If your monitor/TV has a Sharpness control, set it to zero

The bottom line

The sharpness setting on TVs and monitors produces edge-enhancement distortions to create the illusion of a sharper image. Text characters are almost entirely edge. The sharpness processing messes with font antialiasing, and can harm text rendering and readability.

You should set the sharpness all the way to zero to see the source image undistorted. Even on your TV, the sharpness setting should be turned to zero.

Images of text rendered with sharpness turned ON/OFF

The difference is noticeable when reading a page, and especially noticeable with serif fonts. See a couple of comparison shots, taken with a camera set on a tripod and with locked exposure and focus:

What I noticed and you may too

For years I’ve been slightly dissatisfied with reading text on my monitor. A few years ago I upgraded to a 2K monitor (i.e. 1440 horizontal lines), and while the text rendering improved, it still often felt slightly off. Serif fonts often appeared “spidery,” and some thin sans-serif fonts appeared washed out.

In comparison, text on iPhones or iPads was full and perfect. This year I bought a 4K monitor (2160 horizontal lines), and still I found reading text on it disappointing. Recently, exploring a different rabbit hole, I realized that my monitor had a Sharpness setting that came factory-set to 50%. I turned Sharpness to zero, and that was it. Immediate improvement.

Old man yells at cloud

If you’ve navigated TV settings menus you’ve probably noticed the proliferation of settings that sound very technical and obscure. MPEG noise filtering, or Intelligent Frame Creation. Things like that.

You don’t need any of them. Many TVs today come with some sort of “Filmmaker Mode” that bypasses the fancy settings, and shows the source images and video unpolluted. You should use that on your TV.
All that work on fancy bells and whistles that are best avoided. Sigh.

The sharpness setting has long been present in televisions and monitors. You might wonder why you need it. It’s not like your TV/monitor is discarding image information that the sharpness setting somehow recovers. The sharpness processing exaggerates edges to create the illusion of sharpness.
You don’t need it and you don’t want it, trust me on this.