsers is like night and day. I tried using that screen capture thing that's bundled with windows, but every time I took a snap, the result was magically cleaned up :/

I'm dual-booting with Windows 7 on this machine, and it has zero issues with font rendering. I thought at first it might have to do with Windows 10 supporting HDR output, but disabling HDR didn't fix the issue. I'm now thinking it has to do with their implementation of "retina" or "hidpi" scaling. Something's seriously broken there. If you take a window with black text and ever-so-slowly start moving it horizontally, you'll see sections turning blue, as well as odd blueish "shadows" appearing around letters and then disappearing.

Anyway, the "fix," thought it isn't really fixed, it's just much less prevalent, is indeed to go through the ClearType tuner thing (it's bundled with Windows 10). The first two options you're asked to pick from both look absolutely horrible with blue and red gunk all over the letters, but the farther you advance through the tuner, the less the issue is apparent.

Luckily, this is just a gaming machine, and Chrome renders text correctly, so I won't have too much of an issue. Boggles my mind how people can stomach using this OS on a daily basis, though XD

Cheers!