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I think it's already known issue that old applications look blurry on the new retina display, but some look ok, just worse quality. As an example I want you too look on the image below: bluring example

It's clearly visible that an upper text uses squares of 2x2 pixels as a one big (non hi-res) pixel. And the image below is 'blurred' so each pixel has it's own color an this allows smother gradients, but for me it's harder to look at the blurred text. So does anybody know if there is a possibility to turn off this blurring and see pixels just 4 times larger?

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  • A guess would be that you should select a non HiDPI screen resolution for your display?
    – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
    Commented Dec 25, 2012 at 13:32
  • @ThorbjørnRavnAndersen maybe I have not described my idea correctly or I do not understand something. There are application that support retina resolutions and they are looking awesome. But for old applications (or images on web) instead just using every 4 pixels to show the color of an original pixel they are smoothed or blurred. On retina iPhone you don't have blurry graphics for old applications, right? Each pixel of an old app is represented by four pixels of a display.
    – Uko
    Commented Dec 25, 2012 at 13:44

2 Answers 2

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Alright, it looks like you just have to check "Open in low resolution" check box in application information.

So select an app, press Cmd+I (or got to File > Get info) and check the "Open in low resolution" check box as shown below:

example from below

Now everything should look crisp

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  • Thanks for the tip, very useful for games in windowed mode!
    – NicolasBernier
    Commented May 22, 2015 at 8:11
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The blurring is an effect of subpixel rendering.

The easiest way to get rid of it is to uncheck "Use LCD font smoothing when available" in General section of the System Preferences. (keep in mind - this will affect retina-enabled applications too)

Sometimes you can disable it on per-application basis. The best case scenario is when antialiasing can be disabled in application preferences. If this option is not available, adjusting "AppleAntiAliasingThreshold" in Info.plist can help.

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